Scribbled w/ Frustration on Nov.

26th, 2015
by John Laurits
What Socialism Is & Why It's Not Very Frightening
Part One
Now that we have a self-proclaimed democratic socialist running for
president of the United States, I have been hearing a lot about socialism and about
why that threatens the very foundations of our enlightened society. Almost
everyone that I meet seems to have a strong opinion about it one way or another;
this is strange, however, when I consider the fact that almost everyone I meet also
doesn't seem to understand what socialism actually is - which brings me to the topic
of this paper: I have decided to try, with as few words as possible and despite the
complexity and depth of the subject, to explain what socialism actually is; I suppose,
as usual, I'll have to begin by cleaning up the media's mess of propaganda and
misinformation, beginning with what socialism is not. Firstly, socialism is not a
program of forced wealth-redistribution and...
1. Socialism is Definitely Not a Form of Government
Socialism is not a form of government but a set of theories which are critical
of modern economic systems - theoretically, it would be possible to orchestrate
monarchic, oligarchic, democratic, or anarchic versions of socialism without
compromising socialism's essential characteristics. It is therefore less than helpful to
continue thinking of socialism as a kind of government; this author suggests that a
more accurate description of socialism would be as a type of "technology," if we
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define technology as a set of methods or processes by which a goal is accomplished

or a problem addressed. Just as scientists have pioneered technologies such as
pasteurization and other sanitation techniques in response to the problem of foodborne illness, so proponents of socialism attempt to formulate methods by which to
address the problem of poverty and inequality.
Just as technologies, such as pasteurization or vaccination, may seem
mysterious or strange until the problems that they are meant to address are
considered, in this case food-borne illness & disease, so it is also difficult to make
sense of socialism without considering the problem that it is meant to address; that
problem is the relationship between what are called capital and labor.
2. Capital & Labor
Taken together, capital and labor are basically how everything in the world
is produced and therefore the economy, which is the science of how those products
are distributed, rests on the relationship between capital and labor. But what is
meant by capital and labor?
Capital includes all raw materials such as grain, iron, or oil, as well as things
like land which is used to farm and to build things, and machines such as looms,
mills, and factories, which are all used to produce goods. Capital also includes
money because money can be exchanged for any of these things and any of these
things can be exchanged for money.
Now, labor can be thought of in a couple of different ways and one of those
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ways is time. In the same way that grain can be measured by pounds or money by a
dollar amount, a human being can be measured by their time. The time of human
beings is special because it can be used to turn iron ore into steel, or steel into car
parts; it can turn land and seed into a harvest of grain and turn that grain into flour,
bread, or refined sugars. In other words, human labor transforms resources (or

capital) into products, and when capital and labor are mixed, a product is the result.
All human civilization, or at least the physical parts of it, are essentially the result of
a long tradition of mixing capital, in the form of resources and money, with the
labor of human beings. Capital and labor are useless without each other: without
labor, capital is just a pile of resources, iron ore fast asleep in the heart of a
mountain - and without capital in the form of raw materials, labor cannot produce
anything. Human civilization would be paralyzed without the interaction between
capitol and labor.
3. The Transformation of Value
Now that we understand that civilization is essentially the product of capital
and labor, things are going to become a bit more complicated but bear with me. All
of the transformations described above, i.e. iron into steel, steel into car parts, show
that when labor interacts with capital the product is more valuable than the
resource from which it was made. Bread has more value than a handful of grain and
an engine has more value than iron ore. The added value comes from labor. Steel +
labor = a car part, therefore the value of the car part minus the value of the steel
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should equal the value that the labor added to the steel. Make sense? The difference
in value between the steel and the car part comes from the labor, or time, that the
human put into the steel.
a. Exploitation of Labor Inheres in Capitalism
Now, the problem arises here: say that John owns capital in the form of steel
and money. Another person, Jacob, only possesses their own labor. So John invests
his steel as well as the money necessary to reimburse Jacob for his time used
turning it into a car part. Now obviously John cannot pay Jacob for the full value
of his labor because that would not leave any money for himself! John has to pay

Jacob less than the value of his labor so that John can make money. This is called
exploitation and it is necessary for capitalism to function - this is not a moral
judgment but merely a statement of fact. Now, we can say that John performed
labor by organizing the steel, the money, and Jacob together in such a way that a
valuable product was created - but what if John has enough steel and enough
money to hire someone else to do the organizing for them? If that happens, John
has become a capitalist. Without performing any labor whatsoever, but only by
owning capital, he has engineered a system of exploitation by which he can extract
the value of Jacob's work.
4. The Problem Presented by Exploitation
I think that we can all agree that the laborer, the organizer of labor, and
indeed anyone who invests their time in the creation of a product, all deserve to
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share in the value that is created (remember, value of car part - value of steel =
value of the labor). The problem arises when the capitalist owns the capital but
pays the laborers and organizers less than the value of their product, keeping a
portion to repeat the initial investment and a portion for himself. This problem
becomes more extreme as the capitalist's wealth becomes more extreme - if the
capitalist uses these exploited profits to purchase more car-part factories, hiring
more workers, their profit will increase even faster, enabling them to purchase even
more factories, which turns a faster profit, and so on. This results in increasingly
large organizations which compete for control of resources or capital in the form of
land, machinery, and money. Those who don't already possess capital are
increasingly left with but one remaining abundant resource which they must barter
in order to gain their piece of the proverbial pie: labor. This and the resulting
inequality and poverty is the problem which socialism attempts to address.
Understanding this, we may finally grasp what socialism is.
5. Socialism's Critique
All the various versions of socialism converge on one central critique of the
capitalist economy: the critique of the ownership of the means of production.
Socialists propose that civilization can continue its ancient march of creativity,
invention, and production without the problem of exploitation. Socialism points
out that exploitation of labor is impossible if the private ownership of the means of
production is abolished. But what are the means of production?
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a. Ownership of the Means of Production

The means of production is that portion of capital with which the product is
created. This includes land, natural resources, and the factories, without which the
production of goods would be impossible. Other types of property such as your
house, car, clothes, or your books are not means of production because they are not
used in the manufacture of the products of society. Those types of property are

personal property as they are the products of past labor which are being enjoyed or
used presently. Most socialists would agree that the private ownership of personal
property does not pose a problem. Things like real estate, iron, or a factory are not
personal property - that is, they are used to produce goods and generally aren't left
laying around the house for personal use.
b. Collective Ownership of the Means of Production
Socialists hold that, if the private ownership of the means of production
were abolished in favor of some type of collective ownership, exploitation would be
eliminated and everyone would be able to keep the full product of their labor. The
people in general would have fair access to resources with which they could apply
their labor in order to create useful products for civilization while keeping the full

value of their labor. Socialists believe this would be so because there would then be
no middle-man or "owner" of the resource or factory to exploit "extra value" from
the product. The fruitful dance between capital and labor would be allowed to
continue unimpeded while everyone would be free to generate as much value or
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wealth as they want, provided they are willing to supply the necessary labor. As
humans are finite entities, this would generate a natural limit to wealth while at the
same time ensuring that no one who worked full-time would go home emptyhanded. Socialism calls for collective, democratic control of critical resources and,
in that sense at least, socialism represents an extension of democracy into the
economic sphere.
6. But How Could That Possibly Be Accomplished?
How indeed? This is how socialists differ from one another and this is why
I believe that socialism is closer to a new economic technology than to a system of
governing - because implementing this change could be done a hundred different
ways and I'm sure that no one knows for certain which is the best (no matter how
loudly they claim to). But that is the beauty of socialism and of the human journey
through history - we get to figure it out together. This is a new way of using the
economy and we may have to experiment to figure out what works and what
doesn't, but we will examine this in more detail with the next essay. Countless times
throughout history we have realized that we weren't doing things in the best way
that we could - take the gradual discovery of the rules of perspective in visual art,
for instance, or the rejection of monarchy as a fair system of government.
Conclusion
Sometimes we figure out how to do things better than we were doing them but progress will be very, very slow if we're constantly afraid of the unknown,
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rejecting new ideas just because they are unfamiliar and scary. And that is what I
hope to accomplish by writing this article: to help destroy the fear of the unknown,
even if it's only in a small way or only for a few people. Now go forth, komrade!
Unleash a wave of knowledge, open-mindedness, and experimentation upon the
West...
In Solidarity,
JM Laurits