Market Socialism May Actually (Not) Work
Is market socialism a plausible or defensible theory? Is market socialism a contradiction in terms? Is market socialism the best of bother worlds (socialist values and market efficiency)?
The result of the transition from industrial village communities to modern factory-powered and corporate infrastructure societies has enabled employers to exploit and place suffering upon the working class workers for economic gains.
Some groups in society strongly condemned this practice and this group are known as the socialists.
This was the start of the genesis of the early socialism.
Early socialists advocated for material equality — specifically, a better standard of living for those in the labouring class — and encouraged social harmony and co-operation instead of competition and conflict propagated by a capitalist economy.
It was a determined attempt to combine the material benefits of industrialisation with the social and human benefits of the pre-industrial communities through a planned economy.
This is all great but why is socialism discredited?
Little analysis of the proposed system and understand of the economics behind it
There was, of course, tension between defendants of socialism and of democracy especially when they were exchanging ideas (more like quarrelling) on which system is better.
However, what early socialists lacked greatly were their little attempt to analyse and understand the economics (i.e. how the market would react to these theories, how demand and supply would operate, etc) behind their own proposed system.
Especially since the democratic markets worked on the system of financial incentives and profit-seeking players, this would have been absolutely displaced in the mechanism of market socialists because the inequalities of capitalism has been superseded by the distributive maxim.
But really, how would this work? How would a system without monetary gains and rewards look like?
Difficult to transition a democratic state into a mildly socialist one, if not fully
One of the few appeals of market socialism is its elements that allow the mechanism to accomodate both perfect egoists and perfect altruists into one functioning society.
In other words, this market system enables both of those who are happy to contribute their earnings into the public purse (i.e. altruists), and those who need material rewards to satisfy and motivate themselves to work (i.e. us, egoists, in an enabled democratic society).
Though how can this be if the vast majority of people in society are already unwilling to contribute?
It seems inapt for the same group of people to just suddenly become devoted citizens who are so socially responsible that they require no private incentives to employ themselves in the most useful way simply because of a systematic change, from democratic markets to market socialism.
It would be relatively easier to form a market socialist working economy if the state was working with a clean slate.
Governing a vastly democratically-minded population would definitely (somewhat) be a tough one (if it isn’t tough already).
Market Socialism does not solve all the problems that we currently face in democratic markets
Even if people require no monetary rewards to work, there still may be a need for a mechanism to signal what the most useful employment is.
As proposed by David Miller in his paper titled “Market, State, and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism”, there would need to be agencies that allocate labour to firms, determine the number of quantities and price of goods and services thus calculating the supply and demand.
Giving power to agencies and bureaucratic bodies has its problem on its own and one of them is corruption.
Democracy seemingly may not be able to facilitate a fully equal society but it can strive to be
The major criticisms of capitalism is that it distributes material wealth very unequally and is unable to generate enough jobs for those who are capable of doing so. Thus failing to close the gap between employers and workers.
Subsequently, this is where democratic markets fall short and market socialism reigns its appeals because it remedies all of the issues mentioned.
While this may be the case, this is not to discount democratic societies because they, too, realise the merit in equality and are striving for the latter in response to this.
Continued efforts as revealed in current (and future) regulations and measures (i.e. income distribution, corporate social responsibility, and so on) are moving democracy closer to the utopian ideal of equality.
In other words, democracy is capable in achieving the same goals of market socialism but perhaps just more slowly.
All in all, market socialism is great in theory however questionable in implementation. It enables a functioning market with both egoists and altruists but is limited in a multiple of contexts.
