In U.S., "socialism" is, to put it mildly, a dirty dirty label. Few want it attached. Even leftists dislike the name. Funny enough, I am pretty sure that quite few people actually understand what that term actually means, and what those movements strive (or strove, on this side of the Atlantic and equator) toward. It's kinda like "gay." Or, frankly, "freedom" and "liberty." Now, the concept may be good or bad. The debaters must judge this for themselves. However, it is utmost important to truly understand what the terms and its bearers want, rather than arguing and condemning on stereotypical basis.
Let's start with the popular American understanding of the term. Generally speaking, "socialism" is believed to push for government and against competition. The haters would then tack on a bunch of additional attributes. For example, "socialism" is accused of tyranny (in the basis of its supposed advocate for government), thief (because of its supposed demand for taxes and wealth redistribution), and discouragement of hard-work (because of its support for welfare). As such, "socialism" is created by tyrants, sustained by ignorance, and beneficial to the lazy, the stupid, and the useless. Terrible concept, no?
Funny enough, if you actually read Marx and look over socialist history (up until, I guess, Soviet Union), socialism did not seem to like government. Marx wrote of government's withering away. Early socialists and anarchists (surprised!) allied with one another. Competition, on the other hand, did not receive that much attention. After all, when you think about it, economic competition (at least in terms of competing firms) is a relatively new concept. A hundred years back, there are just not that many corporations! In other words, real "socialism" bares little resemblance of popular American opinions. In fact, let us remind ourselves that Karl Marx and Adam Smith are classified as the same school of economic thoughts.
This should raise a big question: if socialism is not about government; if it does not suppress competition; then what is it about?
It's about alienation of labor. By the way, it's a bit sad that the term alienation has fallen somewhat from use. Beside "unalienable rights," we just don't seem to use the term that much anymore. Such a waste of a beautiful word. Either, I digress.
Socialism is about labor's alienation from its fruits, as well as from life, society, and humanity in general.
Let's start with the first: socialism is concerned that the laborers don't get all of the compensation that they deserve. (to put it in context, this is the exact reverse of popular American notion of socialism). Imagine a company. It sells its products for a pot of money, which is then used in 4 ways: raw ingredients, capital investment, wage, and profit. Now, you can see that the first 3 uses of the revenue is fair: without any of these, the company can't make its products. But, how about profit? Why should the stock owners, who did not sweat and labor on the company and its work, enjoy a share of its precious revenue?
Let us be remind that socialism was born from a time of rampage profit share. Of the 4 uses of revenue, a significant and growing chunk of money went to the stock owners. Meanwhile, the employees earned crumbs, worked in rundown, dangerous environment, and mother Earth was raped barren. Think back to 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries: back then, children had to work 60, 80 hours a week, yet their families could not earn enough for food, clothing, and shelter. Such was the cradle of socialism.
Worse yet, increasing specialization distanced the laborers from the meaning and the joy of their works. You have heard this type of expression over and over: "I love working as a teacher because I help kids grow," or "I want to be a doctor to cure people." However, when your job consists solely of, says, rolling the chalk piece, can you really see how your products (the chalk pieces) make somebody's life better? This type of alienation renders life lifeless. It turns humans into robots. Robots to increase some profit of some people.
Lastly, socialism accuses the relentless pursuit of profit magnifies the above alienation. In modern terms, when an investment banker look at a stock, the stories of how such firm makes the world a better place, the stories of its employees sweating over each and every details, the struggles for betterment of its future, its technologies, its customers, its suppliers, and its people, all of that are ignored. The banker only cares about, well, how well this stock will pay in a year. Worse yet, because of the way stock market works, steady stream of profit (says, $1Million a year forever) is not enough. The stock market wants increases. If a stock pays $1M today, its employees have better pay $2M next year. In this relentless race for more, all life and humanities are sucked out, replaced by heartlessness, cruelty, (in our times) outsource.
Socialism does not care about government. Early socialists' experience with government generally involved the governmental attempts on their arrest, tortures, and executions. Socialism does not care about competition. By the way, just as a reminder, neither does capitalist. The whole "competition" picture is a Reaganian fantasy for the mob. Capitalists have always been about building monopolies. Monopoly is much better for business than competition.
For socialism, government and competition, and even property right, are beneath its vision. It fights for fair compensation to the hard working, for enrichment of all people, for humanization of its species.
Now, there are many roads to Rome. To accomplish their goals (fair compensation and enrichment to the workers), socialists turned to various means. Back in the day (up until early 20th century), when inequality was massive and the workers were quite, well, far from enriched, the means was anarchism. Back then, socialists organized unions, called for and supported strikes, as well as threw rocks at national guards. Nowadays, the people are well educated (historically speaking at least), so socialist prefer more gentle methods, such as minimum wages, safety regulations, welfare systems, etc. The most important thing to remember, though, is this: socialism itself is above government and market and whatnots. All of these are simply means to ends. If they are usable, employ them; if they fight back, throw rocks at them (or build a picket line). They are merely means.
Socialism fight for fair compensation and enrichment of the people. That's all.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Monday, October 5, 2015
In Defense of The System
Roman Republic and Empire was a land of political upstarts. From Gaius Marius to Augustus himself to Diocletian, these men was born into merely middle class family or worse, but rose to eminence. In fact, the Roman had a name, novus homo, for those upstart. After the collapse of the empire, suddenly political upstarts ran away from Europe. Most glaringly, Byzantine empire, as byzantine as it was, continued to host self-made emperor: origin of Heraclius the Elder was so obscure that we continued to puzzle his birth place, yet his son claimed the purple. Meanwhile, Europe must wait for more than a millennium for an upstart to appear, in the person of Napoleon Bornaparte.
Here is the question: why did just about any political player in Medieval Europe need a lineage, while Byzantine emperors apparently did not? We like to think of competition as the gears of meritocracy. If competition is so great, then Western Europe, split into so many states and estates, should have produced tons of political upstarts, while Byzantine empire, with its intricate court and procedure and massive capital, should have frozen its imperial rank. Yet, the reverse happened. And when did upstarts start to appear again? Ah, after France squashed any kind of competition with its central power.
Modern Americans love the idea of chaos and individualism. Meanwhile, they despite the system and bureaucracy. To them, the system virtually always stands in the way. Except when it helps, of course, and they will belittle its power and assert their self-made-ness. As an extension of this, they hate government, bosses, support personnel (who work for the other side; their support personnel is useless without their genius), any team with more than maybe 5 members.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than software engineering. Frankly, I am sick of this question: "assume that you and the smartest guys are in the comfort of your own home, undisturbed by all of those, how long would it take to do foo?" The assumption? Well, bosses and earnings and teammates and geography and finance can only stand in the way. In fact, business dress of any manner generally stands in the way (SHORTS AND TSHIRTS FOR THE WIN). Only "the smart guys" matter.
But, let's be frank, smart guys are (as a rule of thumb) everywhere. Yet they succeeded in highly complicated society of Byzantine, yet failed in the supposedly free (at least freer than Byzantine) societies of Western Europe. Why? Wait, when one thinks really hard, Islam, for most of its history, supported excellence social mobility. Its founder, Prophet Mohamed Himself, started his life as a slave, and Islam spent most of its infancy fighting against richer, more established opponents. And let's not talk about China (the damned culture has almost half of its major dynasties founded by commoners and, gasp, barbarians).
Thus, the question reigns: why can't structure-free societies of Western Europe support "smart guys"? Why did they need to move to Byzantine empire and Muslim empire and China to start their dynasties? Reversely, why did they (and by "they," I meant "the Bornapartes") move back to France right after French royal unified and complicated their own court?
Here is my answer: because Byzantine and Islam and China and modern France have the system, the bureaucracy, and complications that allow smart guys to excel. I don't know if anyone notices, but most of great feats are very hard. They can't be accomplished by a few guys in a garage. Now, I don't mean to belittle a few guys in a garage: they do accomplish certain classes of things. However, building empires, turning business around, or merely crafting a feature-rich-plus-intuitive-plus-pretty-looking software for wildly different classes of customers are not among the things that a couple of guys in a garage can do.
To follow the grand tradition of root cause analysis: why can't a couple of guys in a garage build an empire? Or, less ambitiously (and more in topic), a feature-rich-plus-intuitive-plus-pretty-looking software for wildly different classes of customers? Let's tackle the empire. It's simpler. To build an empire, one needs to be trusted (surprised! Most citizens must tolerant a certain man for such man to be despot). By having a system and bureaucracy and shared culture norms in place, it's easy for one to earn trust, find accomplish (I meant, comrades), build teams, and do amazing feat. After all, those systems and bureaucracy take centuries to perfect, and culture norms take generations to root. Thus, it's easier to found a new dynasty in a well-organized (albeit complicated) society.
How about the aforementioned software? I mean, is the description of the software not enough to explain? A couple of guys in a garage setting excel at sharp focus. Without distraction (aka "support") from everyone, they are free to zero into whatever they deem important. This can produce amazing technical solutions. See the emphasize? Yeah. Technical problems can be solved with focus. However, a successful software is not merely technically superior (QWERTY keyboard debate, start!). It must also excel socially, commercially, and financially. It must woo new users with minimal initial interest. It must keep expert who controls public opinion. These requires way way more than mere technicality. Take, says, Emacs. In my opinion, its technicality is impeccably elegant: instead of trying to solve all problems with text editing, it provides a platform on which different groups can tackle different problems separately. Very smart, very elegant. Fucking hard to learn. Because the solution is so abstract (all good technical solutions are, at least for software), application demands a level of expertise that 99% of users can't supply. Guess what, Emacs is forever cursed as a niche product. An excellent product, but niche nevertheless.
Thus, we need systems. We need business people to pump the money, legal people to ensure our safety, customer service to hear from users, fulfillment center to deliver the goods, and a bunch of bosses to keep of of those out of our hair. Coding is hard. If I need to code while worrying about money and laws and customers' complain and whatnots, sorry, my brain has limits. Everyone's brain has limits. At least those limits are greater than the physical limits, which are extremely limited. Last time I check, I can't talk to customers while looking for laws to screw, I mean to help, them.
And, here comes the bureaucracy. And bosses. And lawyers. And consultants (now, I am about 90% those are truly useless).
Here is my humble opinion: complication don't necessarily make something bad. The world is wonderfully complicated: human species have studied it for way too many years to discover way too little. Yet, the world is not bad. It's wonderful, supportive to all (most of the time anyway). Similarly, bureaucracy and system and bosses ain't inherently bad and counter-productive. Occasionally they are. However, most of the time, they exist for a reason.
An engineer then has 2 choices: either fight them or use them. Which one are you using?
Here is the question: why did just about any political player in Medieval Europe need a lineage, while Byzantine emperors apparently did not? We like to think of competition as the gears of meritocracy. If competition is so great, then Western Europe, split into so many states and estates, should have produced tons of political upstarts, while Byzantine empire, with its intricate court and procedure and massive capital, should have frozen its imperial rank. Yet, the reverse happened. And when did upstarts start to appear again? Ah, after France squashed any kind of competition with its central power.
Modern Americans love the idea of chaos and individualism. Meanwhile, they despite the system and bureaucracy. To them, the system virtually always stands in the way. Except when it helps, of course, and they will belittle its power and assert their self-made-ness. As an extension of this, they hate government, bosses, support personnel (who work for the other side; their support personnel is useless without their genius), any team with more than maybe 5 members.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than software engineering. Frankly, I am sick of this question: "assume that you and the smartest guys are in the comfort of your own home, undisturbed by all of those, how long would it take to do foo?" The assumption? Well, bosses and earnings and teammates and geography and finance can only stand in the way. In fact, business dress of any manner generally stands in the way (SHORTS AND TSHIRTS FOR THE WIN). Only "the smart guys" matter.
But, let's be frank, smart guys are (as a rule of thumb) everywhere. Yet they succeeded in highly complicated society of Byzantine, yet failed in the supposedly free (at least freer than Byzantine) societies of Western Europe. Why? Wait, when one thinks really hard, Islam, for most of its history, supported excellence social mobility. Its founder, Prophet Mohamed Himself, started his life as a slave, and Islam spent most of its infancy fighting against richer, more established opponents. And let's not talk about China (the damned culture has almost half of its major dynasties founded by commoners and, gasp, barbarians).
Thus, the question reigns: why can't structure-free societies of Western Europe support "smart guys"? Why did they need to move to Byzantine empire and Muslim empire and China to start their dynasties? Reversely, why did they (and by "they," I meant "the Bornapartes") move back to France right after French royal unified and complicated their own court?
Here is my answer: because Byzantine and Islam and China and modern France have the system, the bureaucracy, and complications that allow smart guys to excel. I don't know if anyone notices, but most of great feats are very hard. They can't be accomplished by a few guys in a garage. Now, I don't mean to belittle a few guys in a garage: they do accomplish certain classes of things. However, building empires, turning business around, or merely crafting a feature-rich-plus-intuitive-plus-pretty-looking software for wildly different classes of customers are not among the things that a couple of guys in a garage can do.
To follow the grand tradition of root cause analysis: why can't a couple of guys in a garage build an empire? Or, less ambitiously (and more in topic), a feature-rich-plus-intuitive-plus-pretty-looking software for wildly different classes of customers? Let's tackle the empire. It's simpler. To build an empire, one needs to be trusted (surprised! Most citizens must tolerant a certain man for such man to be despot). By having a system and bureaucracy and shared culture norms in place, it's easy for one to earn trust, find accomplish (I meant, comrades), build teams, and do amazing feat. After all, those systems and bureaucracy take centuries to perfect, and culture norms take generations to root. Thus, it's easier to found a new dynasty in a well-organized (albeit complicated) society.
How about the aforementioned software? I mean, is the description of the software not enough to explain? A couple of guys in a garage setting excel at sharp focus. Without distraction (aka "support") from everyone, they are free to zero into whatever they deem important. This can produce amazing technical solutions. See the emphasize? Yeah. Technical problems can be solved with focus. However, a successful software is not merely technically superior (QWERTY keyboard debate, start!). It must also excel socially, commercially, and financially. It must woo new users with minimal initial interest. It must keep expert who controls public opinion. These requires way way more than mere technicality. Take, says, Emacs. In my opinion, its technicality is impeccably elegant: instead of trying to solve all problems with text editing, it provides a platform on which different groups can tackle different problems separately. Very smart, very elegant. Fucking hard to learn. Because the solution is so abstract (all good technical solutions are, at least for software), application demands a level of expertise that 99% of users can't supply. Guess what, Emacs is forever cursed as a niche product. An excellent product, but niche nevertheless.
Thus, we need systems. We need business people to pump the money, legal people to ensure our safety, customer service to hear from users, fulfillment center to deliver the goods, and a bunch of bosses to keep of of those out of our hair. Coding is hard. If I need to code while worrying about money and laws and customers' complain and whatnots, sorry, my brain has limits. Everyone's brain has limits. At least those limits are greater than the physical limits, which are extremely limited. Last time I check, I can't talk to customers while looking for laws to screw, I mean to help, them.
And, here comes the bureaucracy. And bosses. And lawyers. And consultants (now, I am about 90% those are truly useless).
Here is my humble opinion: complication don't necessarily make something bad. The world is wonderfully complicated: human species have studied it for way too many years to discover way too little. Yet, the world is not bad. It's wonderful, supportive to all (most of the time anyway). Similarly, bureaucracy and system and bosses ain't inherently bad and counter-productive. Occasionally they are. However, most of the time, they exist for a reason.
An engineer then has 2 choices: either fight them or use them. Which one are you using?
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