Left Wing Innovators

[JerryBiscoTrey]

A typical Cappie talking point of course is to say "In [Communism, Socialism, fill in the blank], there is no motivation to create new technology, etc. There needs to be profit motive!"

1. I was wondering if anybody knew some prominent Left Wing Inventors/innovators to prove that profit wasnt what motivated them and an egalitarian society is possible

2. I've learned alot from the "High School Commie Guide" post but i was wondering what some refutations to this statement would be.

Thanks for the help! I suck at debating :lol:

[Apoi_Viitor]

Noam Chomsky - So they're granted rights way beyond persons. They are immortal, they are extraordinarily powerful, they are pathological by legal requirement, and that's the contemporary form of totalitarianism. They are not truly competitive, they are linked to one another. So Siemens and IBM and Toshiba carry out joint projects. They rely heavily on state power; the dynamism of the modern economy comes mostly out of the state sector, inot the private sector. Almost every aspect of what's called the "New Economy" is developed and designed at public cost and public risk: computers, electronics generally, telecommunications, the internet, lasers, whatever...

Take radio. Radio was designed by the US Navy. Mass production, modern mass production was developed in armories. If you go back to a century ago, the major problems of electrical and mechanical engineering had to do with how to place a huge gun on a moving platform, namely a ship, designing it to be able to hit a moving object, another ship, so naval gunnery. That was the most advanced problem in metallurgy, electrical and mechanical engineering, and so on. England and Germany put huge efforts into it, the United States less so. Out of associated innovations comes the automotive industry, and so on and so forth. In fact, it's very hard to find anything in the economy that doesn't rely critically on the state sector.

After the Second World War this took a qualitative leap upward, particularly in the United States, and while Alan Greenspan and others make speeches about "entrepreneurial initiative" and "consumer choice," and things you learn about in graduate school, and so on, this has almost no resemblance to the actual working economy. In fact a striking example of all this which we see very clearly at MIT, a main technological scientific university, is a recent shift in funding. When I got to MIT 50 years ago, it was Pentagon funded, almost one hundred percent. That stayed true until about 1970. Since then, however, Pentagon funding has been declining and funding from the National Institute of Health and the other so called health-related national institutes has gone up.

The reason is obvious to everybody except maybe some highly theoretical economists. The reason is that the cutting edge of the economy in the fifties and the sixties was electronics-based, so therefore it made sense for the public to pay for it under the pretext of defense. By now the cutting edge of the economy is becoming biology-based. Biotechnology, genetic engineering and so on, and pharmaceuticals, so it makes sense for the public to pay for that and to take the risks for it under the pretext of, you know, finding a cure for cancer or something. Actually what's happening is just developing the infrastructure and insights for the biological-based private industries of the future. They are happy to let the public pay the costs and take the risks, and then transfer the results to private corporations to make the profits. From the point of view of corporate elites it is a perfect system, this interaction between state and private power. There's plenty of other interactions as well. For example, the Pentagon isn't just for developing the economy, it's also for making sure that the world follows corporate friendly rules. So the linkages are quite complex.

[Apoi_Viitor]

Noam Chomsky - The Great Depression was the nail in the coffin for laissez faire capitalism, it removed any credibility it had left as a functioning economic system. This is readily visible by the fact that every country experimenting with solutions ended up coming up with the same one, massive public spending. If you take a look at all the industrialized countries today, you'll see that they all have a huge state sector. In fact if you want to look at the history behind that, the countries that ended up industrialized all had measures like high tariffs, subsidised and government intervention. The free market played no role there, it was the measures we're trying to block developing countries from using that did it. If you're interested in that see the appropriately titled Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang for more information.

This public spending was not the the New Deal, which barely did anything (it was first in 1939 income levels started getting within 10% of what they had been a decade earlier). It was far too small and in fact heavily marked-oriented, legalizing cartels and so on. World War Two however, caused the US to switch to a semi-command economy with wage and price controls, allocations of material and state spending skyrocketed while corporate executives were flown to Washington to run it. It was a tremendous economic success, the industrial output almost quadrupled and the US pulled out of the depression.

That experience played a huge role in speeding up the already undergoing corporatisation process, which was a natural response to the great market failures in the latter half of the 19 century. It represents a shift from what is sometimes called "proprietary capitalism" to what you have now, which is the administration of markets by collectivist legal entities, mergers, cartels, corporate alliances in association with powerful states, and by now international bureaucracies, which regulate and support private power. Macro-economy changed permanently after the experience of the 1930s and no industrial state ever went back to anything approaching a pure capitalist economy

After WWII, it was well understood in the business world that the way forward was state coordination, subsidies, and a socialization of costs and risks which is the primary function of states in modern capitalism. During the latter half of the 1940s, it was even discussed openly in the business press that it the state would have to keep "large-scale intervention" up. In 1948, when postwar pent-up consumer demand was exhausted and the economy was showing signs of sliding back into recession, Truman's "cold-war spending" was regarded by the business press as a "magic formula for almost endless good times" (Steel), a way to "maintain a generally upward tone" (Business Week). The Magazine of Wall Street saw military spending as a way to "inject new strength into the entire economy," and a few years later, found it "obvious that foreign economies as well as our own are now mainly dependent on the scope of continued arms spending in this country," referring to the international military Keynesianism that finally succeeded in reconstructing state capitalist industrial societies abroad and laying the basis for the huge expansion of Transnational Corporations which were predominantly american at the time.

Fortune and Business Week reported that high-tech industry cannot survive in a "pure, competitive, unsubsidised, "free enterprise" economy" and "the government is their only possible saviour." This was especially in reference to the aircraft industry which has been completely dependent on the state for a long time, every time you get on a plane you're essentially getting into converted military aircraft developed and funded at public expense which is why most of the disputes between Airbus and Boeing about who should win the contracts they're competing over is them sending legal briefs back and forth across the Atlantic arguing that the other guy violates market principles the most.

http://www.zcommunications.org/free-market-capitalism-and-the-pentagon-system-by-donald-m-ferguson

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-center-cannot-hold-rekindling-the-radical-imagination-by-noam-chomsky

http://www.zcommunications.org/state-and-corp-by-noam-chomsky

[Jimmie Higgins]

1. I was wondering if anybody knew some prominent Left Wing Inventors/innovators to prove that profit wasnt what motivated them and an egalitarian society is possibleWell plenty of scientists have been left-wingers, Einstein and Stephen Jay Gould, two name two off the top of my head. As for not being motivated by profit, Jonas Salk famously gave his polio vaccine patent away to "humanity".

IMO, very few scientists at these levels of experience and skill are motivated primarily by profits or personal gain beyond maybe a place in history or more freedom from educational institutions to follow the work that interests them.

But I think the more political and stronger argument about capitalism and innovation is that private property and competition actually hold back innovation at this point in capitalism. Most of the major advances of the last few generations have been things that were discovered by universities, developed by the military (the internet), and so on. Human DNA was mapped because several different companies and institutions pooled their information. When it comes to advancing knowledge, it's just common sense that pooling information advances knowledge for everyone.

[mikelepore]

When they say that profit motivates invention, I consider that an action-at-a-distance belief like the magic of voodoo dolls. They are two separate groups within the population. The workers who make most of the inventions are paid wages, and the owners who receive profits usually don't go to work. How does a payment given to Jones provide a motivation a thousand miles away for Smith?

[Revolution starts with U]

The burden of proof is on them, really. As has been pointed out, the vast (and by vast I mean 99%) majority of innovation is made by the state, einstein was a socialist, Salk gave away his vaccine, even Tesla wouldn't be considered a capitalist in the way they're thinking.
All I can think of for them is Goodyear and Edison, and Edison was a statist through and through, so Laissez Faire capitalist will find no solidarity with him.
The burden of proof is on capitalists to show their system, rather than the democracy that accompanied it, is progressive.

[ed miliband]

Surely capitalism ultimately holds back science? My dad's a scientist and has found that a lot of the studies the organisation he works for want to do end up getting cancelled because profit cannot be guaranteed; the aim becomes to develop things as quickly and cheaply as possible.

[mikelepore]

The burden of proof is on capitalists to show their system, rather than the democracy that accompanied it, is progressive.

Logically, you're right. But as a practical problem the burden of proof is on whomever wants to persuade the audience. Unfortunately, about 99.99 percent of the people defend capitalism and make wild excuses for its faults. To drive a crack in that, we need to produce a new batch of capitalism-sucks publications, similar to the religion-sucks books and videos that have been coming out recently. We here don't all agree on the goals and strategies, but we can all collaborate on a capitalism bashing project.

[dernier combat]

Whenever I hear this kind of reactionary drivel I always wonder if the capitalist in question actually believes no-one invented anything in prehistory because there wasn't any profit to be made.

[maskerade]

this is an argument which pretty much sums up the vast intellectual dishonesty amongst people who defend capitalism. Are these people actually stupid, considering how they suggest that profit is the only motive? Even before I ever considered myself a socialist I knew that profit wasn't the end all be all motivation: what about nearly every single scientific discovery? what about every person who has a hobby - are people only interested in things because they can make money from it?

A great thing to always keep in mind when people bring up this idiotic human nature stuff (humans are always greedy, only want profit etc) is that for most of human history we lived in hunter-gatherer societal structures which shared lots of characteristics with communism.

[mikelepore]

Whenever I hear this kind of reactionary drivel I always wonder if the capitalist in question actually believes no-one invented anything in prehistory because there wasn't any profit to be made.

They generalize the idea of "profit" to mean any selfish material desire. I invent the bow and arrow because I want to eat a bison, not because I want "the people" to eat a bison.

[red cat]

A typical Cappie talking point of course is to say "In [Communism, Socialism, fill in the blank], there is no motivation to create new technology, etc. There needs to be profit motive!"

1. I was wondering if anybody knew some prominent Left Wing Inventors/innovators to prove that profit wasnt what motivated them and an egalitarian society is possible

2. I've learned alot from the "High School Commie Guide" post but i was wondering what some refutations to this statement would be.

Thanks for the help! I suck at debating :lol:

Focusing on the advances made in mathematics in the USSR is a good idea.

[Sir Comradical]

Errrm.

http://www.bisbos.com/rocketscience/spacecraft/sputnik/images/Sputnik-2l.jpg

+

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Rifle_AK-47.jpg

= Win.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Ask Cappie how many "innovators" were left in Germany after 1933, when all the certifiably left-wing scientists, scholars, intellectuals and artists had been driven into exile, imprisoned or killed.

[Revolution starts with U]

Good point. Any time I see a capper make this claim I'll just whip out my Cypress Hill;
"A to the motha fuckin K home boy! A to the motha fuckin K! (a to the k)"

[RadioRaheem84]

Yeah, I hate it when cappies make that argument. It should also be noted that a lot of the "innovations" also stem from the contradictions of capitalism. They exhaust the shit out of some market and then pat themselves on the back for haphazardly jumping into a new one. Take the latest "innovative" praise which is directed now at the financial world. Bankers and their quants are coming up with more complicated schemes to scam dope investors. Each crisis was only averted because some guy figured out another market to exhaust in time, and then they praise him for being "innovative". Dot.com bubble crisis was only averted because of a housing bubble that followed. Before that it was savings and loan, tequila crisis, long term capital management, Asian flu, assett stripping and corporate raiding, the debt crisis of the early 80s. That the extent of the capitalist innovation.
Chomsky is right. Any real innovations came from the Stats sector and still do. The problem is that most of the State's earlier functions have been privatized. Now all the State basically does most is provide funding. It contracts out everything else it used to just do straight out.

There is an excellent article by public health scientist Richard Levins in Monthly Review where he goes into how the privatization of a lot of things that used to be just straight run by the State are now contracted out. He says that it has really stifled innovationand closed a lot of doors on information sharing. Everything is now done not just with expected notion of finding inovative new things but a strict corporate mindset that will benefit industry. There at least used to be a line between letting the scientists work and waiting for results before letting new innovations hit the market. That's all gone now. They want anything out there remotely profitible, consumer be damned.
Finally, it should be obvious to anyone that the profit motive is not the only thing that drives innovation. Cuba has a world class biotech industry and is leading the field!
Plus four letters to dispel that myth further; U S S R.