competetion

[sukirti]

Competition: theirs and ours

In so far as civilization is a continuous journey, it is dependent on material progress for its actual progress, which eventually in turn changes civilization itself and takes it to ever-newer heights. There never has been an age of heightened intellectual progress, which has not been the result of some immense material progress. The consequent rise in thought has spawned in its turn newer and more innovative material, which in turn and in an ever-increasing spiral of thought-material and material-thought has dramatically and suddenly changed forever the course of civilization and taken it to new heights. All along there have been trends towards former thoughts and though they may have been successful in the short term, in the long run these have always lost out, because the logic of progress has cast the unchangeable sentence of death to all that is best today only to be replaced by something that is better than the best. The struggle for ever better use of material, for newer material more suited to our tasks is the instinctive desire of man to master nature and use it for its own purpose. How best to produce newer material or to derive more efficient use from existing material? The respective answers to the above question reflect the great divide between the different economic approaches to society of capitalists and socialists.

For capitalists the way consists of a single word-competition. For socialists too the way is competition, but of a different manner which we shall call socialist competition. What are the two different approaches? Why indeed are they different? We shall attempt to delve into these questions in this piece.

What is the immediate goal of competition? To capture as much as possible of the market, to drive out other similar entities from the market. Note nowhere is the goal of ever better use of existing material or better newer material implicit. However, the goal of socialist competition is not for the capture of an ever-growing market share but on the contrary to make maximum use of available resources and to provide ever better material for human use. By some mysterious process, the search for ever increasing market share is said to actually metamorphose into better use of existing resources or better material. The logic forwarded is this; to survive one must produce at lower costs than competitors and this is made possible only by ever-efficient use of available raw material. If you derive more from your share of cotton, you can sell your shirt cheaper than Smith, your neighbor, for he has to cover the cost of extra raw material from selling the same number of shirts and viola! Smith loses out to you and is driven to the brink of extinction.

However, you of course become the flavor of the countryside and the great new inventor off an exceedingly modern technique for extra cotton extraction from a bale of cotton. What will happen to Smith, will he die of hunger? No capitalist has ever answered this question beyond the nursery rhyme tale of his being gainfully employed somewhere else. How Smith who knows nothing but weaving will find employment elsewhere is not off course your concern. Even if he does learn some new skill in time to save his starving family what protects him in the case of his encountering another smart chap like you is also out of your jurisdiction.

We will not worry about that. What we will instead worry about is how in similar conditions available to you, can you come up with a better method to extract more linen from cotton than Smith. If there are no divine saints to tell you in your dreams how to do so and this we will assume true, you can not extract more from your bale of cotton than Smith and yet you manage to sell shirts far cheaper than your neighbor. Your secret is not in the cotton it lies elsewhere. Both you and Smith employ ten men and though Smith does not attend church regularly and evidently is a scoundrel because of that and will definitely burn in hell till eternity, to give the devil his due, he pays the weavers under him more, much more than you do. That is the secret of your competitive success.

Under competition, the chief means by which to overwhelm your competition is off course to produce more at lower costs. This can be done in two ways, firstly by extracting more from your existing raw materials, which presupposes the discovery of newer, better technology at a very rapid frequency. The second way is to get the raw materials themselves at a cheaper price. However, constant raw material can seldom be got at lower prices than your competitor, so the only option left and to which man swims like a salmon swimming back to its birthplace is to lower variable costs that is labor costs. This single factor explains the employment of child labor by big classy western companies and is also the sole reason for business outsourcing. What happens to a nation which has become dependent on outsourcing as its main revenue earner when a hitherto unthought of nation emerges with the same services at a lower cost can only be grasped by the proponents of service driven economy when they will actually face the situation; as they surely will have to in the near future. Competition capital is no man’s friend; it simply drifts to the cheapest source of utilization whatever be the means of the same. In the short run and in the regime of knowledge patents this route will be the most taken by corporations to survive if not as a matter of choice then as a matter of necessity.

There still remains the second way, the way of newer technology and newer material. There has indeed been a great leap in our science and technology than previous ages. As true as this statement sounds it is also true that each successive age does produce improvements in material, science and technology than the previous age. We affirm that under socialist competition we can improve our science and technology beyond anything ever possible until now, exactly how and why we will investigate in a later section in this piece. New technology to be successful must be available to every man equally. Competition violates this rule. Think what would be the state of the world today if we had to pay in addition to the charges of using electricity that we rightfully pay to cover for the material and human costs of producing electricity, a patent charge to the corporation that first invented electricity. Thankfully, nothing of that sort existed then but it exists now. Big corporations turn to this second way not in order to improve man’s material condition but as is usual to garner more profits, hence the devastating clamor today to patent thought. If Einstein had patented his thought and invested the rights to a global corporation, it surely would have been the richest by today failing which time-space research would have languished for the lack of money. Big private labs obtain hegemony over ideas and products and no matter what follows you will have to pay forever to these labs for using ideas, which only incidentally they have stumbled upon earlier. And make no mistake about it if one does develop something independently which is in direct conflict with the huge amount spent by these corporations one risks above all one’s life not to mention the debilitating effect of numerous crippling law suits.

No matter however that for every new invention one has to start from some existing material or theory. More importantly if a scientist works for a big corporation he/she may get their photographs in the cover page of science, but the patent rights, nay that is a different matter , that always will belong to the corporation, seems right too, after all did not the scientist use the resources of the corporation in the first place? Granted, and by the extension of the same logic under the socialist system for using the resources of the society all similar credits must be extended to the government. Why this should seem a gross violation of human rights and the former a glowing example of unmitigated capitalist triumph will forever remain a mystery.
The amount of resources that a big corporation will make available precludes all individual attempts from having success in the same field. Indeed the only system that can better these giant corporations is the government department dedicated to the same. There be no coincidence in the fact that NASA has never been dreamt of being privatized.

A second more amazing legacy of corporation-dominated research will be fewer breakthroughs. Even at this rapid pace of break throughs, we affirm it is still possible to better the same. No corporation howsoever big can ever compete in terms of manpower with a socialist department. For the same task in the later, more minds will be thinking about the solution to the same problem and more diverse minds, for that matter. Where the paranoia of the corporation against poaching by rivals or leaks restricts it to have strict security measures the great scope of cooperation afforded by socialist departments will make infinite more, diverse minds think out the solutions to the same problems, and this will better material and scientific progress.
Where there is industry dominance as in the case of monopoly or in cartels eventually the appetite for scientific progress will be reduced substantially because when all danger is eliminated one returns to one’s basic goal, which is not , we repeat the desire for material progress of man but only profits. Ridiculous as it may seem, it is true, when one can make profit without scientific progress, nothing except a moral sense for the continued triumph of science will lead to faster scientific progress. Inspite of being the wealthiest companies’ airbus and Boeing have been forced to shelve the sound barrier breaking Concorde aircraft. Attention has shifted from the science of safety at high speeds to the need to have ever-bigger profits by crafting huge capacity aircrafts capable of carrying more number of passengers, useful no doubt, but something that pales in comparison to the huge profits that could be made by reducing journey time by the Concorde. However, that involves commitment to scientific progress and not just mere profits. In the stages of early, intense and unregulated competition too, the focus changes from long term material progress to short term market capture through attractive advertisements or cost cutting measures. Telecommunication is touted as the great big miracle of capitalism. True we have made progress but not enough or as much as could have been made. Still today, the two great competing technologies in telecommunication remain GSM and CDMA, remnants of world war two, when the focus was not on profit but on material protection of man from the ideology of fascism. The search for profit and the desire for scientific progress, two different approaches, two different ideologies Each can bring about the other, of that there is no doubt, and equally no doubt exists about which should be the precursor, definitely material progress. The stupendous pace of progress has been achieved by placing the pyramid up side down; just imagine how much faster we can progress by placing the pyramid upright.

Show me another nation that has risen up so rapidly from almost medieval backwardness and challenged the supreme nation of the world purely in economic terms, like the Soviet Union, even though the bourgeoisie khruschevite-gorbachev counetrreaction was already underway. We have a system like this and yes, we will work wonders!

Another effect of competition is the negligence of certain essential sectors like health and education by big corporates. Being limited by the immediate, these capitalists fail to realize that without the spread of education, without the knowledge needed to operate the increasingly complex material goods of this age, eventually the sale of goods that they themselves depend upon to survive will never take place. The worlds largest FMCG in India is facing troubled waters. To spread it must sell in the huge rural belts in India. However, the primary crafts they sell, essential elements of personal hygiene, are not used by the rural masses. They do not know why these items are must use. They have no education, poverty is rampant. To sell these goods it is essential to educate the masses, tell them the necessity of personal hygiene and the dangers of neglecting the same. By its very nature, this is not a short-term project. However, the urge to make profits cannot by its very nature wait for something for so long a period of time. They bring out road shows and folk and rural advertisements and yet the sales continue to plummet. Folk songs and rural advertisements are just a form of entertainment and speeches from blaring loud speakers are sermons of the showy man from town. What is required is education but in so far as every capitalist is not a conscious historical materialist, he is a floundering manager wondering why all the bourgeoisie textbook predictions are not working. He scratches his head in vain but educating the rural masses? Why, since when did that become essential for business success? His textbook does not tell him so. That is the domain of the charity worker or the crazy socialist. No one can match Cuba in education but wait, that never was a parameter in judging development. Development is directly related to the number of shopping malls and hip joints you have in you city/nation and inversely related to the education level or social consciousness of the citizens.
Socialist competition differs from competition in this one vital and major aspect. At the bottom lies the desire for material progress. Here your success does not mean Smith’s funeral. Here no hegemony is possible. Whatever you invent is for all to share, whatever others invent is for you. Here a far greater number and diverse minds will be delegated to finding out solutions to the same problems. Here no one becomes the master of thought. Here the competition is for better material or increased efficiency of the same material. We go direct to the goal, not through the alley of profit, which can slow us down and in some cases obfuscate the road to such an extent that it becomes impossible to ascertain the goal. No corporation will own your efforts, your efforts will be owned by the society, to whom we all have an eternal debt to repay. Socialist competition is intense and fierce, to find out the best ever possible material use or to develop new material altogether.

That is how we will create far greater progress than competition. Also and equally importantly we recognize the need for each new material progress, each new progress in thought to percolate down, to be shared by all. In the failure of this will lie the failure of the great new material thought itself, of the great new idea itself.

At each new step, at each new epoch we will of course be material dialecticians, the highest from of thought available till now to humankind. Destiny has bequeathed dialectics to be the guiding force that will put an end to competition, to capitalism.

Socialist competition will replace anarchic and profit driven competition. It will result in historic material progress and as such great progress in human thought. What will the new man in that age look like? We can scarce imagine. But it will be a better, more socially conscious man than before and the seed of the new man must be sown by us today. That will be the beginning of socialist competition. Until always!

[encephalon]

While I disagree with the emphasis on dialectics, it's an interesting read nonetheless.

[ioncannon152]

Great article, comrade.

[gilhyle]

Excellant that you write an article on this topic. Most welcome. Just a few points:

- in addition to cheapening inputs and improved technology, economies of scale and scope are a source of increased efficiency on which capitalist competition widely relies, but that you did not (I think) deal with;

- it is worth noting that it is far from clear that in all cases, cartels (of course illegal in most capitalist countries) and monopolies act as an obstacle to all research and development. On the contrary, it is sometimes (but only sometimes) one of the tactics of monopoly, in particular, to promote scientific development to ensure that the fixed costs of the sector remain sufficiently high to prevent the monopolistic characteristics of the economic costs of the sector dissipating. For Cartels, agreements are usually on price, therefore the advantage to the individual participant in the cartel from scientific developments which reduce that firm's costs for a given price remains - thus the motive for certain research remains.

- your contrast with socialist competition reminds me very much of Che's arguments when he appeared closest to Maoism. THere is a problem - a big problem - with suggesting that social institutions, factories, shops etc can take on and operate under the guidance of such an ethical concept as, you suggest, would guide socialist competition. On the contrary, an alternative view of socialist competition would be that it must be based on creating a framework within which a certain amount of self-interested economic activity continues (for a time) within a legal and social framework that leads to better social outcomes than capitalist States allow to be measured. The idea that the revolutionary elan will suffuse all the institutions of society with such a moral purpose for a sustained period of time (decades ?) is problematic

[stevensen]

thanx for the encouragement.
it is true that even in capitalist economies there is no denying that research has to be there solely guided by the profit inorder to develop new products that will incease profits of a particular organization. however if we agree that new ideas and innovations can come from almost any source, the close guarded rights over a new idea of a new corporation automatically precludes all other minds save the ones belonging to the corporation that 'owns' the idea. this reduces the chances of many more minds thinking about the same thing.
i also agree with your suggestion that initially self interest must guide economic activity.it must however peter away with time.
however it doesnot depend purely on ethical behaviour as you say. if we grant that in perfect socialism pay is near about equal, why would any perosn allow any other person to get the same amount of pay by doing less labour? the dissenting or lazy element would be forced to work the socially necessary number of hours by other coworkers who would refuse to grant the same pay for less labour.
that is why a system of wroker appraisal must exist more so in transitory socialism . but here worker appraisal will be done by workers themselves, maybe by nominated workers on rotational basis.
thus we depend here not on revolutionary elan but on worker appraisal of fellow workers. i do no think that it is an utopian dream but most certainly in the initial period we must have some sort of self economic guided incentives.
will wait for ypur reply.
btw stevensen and sukirti are both my ids

[gilhyle]

The economic argument within capitalist economics for the existence of copyright laws is that it motivates research. It clearly also leads to some absurd, unacceptable outcomes. I recall Ivan Illych claiming - many years ago - that a pharmaceutical company had closed down research on an anti-burns treatment which was proving too effective ! Its consequences in the music business are almost entirely negative. Has the open source human genome project promoted or retarded research ?

I think the argument has much merit; in some areas the complexity of science has significantly reduced the replicability of research paradigms in multiple locations. High fixed costs of research have this effect, creating a natural research monopoly. But this is clearly not the case in many areas such as pharmaceuticals. Therefore, I agree with your point, in principle.

I find this concept of fellow-worker appraisal as a basis for wage determination or wage award an interesting one; its not one I am familar with.

However, I think that if it is clear that we are talking about a stage in socialism where similar wage levels are generally assured, then we are dealing very much with the second phase of the building of socialism. I think the more difficult period to conceptualise is the conceptualisation of a sustainable form of competition under a workers state that is different from capitalist competition without yet having attained the social wealth to sustain the kind of competition based on equality of wages which you very usefully articulate, and which is itself a useful corrective to monlithic conceptions of economic activity as planned 'allocation'.

[stevensen]

i think i agree with u. in the first phase of socialism there must be individual economic incentive as u say. however i do not quite get what is the difficulty in conceptualising the initial phase of socialism. is it the individual economic incentive based on performance or the lack of bourgeoise managers? i still believe in the inital phase there must be as there were elected mangers from amongst the workers in at least the initial soviet years.waitin gfor your rejoinder

[gilhyle]

In its minimal form, in for example, NEP the critical interventions by the workers state involve competition policy as a vital pillar - for example the State monopoly of foreign trade. But it seems to me a difficult practical question to know what such initial policies would look like to combine a) a significant improvement in the relative position of workers within an enterprise and b) an effective mechanism for achieving the benefits of competition - I guess its a whole other topic.

[stevensen]

a) i think the improvement in worker benefits would come from an increase in salary of workers who work well for the socialist cause. equally workers who are intentionally lazy will not be paid the socially minimum accepted wage rate. managerial and worker disparity would be far less, though there still will be some to give talented workers the initiative. now a days the ratio of a worker's salary to a middle management is in excess of thirty. that will not be there.
b) as sais if the most hard workers are put in managerial position, this will increase the benefits from competition. worker managers will be rewarded not merely on profits but more importantly on the objective of the job. it is a modern marketing jargoon that if the product is good profits will follow, it can do so only if all are competing on same level. a better product becomes the target instead of just merely using superior technology if ur technology is as similar to others. u concentrate on aspects like quality control only when u know u have to maintain the strictest quality criterion to compete with others because all have nearly the same technology. if u have monopoly over a superiori technology u will doubtless produce better goods without working and more importantly thinking hard about the next step. that will be the benefit form competition.