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: : : Nothing prohibits people from inventing in socialism, theres just no reason for them to.: : Except maybe to make life better for people. Please don't spend endless bandwith trying to persuade me that technology isn't invented to make life better but "merely" to compete in a capitalist arena. I'll let someone else respond to the next ideological boast; I'm unconvinced that competition is the "cause" of all major inventions, simply because there's plenty of other reasons to invent things. Look at the zillions of Web pages that have been put up (McSpotlight, for instance) without the least thought of profit.
: Sorry to stop you there, but I find that in a non-capitalist world, the currency is "control" and "power".
One could certainly say that all previous attempts to create a non-capitalist world have depended upon police power. One reason for why this is so is because capitalist nations have always waged holy war against non-capitalist attempts, and so the best the non-capitalists could do has amounted to "war communism," which became a fraud. Did your history books tell you about the tens of thousands of US troops that were sent to Russia to fight the emerging Soviet Union during World War I, or about the true deeds of those loyal freedom fighters Reagan sent to Nicaragua in the '80s? One might say in that regard that it is capitalism that requires this constant vigilance of police power, since the US Federal Budget is still spending about half of your tax dollars on the military.
: Since we are capatilists and cannot comprehend the utopia's you envision, you and your compatriots must show us the way by removing capital(ism) from the equation
Nope, I'm doing nothing to remove capitalism from anyone's equation, unless others of like mind decide that they too want to get the capitalists out of their lives, that we're tired of depending upon them for our livelihoods, in which case we together become a hindrance to those capitalists intent on exploiting us. Anyone here interested in forming a cooperative?
Showing the way means encouraging people to envision things as they could be otherwise -- starting gardening cooperatives instead of buying at McDonalds, for instance, or homeschooling children instead of having the public schools train them for corporate subservience. The point is to expand freedom, not to limit it.
Pro-capitalists, on the other hand, like to dismiss alternatives to the subservience to capital, because creating relations of subservience is their business. You may think as an employee that you can get anything you want out of the capitalist system if you work hard enough for it, but that's only the advertising pitch for the system. When you're working for me, you'll work for MY rate of pay at a job I design during hours I specify, and if you work really hard, I'll milk your labor power until my business can afford capital improvements, and then I'll replace you with a machine (or some of those compliant Asian women I've seen advertised in the business magazines). And if I'm really mean I'll send you a letter, like AT&T did when it downsized about 100,000 of its employees, that says you're not cut out for my business. So judging from the drastic inequalities in income and ownership endemic to American and world society, I'd say subservience is doing incredibly well as a social trend.
: and instructing us on how to live (instead of making our own decisions as we do now).
Read Stephanie Coontz's THE WAY WE NEVER WERE: AMERICAN FAMILIES AND THE NOSTALGIA TRAP, a book which will show you how Americans "allow the myth of self-reliance to obscure the reality of their own life histories." In one sense, people make their "own decisions" regardless of any instruction they may receive, as if instruction had this fantastic power to threaten our freedoms; in another sense, people make decisions to benefit themselves and their immediate families and communities based on the privileges acquired from group association ("who you know" in the business world, for instance, or "who you know" in the world of politics that allows you to manipulate the business laws of City Hall and elsewhere to your profit, or forming financially-productive relationships by going to the right colleges and meeting the right people at college socials.) Sure, individual initiative counts for something, but are you saying this doesn't count for anything? I'd say it's most of the game, the way the rich get richer and the poor have babies.
: Watch the movie THX 1138, a utopia where there is no money at all...
THX 1138 is an anti-utopia. How about Alvin Toffler's CREATING A NEW CIVILIZATION, a utopia where there is no job security and everyone works at ad hoc projects when they can. I wonder what keeps the unemployed "in line" in such a utopia? Or, on the other hand, how about Aldous Huxley's ISLAND or Ernest Callenbach's ECOTOPIA, utopias which actually suggest a few redeeming social ideas now and then?
: but one of the characters behaves as all humans do, he learns how to make the system (any system is susceptible) work more equal for him; he gets to assign his own schedules and living spaces, etc, etc... coin of his realm. So your "profit" is to take the choices we have in capitalism away from us and we are only left with the choices you find acceptable. You hide the fact that you know that money is analoguos to power.
If money ISN'T power, then what were all of those fools buying when they boosted the money-sum of political contribution to a record level in the 1992 and 1996 American general elections? Read Mathew Josephson's THE ROBBER BARONS and THE POLITICOS for a 19th century perspective on how money was power.
:Since you cannot get enough money (this requires working for it),
Getting money, of course, requires fooling enough people to give it to you. That's what sales is about: telling people they need something persuasively enough so they actually think they need it. And, as the inspirational speakers currently on the market will tell you time and time again, all the other jobs are really sales.
And as for getting ENOUGH money, mere labor-power as a commodity, supplied daily by working people everywhere (and as long as we're on McSpotlight I ought to mention the folks who work at McDs with low wages and little prospect of advancement) counts for very little when compared to the actual ability to fool people that business professionals use to rise to solidify deals. Robert Ringer's classic '80s celebration of greed LOOKING OUT FOR #1 states the case most persuasively -- the whole ethos of the business agent is in persuading buyers and sellers that the cooperation of the business agent is absolutely necessary to their solidifying the deal, and threatening to withhold one's services to "prove" it.
: you will settle for power (this requires fooling enough people to give it to you).
I will concede that power was once considered a valid mode of distribution. I will also try to introduce another concept of power into the discussion here, the concept of alliance as power, meaning the idea that people can work together to make the team more powerful than the sum of its individuals. This is, of course, a concept that has caught on like wildfire in the business world, only in the business world the team is usually subordinate to a boss, a manipulator, rather than working for itself as a team and distributing the leadership tasks equally, which is how a cooperative is run. A cooperative can be a business too, of course, but it can also enter into cooperative alliances with other cooperatives, which don't have to be business (i.e. exchange) relationships.
The idea of a socialist utopia would have to rely as little as possible on power-as-fooling-people as a mode of distribution. This would be done, perhaps, by communities working to encourage decentralized production and making it less necessary for products to travel long distances to reach their users. Decentralization would have the additional effect of helping humankind create an ecologically sustainable society, something humankind will have to do if it wishes to avoid crises of pollution or of resource shortage. Of course, it remains to seen whether a sustainable society can be cobbled entirely from the motivation of capitalists to earn quick profits.
