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How would one support innovation in socialism? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 7 months ago by Smorty@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/socialism@lemmy.ml

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I am genuinely interested how such a thing would be done. I understand that it wouldn't be as hard as with communism, but I can't think of any way to encourage companies to make better (genuinely better) products. I remember how my mother told me how in her days (she lived in the DDR) there wasn't really any reason to be better than another company, as they would all be payed equally.

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[–] Ramin_HAL9001@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@Smorty@lemmy.blahaj.zone when humans have their basic needs all satisfied, and they feel secure and mostly content with life, they naturally become very creative and innovative.

Think about it: if you were not worried about paying rent every month, not worried about medical bills, not worried about where your next meal is coming from, and the job you did only require you work 6 huors a day 4 days a week, what would you do with your abundant free time? You might have kids and devote your life to them, and that is really helpful for perpetuating society. You might be happy to just play video games and watch TV and movies and maybe read fictional novels in all of your free time, and that would be totally OK too.

But a lot of people would get antsy, they would want to find tasks for themselves to perform. They may devote themselves to sport, and become the best players in the world. They may devote themselves to art, and without a free market to satisfy, without a business case to defend the art you make, the art you make would be truly free and likely very innovative. Even in engineering and science, in which some creativity is required to come up with innovative solutions to problems, if you don't have to worry about making things that are marketable, you just want to make things that you think are cool and useful for yourself, it may turn out to be useful for millions of other people.

[–] No_Change_Just_Money@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

I agree that it would increase creativity, but the question is how new inventions or better versions of existing goods are spread.

When the means of production are with the government how are they incentivised to take the risk of reducing the production of an existing article to produce an alternative, which might be more or less sought after.

Of course a similar problem exists in capitalism where a small amount of people decide what is produced in high amounts but the competition in capitalism strongly favors your product to be slightly different than your competitors, which in theory should lead to evolution as long as no monopolies are allowed.

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 1 points 7 months ago

Open source software may be a good model to look at. People contribute bc they want to, regardless of any monetary remuneration.

But it's hard, and a for-profit corporation can often move forward more quickly to develop an objectively better project. Except even though they *could", they (usually) don't, and really they have zero reason to, bc their goal is to make a profit, not a product. Reddit vs. Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/etc. is one such example.

But it gets complicated bc of all the counterexamples, like at one time Google really was awesome, and free, so most of the open source projects did not push hard to replace it, bc it worked so well for so many. Similar to Lemmy I suppose - before the Rexit it had existed for many years, but it wasn't until that shakeup that it was propelled forward extremely quickly by the influx of developers, e.g. who made the front end apps. Before that, the Reddit experience was fairly good even if not great, so not as many people bothered.

Necessity is the mother of invention.