|
 
How can you ever
prove socialism will
work?
As socialism has never yet existed a very
big obstacle for socialists is the lack of a
working model. In the absence of this we
are obliged to rely on theoretical arguments
in order to persuade people. But not many
people enjoy theory. Help however may
arrive from a quite unexpected source, the
computer games industry |
As the internet
becomes all pervasive and as computer
games become ever more sophisticated, a
new type of game may be able to create this
model by simulation.The Sims launched in 2000 it became the
all-time best selling computer game, and
parents reported how their children's
perception of life and relationships changed
after playing the games. So popular is the
idea of simulation that now political parties
are using it to promote their policies. In
Uruguay the opposition left wing coalition
Frente Amplio devised a game called
Cambienos (Let's Change) for the October
elections, while in the US elections there
were five or six 'party games' on offer (BBC
OnlineTechnology, Sat Oct 23).More
significantly,sophisticated computer
simulations offer a way of conducting complex what-if
analyses of live systems from ecology to economics.
|
Maxis, the company behind
SimCity, was
approached by the military, governments
and oil companies to design sim games that could
help plannerssee the consequences of making different
strategic decisions.
Maxis designed models
for the oil industry, healthcare sector and
the environment protection agency, but
discontinued development because of the
extreme legal complications involved. see the consequences of making
different
strategic decisions. Maxis designed models
for the oil industry, healthcare sector and
the environment protection agency,but discontinued development because
of the
extreme legal complications involved.
So could a socialist sim game be
developed? The short answer is yes. But
would it be any good? That depends on the
number of variables in play, and the
processing power available. |
|
Using
distributed processing across home PCs, as
the NASA SETI project and the British
Astronomical Association do, would
provide a computational power unequalled
by the world's largest supercomputer, and
with continual update and modification by
online participants there is no theoretical
reason why a working prototype could not
provide valuable insights into some of the
complexities of socialism in practice. If a
simulation could give us an idea in advance
of what sort of production and distribution
problems are likely to occur, we can begin
to find concrete answers ahead of schedule.
And if we can show a stable model of
socialism in practice, audited by
independent third parties, it will go a long
way to destroying the claims of economic
calculationists and others who insist that
socialism could never work in practice. |
How do you know
what to produce,
where it goes and
what happens to it?
Capitalist theorists are comfortable
with the argument that the only
variable they need to track is price.
Consumption and distribution don't
matter in themselves and can't
really be gauged anyway, whereas
in socialism, with no prices, the
unmeasurable needs to be
measured. But even capitalists
have uses for better information
and better tracking, and a
revolution is taking place in stock
control which has enormous
potential for socialism - the
|
humble RFID tag. A radio
frequency identification chip is
inserted into all products which then emit
a unique identifier bleep, a kind
of audio bar code, enabling a
receiver to identify all goods present,
and track the passage of all goods
through time and space, anywhere in
the world. The applications however
go well beyond supply chain tracking,
with the US State Department
issuing a million RFID tagged
passports next year (New Scientist,
23 Oct) and supermarkets
hoping to use CCTV to
monitor which tagged items
customers tend to pickup (NS, 28 August).
What this means in capitalism is that the
technology become mired in a new row
|
about state and corporate surveillance. What it means for
socialists is that for a fraction of a cent per item
capitalism has produced an easy way to measure
the 'unmeasurable', which in turn could greatly
facilitate the operation of a socialist non-market economy.
|
|
