A. Einstein: Why socialism?
Did you know that Albert Einstein once wrote an essay titled "Why Socialism?" [1]. I did not either. Recently I have watched a YouTube video, which referred me to a video by Dr. Fatima in which a broader discussion about the essay, as well as about Physics in politics and problems faced by Palestinian physicists, can be found. Feel free to watch the video linked below, or go read the original essay [1].
My take away from both the video and the essay is an observation that in capitalist society, you can make money through owning stuff only if you pay laborers less than the value of their labor. To be fair, often the tools are what enables the labor. Yet without a laborer the tool is often as useless. Either way, such practice diverts the gains from the improving technology and other increases in productivity to the pockets of the select few instead of benefiting society as whole. The worst thing is that having deep pockets, enables the select few to exert influence over politics and shaping the society to their will. To break or circumvent check and balances that should exist in free society.
Additional note
After watching the video, reading the essay and discussing its contents with couple of different people, I have a few things to add. Now on the social media I get bombarded with low effort libertarian AI slop. Most of the time it is various AI-generated comics about how bad it was to live in the Soviet Union and how stupid young people are for trying to bring it back. Yes, they are dumb, if they are trying to bring Soviet Union in all its glory. Yet, Einstein advocates for a different thing - planned socialist economy with strong democratic safeguards.
Though I think that given the inherent economic complexity, the need to balance interests of many different groups, it would be extremely hard for any committee to produce an economic plan. "Distributed" computing of the free markets does help with this. So, one needs to look for a reasonable middle ground between the extreme ideas.
References
- A. Einstein. Why Socialism? Monthly Review 61: 55-61. doi: 10.14452/MR-061-01-2009-05_7.
