So are we just going to spout Marxist dogma, or do you have some idea for a solution? Preferably something that doesn't require a massive government apparatus and that doesn't infringe on the rights of every individual to make their own choices?
The ideal would be to have a strong social safety net and a fair system of redistribution that operates with minimal micromanagement or intrusion into individual affairs.
Basically you have a government that taxes everyone according to the same rate and provides health care, unemployment and disability protection, insurance against certain emergencies (FEMA, etc.), and some sort of basic income. But as long as you pay into this system and are a 'shareholder' you can do whatever you want.
Employment should be at-will. Companies should be easy to start. Regulations should be minimal and justified by specific rationales (e.g. environmental protection).
The problem with the USSR and to a much lesser extent European Socialist countries is that they try to micro-manage. They have all these messes of laws that try to dictate exactly how things work and exactly how people must live their lives. That doesn't work. It just chokes everything and weighs everything down.
The irony is that all this micro-management is put into place because the obvious alternative -- just redistributing wealth -- is politically toxic. So instead of just redistributing wealth, we try to reach in and piecemeal adjust the operation of capitalism to make it 'more fair.' The end result is the worst of both worlds: the system remains unfair, and we end up with micromanaging regulations that are far more expensive than what it would cost to just redistribute wealth.
The US healthcare system is a great example. We have everything that is bad about micro-managing Socialism (heavy regulations, bureaucracy, inefficiency) combined with everything that is bad about capitalism/free market healthcare (inequality, losing coverage when you get sick, etc.).
No "system" is fair. All systems contain intrinsic biases, emergent behaviors, randomness, massive opportunities for cheating and exploitation, and unintentional/non-obvious "goal functions" that conflict with the stated intents of their designers or operators. Constructing a fair system through central planning is impossible... IMHO it is "perpetual motion" or "halting problem" impossible. Complex living systems are not logical and their behaviors cannot be pre-specified by an intelligent designer.
Wealth redistribution is the obvious answer. Instead of trying to impose the impossible on a chaotic counter-intuitive world, just apply noise reduction and normalization.
One thing none of these countries seem to get is that complex regulations and micromanagement are more expensive than taxation. These things have huge unintended costs, largely in time and in preventing innovation.
If we had free health care and basic income, who cares about at-will employment? If I lose my job, I'll just move on. You don't need all those regulations if you apply a "fairness correction" after the fact.
Cry me a river about competing with people with a greater work ethic. I'm not OK with government doing anything that involves initiation of force to achieve political ends.
The status quo is maintained by force. The government you have distrust for is the thing that keeps everything from breaking down.
There will always be people who want more, work more, work harder, strive harder, and are more ambitious. That has nothing at all to do with "this system of labor relations".
The government you have distrust for is the thing that keeps everything from breaking down.
Feh... I mistrust the government because they're the main reason things are so broken now. The only "government" I want is self-government and whatever voluntary associations people form that don't claim a right to use force for any cause other than defense.
No one in their right mind is expecting the means of production to be collectivized into a bureaucratic mess (considering how many corporations are practically Stalinist dystopias in their own right).
At least the bourgeois states have made their body politic agree at least at some level that it is fair to have a system of property where everyone, in legal principle, is capable of becoming a property owner. The promise that one can achieve economic security by accumulating capital through labor and becoming a property holder is the carrot. The police, military, and private security forces are the stick. It's easier to maintain order with a carrot and a stick than with just a stick.
Your criteria for a solution are exactly mine as well. I bet, though, we have very different ideas about what an individual is or what it means for them to make their own choices.
On government: I cannot say anything about the presence or absence of large governments. It's possible that large scale coordination of human beings requires large scale structures. Capitalism has large scale structures of its own. Markets, financial institutions, national and supranational bodies of law and force, political parties, and who knows what else that slips my mind are all massive apparatuses of power and coordination. Does capitalism not require large government bodies? There are many people who believe invasive governments with their heavy-handed economic policies are a perversion of capitalism. I'm not such an idealist. Capitalism has been unstable since its early inception. It has come up with many, many tricks to keep itself afloat. Laissez-faire failed. What we have now, what many people call neoliberalism, is its latest incarnation. I believe people who believe in bourgeois ideologies and relations of property will be ever creative in coming up with new principles, instititions, policies and markets to keep the system afloat. Call it the efficient government hypothesis: The government is as big as it needs to be for the system to be stable.
On the individual: I emphatically reject many fundamental liberal principles about the self. I am not an atom. I do not exist apart from my social relations. All of my relations are integral to my being. If you poked a hole in the social fabric where I am, I believe that you could reconstruct a large part of my being simply from the information of which fibers criss-crossed to stitch me together. An ideology that treats me as an atom that makes decisions for its own sake while ignoring how essentially mixed up I am with other individuals is barren to me. It does not tell me how to be happy, how to live a good life, how to be prosperous, how to be productive. My prosperity is fundamentally tied up with the prosperity of others. My productivity is nil without the productivity of others (I am a programmer, a profession extremely reliant on everyone else's work). Property is a relation between atomic individuals. Exchange is a social relation between atomic individuals. I am neither. I don't think anyone is. The failure of property and exchange to capture human relations makes the system unstable. It is an abstraction, and a leaky abstraction. Everyone knows what happens when you stick to abstractions that leak. You get into a lot of trouble.
I am perfectly capable of cooperating in good faith with my fellow human beings. I extend that good faith to everyone else: I believe everyone else wants to live in harmony with each other. If I didn't believe this, I would have to accept that society must be structured by force and that some must dominate the others. I cannot accept this. If must be an optimist, I will be an optimist. It's not hard, though. People are good, or the makings of the good. My liberty and my prosperity are in good hands.
On property and individual freedom: An individual tautologically, in a very weak sense, always makes their own decisions. It may be that their choices are strongly shaped by material conditions. When we talk about liberty in the bourgeois sense, we tend to think about making individual choices in the absence of violence.
The problem with this is that you have attached a word to what is impermissible: Violence. It is a symbol, it is an abstraction. It is not reality. Power does not care about symbols, abstractions, or ideas. It only answers to reality. If a human being gives him or herself to an idea, they relinquish the ability to perceive reality outside of that abstraction and they become vulnerable to those who would manipulate that idea. I might not be very clear right now. It's a hard concept to pin down. What I mean to say is:
If you believe that unjustified violence violates individual freedom, then those who seek to curtail your freedom will use their power to frame their actions that harm you as non-violent, or that it is justified violence.
Hence propaganda and the manipulation of social customs.
We are led to believe that being brought into this world helpless and dependent on others without our consent, and then being raised and inculcated in the way the human machine works, and then left to fend for ourselves in a reality where our fellow human beings will let us fall into the flames of despair and poverty below is a non-violent social situation.
Individual choice, my ass. If one wanted me to act on my own choices, they would give me the security so that I could. Instead, I have to give up my individual initiative and ability to make choices to someone else in exchange for the means to survive. Individual freedom in our current system is a function of how much capital you own. That's not freedom. Calling this freedom is ideological propaganda. Everyone knows freedom is good, let's call our hierarchical society of domination free.
If society believes in individual freedom, then society ought to provide for all individuals. Would this work? If one believes in individual freedom, it must be because one believes that individuals will act for the greater good, because the good of society is the good of the individual. Anyone who thinks individuals will behave selfishly and destroy such a society does not believe in freedom. They believe that only a few should be free, and everyone should be ruled by them in some way. Hence, our current economic relations.
The right to dictate another person's actions is not freedom. It is tyranny.
I don't think anyone who takes the idea of individual freedom seriously, has ever contended that every individual should have the ability to make (or at least act on) any conceivable choice. That is, right this minute, I could make a choice to pack my bags, fly to Sweden, and spend a year chasing Swedish super-models. But I can't actually afford to do that. But that in no way means I'm not free, it just means that there are some choices that aren't available to me. But nobody is putting a gun to my head telling me "You can't go to Sweden". More to the point, I'm perfectly free to continue working at my "wage slave" job for the next year, eat Ramen noodles and spend as little as possible, and save every penny so that - next year - I can take my trip to Sweden.
If society believes in individual freedom, then society ought to provide for all individuals.
That's absurd and contradictory. As soon as you say "society should do X" you are talking about depriving someone of their choice to not do X, unless you believe that you can get 100% unanimous agreement with you idea. And when does that ever happen on a large scale?
The right to dictate another person's actions is not freedom. It is tyranny.
Yes, and another word for it is "government".