Communism with robots

One pithy criticism of the RBE is that it's communism with robots. Here we're supposed to take communism to be wrong/bad, and because the RBE shares one or more attributes with communism, it must also be wrong/bad.  I hope you can already see what a cheap shot it is just to stick a label on something and assume that can take the place of a proper logical critique of it.

Nevertheless, I want to examine what the RBE does have in common with communism and see what if anything is wrong with that / those attribute(s).  The RBE says that the planet's resources should be declared the common heritage of all humans living on the planet (or words to that effect). Everything belongs to everybody. This doesn't sit well with the argument that someone has worked hard etc, to get what they've got and why should they give it away.

First, does everyone get a share of the planet's resources based on how hard they work? I think the answer is obviously not. Let's compare:

(a) a super rich person who has everything s/he needs and probably everything s/he wants (such that money can buy). S/he may be highly skilled at gambling his/her spare money in the financial markets and coming out with more money.

(b) Someone in a third world country working in a sweat shop for not enough money to acquire the basics of life, or perhaps someone who has to walk miles each day just to get water.

Whilst there maybe a correlation between how hard someone has worked and what they've got, it is plain that there is not a single baseline from which everyone started. If there were, maybe the work more, have more model would stand up.

For an extreme example, let's also look at a burglar. S/he 'works' nights (unsocial hours), and is highly skilled in a stress filled "job". So, s/he's worked hard to get what s/he's got, and why should s/he give it away?

We have to examine what the work that's being done is. The work in example (a) is not socially constructive. The extra money that (a) gets must either be taken from someone else, or created out of thin air. In example (b) we see work that is technically unnecessary. Clearly it is technically possible to pipe water to all otherwise habitable places and the use of sweat shops reduces humans to below the rank of machines. They have to do the work more cheaply than it can be done by a machine, otherwise it would be done by a machine.

What work is the burglar doing? He (let's assume it's he), is presumably forcing entry into someone's home, causing damage that will need repairing. He may well make a mess looking for valuables, creating work tidying it up. He also creates work for the police investigating the burglary, and for the insurance company who will pay out to reimburse the burgled householder. Here we see how the notion of private ownership creates work for the people who secure it (locks, alarms, etc), those who insure it, those who try to acquire it (burglars) and those who try to stop them (police). In short there is a whole industry around getting and hanging onto stuff.

In my ramblings, I haven't yet made any ethical point about innate equality or birthright to a fair share of the planet's resources.

What benefit does someone directly derive from ownership of something to the exclusion of others? It is clear what disbenefits it has - they must secure it, insure it, and pay taxes to have a police force to enforce the ownership system. If someone steals your car, the most immediate problem for you is that you lose the utility that the car brings, but if someone steals your jewellery, what have you actually lost? There's no real utility in it. OK you've lost the money you spent on it, but that money is only as good as the utility it brings you.


The underlying psychology in possessing things is the mentality of scarcity - there isn't enough to go round so I have to grab what I want and stop other people from getting it. But let's look at cars again. At any one time, most of them are parked, bringing no utility to anyone. Some of them are not yet owned by anyone. There plainly is no scarcity of cars (in the developed world) - in fact the opposite is true in many places, in that owners have to pay money to park their cars.

Thus we have a whole industry of traffic wardens, parking tickets, appeals tribunals, parking meters, car alarms, car repairs, garages, garage alarms, car insurance, and so on, all to achieve the aim of a car owner having exclusive rights to using a car that for most of the time s/he doesn't need or want to use.

So here we have something that's not scarce, but that is treated as though it is, and that generates work managing the "scarcity". What is going on? Why are we pretending something is scarce when it isn't? In worse cases, we make something actually scarce even though it doesn't have to be - for example paying farmers not to grow food (set aside). Do we have some deep-seated desire to have something that someone else does not have, even to the extent that we will actually make an effort to ensure there isn't enough to go round, or is this a genuine fear of scarcity, an over-developed survival instinct?

It's undeniably true that the planet's resources are finite, and therefore it is logically true that there could be some things that are genuinely scarce. Surely this must be where our attention should be focussed, and not on creating scarcity, or pretending there's scarcity where there isn't? Isn't this just logic rather than communism?