Capitalist Competition and Socialist Emulation

Holy egomaniacal, capitalist arguments Nick!
To the RedMobile!

OK, so Capitalists say that technology can’t be advanced without competition and profit motive, which are two of the things capitalism is all about. A few examples of things that weren’t invented through competition and profit motive include the spear, woodblock printing, gunpowder, and the AK-47. In 1971, during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese developed a special extraction method to isolate artemisinin. Those are only a few examples. Those things might sound old to you and I, but they were new advancements when they were first developed.

Let’s also not forget the open source movement for software. Open source has outperformed commercial, for-profit software in terms of server-software and has strongly challenged Microsoft in the realm of consumer software. A report by the Standish Group says that adoption of open source has caused a drop in the revenue of the for-profit software industry by about $60 billion per year!

Marx said that a capitalist gains from competition “more difficult conditions for the profitable employment of his capital.” So it’s not much they gain. Marxists tend to favor emulation over competition. Industrial emulation focuses on making a better product, not a profit. It is more significant in the development of productive forces.

In a talk with Stalin, Colonel Robins of the USA once said of Soviet emulation, “I have already sensed this in your factories where I have seen that socialist emulation has resulted in the creation of a new kind of ardour, a new sort of ambition that money could never buy, because the workers expect to get for their work something better and greater than money can procure.”

Another argument states that in a Marxist society, people could democratically request that new things be developed when needed. Through the examples I have listed earlier, technological advances don’t necessarily have to be democratically requested nor developed through competition.

Sources:
“The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution” by Mobo Gao
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1933/05/13.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software