Profit is nothing more or less than motivation. Why did I make that widget? To earn a return. Why did you paint that picture? I was hoping to make my living as an artist. Why did you open that trendy East Village boutique/CD Store/sex shop/Communist bar? I was hoping to make a living at it.
There are no leftists writing today who did not at some point benefit from the profit motive, and very few who pay their bills who do not currently benefit from the profit motive.
Why do people do anything? BECAUSE THEY WANT TO.
What is the proposed motivational structure in a socialist utopia? That people make things for others for no profit because they want to contribute. They want to do the right thing. They want the social order as a whole to do well, and they thus act selflessly. Socialism depends, therefore, on considerable moral development.
Yet, most socialists have no developed moral sense. They are quite good at pointing to what they see as the inequities of the Capitalist system, but Marx himself had nothing to say about morality, and Lenin rejected the concept altogether.
Logically, if one wanted to build a paradise where everyone was nice, and produced just out of their love of their fellow man–a condition I will not reject out of hand as impossible–the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY to get there is through fostering genuine altruism, which in turn depends on a coherent and replicable moral code.
Where is the evidence of efforts in this direction? From where I sit, what I see are people obsessing about presumed affronts to notions of cultural, racial, social and moral uniformity, but who offer no POSITIVE, actionable set of thoughts for moving forward.
This is a massive structural deficit. Let us posit that many of these people are in fact well-meaning. Let us further observe, as historical fact, that into their midst invariably fall people (like Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot) who are NOT well-meaning. How can they fight them, when they lack a positive moral code?
Practically, this defect gets expressed as people being FORCED to produce for others at pain of hunger or worse. This does not build morality; rather, it destroys it. It teaches people to be crafty, dishonest, mistrustful, and lazy.
The ONLY way forward for people who advocate a reduction in the importance of the profit motive is moral education. This requires the development of a coherent moral system, that is not relativistic, and in which certain core truths are unimpeachable. That is what I myself am trying to develop, a project in which I have in large measure succeeded. See my other blog to learn more.