It's me again, the central planning genius from post who is apparantly to stupid for formatting text properly:
The problem in thinking about alternatives to capitalism is that brains tend to use lazy heuristics, greedy algorithms. That is, it is easier to think of small changes than big changes, and if small changes don't seem to bring an improvement the thinking about change stops. What is needed for communism is a change in a whole package of relations. How do we compare that with capitalism? The lazy heuristic is to think of parts of that package of changes in isolation. "If we changed aspect A, all else equal to now, would that work? Hmmm, no. If we changed B, all else equal, would that do it? No…" And so, if the parts of the big change don't constitute improvements in themselves (they might even make things worse), the big change is rejected. Unless we give ourselves a nudge and think long and hard about the big change, we will give up. (We might even bring up a handy Marxian excuse for avoiding thinking about a better future: that isolated ivory-tower intellectuals can't think up some great blueprint in all details. But that's the crucial thing, the hubris of assuming all details, not to reject all guessing. So, inject some coffee into your veins and think.)
When thinking about an alternative to capitalism, an easy and wrong small-change thought is that people in important positions such as supervisors will have a different duty. Instead of benefiting themselves, they shall act for the benefit of the community, inshallah! But their current positions generate their current behavior (which re-generates the positions and behaviors).
So, I don't believe supervision is ever going to disappear, but who is going to do this? Will it be different from now, and is there reason to believe that the set of relations will be stable and not turn back into old roles and behaviors? Who sets the standards for how much effort can be reasonably expected at this or that task and how it is to be remunerated?
The key is this: If you say some task is done in an unusually slow way compared to some other task or unusually highly compensated compared to another task that is similar (according to your judgment), you have to be up for doing things yourself, that way, with that compensation, for your words to have merit. Simple as that. (And yet, you will not find this insight in the entire works of, say, Trotsky, who believed the magical party magically knows.) Comparisons of two tasks is done by people who do these two tasks. They don't give a report to "experts" who then decide to do whatever they want with that (wipe their arses, for instance), they decide on productivity norms and renumeration (in relative terms, like distributing 100 points for arduousness between the two tasks, not reporting on some absolute scale that both tasks are worth one trillion points or something like that).
There isn't anybody who does all tasks, but you have people who do A and B, and people who do B and C; and so you obtain information about how arduous doing A is relative to C, even if no individual actually has ever done both. The longer these comparison chains are and the fewer people add their voice (I'm thinking especially about the weakest link in such a chain), the less reliable the information is. For that reason, some people should be assigned to tasks in a way to make these comparison chains more reliable. (Another issue is Condorcet preference loops. I think they are not common, and they can be dealt with by taking that as evidence the tasks in the loop are similar, but we are getting into detail territory here.)
