Is Market Socialism necessary for a well fed population?

Is Market Socialism necessary for a well fed population?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0e3a/443d6fb314eb8b160576faa9928aa151d6fb.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy
youtube.com/watch?v=tO7HXrhHOS8
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

No, cybernetics + planned economy is perfect for that

Why specifically market socialism?

No.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara

Also it depends on what you mean by well fed. For example nobody went hungry in the Soviet Union after the third famine ended, and I mean nobody. That being said most people wouldn't have had much of a variety to choose from since the black market had so thoroughly infected everything.

A planned economy led to food shortage for millions of people in Russia, compared to a freer market in the USA.
There could be other factors i'm missing, however.

...

The Comecon existed for decades and it didn't have a constant famine for that time period.

Muh FALC will make anime real, right.

...

...

wat

Sankara focused on nationalizing production of food, no?
What happens if there is a drought?

not necessarily, but planned economies inevitably detach themselves from the reality of being human. The elites who are well taken care of decide that people don't need feast holidays, drinks, ice cream, video games, etc. because that's 'inefficient'. They also decide that their racism means that some groups are even more undeserving of a decent share. Command economies are a terrible idea, no-one would ever want their enemy to run economies like this which is precisely why you should never be for it.

Russia had famines literally every 10-15 years under the Tsars, of the three that occurred under the Soviets two of them were directly caused by wars. Socialism eliminated hunger literally for the first time in Russian history.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union

You think?

Nice meme

true up until you said this

not socialism, plenty of hunger to go around

You have to go back. >>>/liberty/

Where are the famines after 1947 then? There is a pretty clear cycle to Russian food security that isn't eliminated until the Soviets take power.

real good argument user

...

What do you mean "free market"? I live in a country that's "free market" for the past 40 years…I live in a city with various shopping malls, yet they all have the exact same stores.
So where is my freedom of choice under "free market"?

the "free" does not refer to freedom of choice. It refers to freedom from government intervention.
Also stop shopping in malls if you want choice

7 million people starve to death literally every year, all in capitalist countries. 20 million are due to starve to death within a few months in countries being torn apart by wars started by capitalist states. Also historically there have been numerous capitalist famines including the Bengali Famine, Irish Potato Famine, the Chinese famine of 1850, etc.

...

Market Socialism isn't the ideal, but it is good for transition to full socialism
Especially in countries like the United States were the free market is basically deified

Government intervention happens all the time in these "free" markets via numerous means, including but not limited to subsidies, taxes, tariffs, regulations, and land laws. To put it down to interventionism is very silly. Additionally, numerous centrally planned economies had no such famines.

I don't support central planning, but your argument needs a lot of improvement.

I think a lot more people in the US would get on board if they new about it

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States

Really gets your noggin joggin'

notice that I said "freer" every time except then.

The "free" market is predicated on government intervention. The entire concept is a fantasy.

But you literally just said "It refers to freedom from government intervention", when that isn't even the case in 'freer' systems. You also have not addressed famines and hunger problems in 'freer' market systems. Come on, you can do better than this.

These threads are my favorite.

i'm trying to talk about planning an economy a little bit less than the USSR did, and everyone's strawmanning ancap free markets

C-M-C' =/= M-C-P-C'-M+
Read some history on the subject comrade…

you can't name any famines in capitalist unions though

Have you never heard of the British Empire?

You mean dressed-up capitalism? Markets inherently require the law of value. If you assume that, then you're just having capitalism by a new name.

In the early stages of the revolution, yes.

Markets and Capitalism are not the same thing. Markets were used for centuries before Capitalism existed.

More importantly, markets are a method of resource allocation predicated on scarcity. In terms of current global accessible resources and productive capacity, scarcity is an utterly outmoded concept.

One of capitalism's prime failures is its inability to account for its own productive capacity - it simultaneously operated on the assumption that prices are always non-zero while actively driving prices to zero. All crises under capitalism are crises of overproduction.

Prices are an archaic holdover from a time when we lacked the information processing capacity to make economic calculations in real quantities. Why should we bother retaining such an outmoded resource allocation model? Better to build a new economic system predicated on and capable of efficiently administering to the generalised abundance we have created for ourselves.

Markets require the law of value. They are a symptom of a capitalist system. Yes, they are incompatible with socialism.

We aren't post-scarcity though, only post-subsistence at best. And even if we accept that it is possible to produce enough goods and services to meet subsistence levels for everyone - that doesn't help us in meeting the logistical challenges involved in coordinating the production of those goods, and the transportation of those goods to where they are needed, when they are needed.

Of course, you might be able to do this entirely through planning alone, without markets. Of course, then there's the question of who is doing the planning and how fair and smart their judgment would be.It's perfectly fair to at least have skepticism of planned economies.

Please actually read Marx before talking about a subject you are so uneducated in.

How about market socialism with strong government intervention.

do you want to starve user

I wasn't aware that crops grown in a free market are immune to droughts. If a drought wipes out a food supply then it will do so regardless of the economic system.

I never said that a post-market system of resource administration had actually been developed yet, merely that its development was a necessity for communism. And if you think the nebulous category of 'economic planning' necessitates a ruling class to administer the distribution of surplus, then it can't be said that you've considered the topic very extensively. Such a lack of consideration is common among socialists, and it is very disheartening. The assumption that 'a market will be necessary' is intellectually lazy, since no serious attempt on the part of the claimant has been made to develop a post-market economic system.

What exactly is the difference between this made-up category of 'post-subsistence' and post-scarcity anyway? We have food to make 10 billion fat despite only having 8 billion, food production consistently rises faster than population growth, there are more empty houses than homeless people, we have the immediate technological and productive capacity to harness orders of magnitude more energy than we currently utilise, in all of our productive history we've only actually lost one material resource (Helium), and that isn't actually required for the mass production of anything. On top of all of that, we have 8 billion people on the planet, most of which are capable both of productive labour and the further improvement of productive processes.

Tell me, what role do you see scarcity playing in such a world?

No thanks.

this means different things to different regimes. To Bolsheviks it means people are still alive. To capitalists it means they're alive and fat and thus happy. to fascists it means the ones who are people are alive and fit, maybe not happy or always well fed. I think you'll find that its rather impossible to keep 7 billion people well fed.

...

I never said that.
I never said that either, nor do I assume it to be true.
At the very least, I'd like a world where people have access to more than just the bare minimum of what they need to live. Therefore I think it's important to extend our analysis beyond merely "having enough to feed everyone" and into consideration of how we can best satisfy everyone's material desires in totality. This is where scarcity comes into play - as I doubt we currently have the means to satisfy every material desire of every person on earth. Of course, food and such takes preference over luxuries I was just pointing out that there is more to post-scarcity than food alone.

I may be a committed market socialist, but historically, the answer to that question is no.

The use of a market as a mechanism for planning and distribution has very little to do with how well fed a population is. No successful agricultural market or finished food market has ever existed without massive subsidies, regulations, and some level of rationing. Where we see a man-made hand in famines occurring we usually find them to be the result of one of two things, a lack of government subsidy/regulation or a result of squeezing the agricultural sector for the purpose of development.

In the case of the US with the Great Depression, we see the dust bowl occurring because of a lack of government regulation on plowing on the macro level, permitting overplowing to create the conditions for the catastrophe. in order to prevent mass famine, the government instituted rationing, and eventually the food stamp program. In Ireland, the primary cause of the Potato Croup failure was natural, but the British government's refusal to provide aid on the basis of not interfering in the free market and causing a "moral hazard" is what actually caused the sheer amount of starvation that killed 1/8th of the population.

In Ukraine and Mao's China, we see the government trying to use the agricultural sector as a source of much needed resources they could exchange for developmental capital. Their attempts at collectivization, often clumsy, represented the extent to which peasant's had little influence over policy making, and, in my opinion, led to famine because, like the British government in respect to the famines they caused in Ireland and India, the central government's power was too great and far removed to be effected by the distress of those effected.

There's enough food in the world to feed 10 billion people

Pick one, bruh

Who are you quoting? I said "We have food to make 10 billion fat despite only having 8 billion [people]", so you can't be quoting me.

And I wrote a whoooole paragraph about how we have the material resources, energy, productive capacity, and labour enough to provide for the rest of those desires. Can you please read my posts before you quote and respond to me? You embarrass yourself and offend me when you don't.

This just refers to anyone that does planning, as part of a ruling class or not. At this point you're clearly trying to inject subtext that is not there. Especially since you changed "ruling class" to "planning class" which seems to me like a purposeful distortion.

I wasn't quoting you. I would have used greentext if I was, like I've used greentext every other time I quoted you. There's no need to get so upset over this.

But we don't. I read your post and I get the implication, but you didn't actually say that we have enough to satisfy every material desire so I assumed you were not implying that. Certainly, we have the ability to go some ways towards achieving that, but it's not like with food where we obviously have more than enough. I've seen no evidence to suggest that we actually have the productive means to provide for every material desire of everyone on Earth. Your paragraph does not prove that we have this capacity either, if that's what you are implying.

Post-scarcity as a concept is more philosophical than practical for most things.

For instance, copies of software that has already been invented are post-scarcity in absolute terms, 1st-world tapwater or domestic electricity are just vastly more abundant for most people than their needs but still easily exhaustible if abused, and something like the global food supply or habitable land are merely abundant enough to exceed minimal demand if efficiently rationed.

Beyond the absolute sense, "post-scarcity" as a sliding scale is helpful to indicate where the need for economics breaks down. But so long as even the tiniest trace of scarcity remains, so too does the need for at least a skeletal economy.

obviously. Doesn't mean there's less food on the shelves though, does it.

freer market countries generally trade with other countries a lot more

Could you remind us all what it is people from from having food on shelves and then deliberately destroyed before being disposed of?

Absolutely. The 100 billions gorillionz should never happen again.

...

those four famines that preceded the Taiping Rebellion in China were actually caused by low levels of rainfall in Guangzhou, not capitalism

Only thanks to evolved plants.

Oh fuck man, you can't be starving if you get to look at food sometimes. Dang dude. Thanks for making me realize that.

really made me think

I completely do support that. I'm just saying that food being in a supermarket temporarily does not mean this food is for us in the eyes of the system. This food is for the dumpster more or less.

you realize that there would also be more food in the food banks?

wew lad

No shit sherlock. In any case if you're going to advocate markets you really need to lose that flag.

No?

There's some restrictions on donating it, but the fact is that these companies would sooner destroy their food than give it away. They won't even give their shit to their own employees, much less random panhandlers.

Fuck poor people.

Capitalism works. If the demand is there, in willingness to pay (which poor people don't have), the products are on the shelves. Want to eat? Contribute with some value back. We used to call it reputation.

Also not for us. Unless it's rotting and moldy, they like to give us that.

Yeah, fuck poor people for not having little value left after it's been extracted from them by the bourgeoisie.

There's something hilariously self-defeating about saying "Capitalism works. Fuck the people it doesn't work for."

Question: why do we have to have either market or planning? Why can't we just start with a market system, and as products become trivial to make, move those products to a planned mode of distribution.

Then if planning ever fails and there's a sudden shortage of a certain kind of product, we can just move them back to market distribution as a fallback to cushion the blow.

Exactly, I don't understand how anybody has the right to just take property because they believe it could be used in a better way. If you can truly plan production in a way that is more efficient and more fair, then we would have all seceded from capitalism by simply switching to the superior mode of production and out-competing it. Workers would flock to any place that uses social ownership.
We could just let people organise labour however they want and organise property however they want, as long as they don't violently stop others from using property in a different way. A lot of people in society want to voluntarily work. A lot of people want to work together. They agree using contracts, it's completely fair.

It works because demand is fulfilled, which is exactly what doesn't happen under communism. Poor people can't demand anything because they don't have money.

mein gott

Well, here's the thing: if they take it and contiune to hold onto it, then they have the right to take it. It's pretty simple.

>implying capitalists do anything more that shuffle paper around, if that, they usually get other people to shuffle their paper for them
Wew there lad.

they do it randomly?

communism couldn't even get that right haha


demand is defined by willingness to pay

stop posting your failed faggot

Yes, if they use violence. Your ability to take my property doesn't entitle you to it. I completely agree that you should use something that someone isn't using, but you're saying that your right to use it is more important than their right to use just because you are better at being violent. If they were using it before you, then you can't deny that they have the right to use it. If they didn't use violence to take it then they are clearly more fit to take it than you. If your claim to taking it is your ability to take it then you're just proving that it was harder for you to take, and that the original owner belongs as the true owner.

...

Here's a hint. The bourgeois do not use their property.

Not really what I was going for. More like in a market socialist system, that already has publicly owned enterprises competing in a market, why couldn't we move industries that had been 99% automated and has trivial resource requirements to a planned system?

For example, cheap mass produced ramen noodles. Its all just machine produced dried starch and machine mixed broth powder, and these companies still turn a profit on just 25¢ per meal. If the public decided to effectively merge the cheap ramen enterprises and convert them into a planned system where we just give people ramen noodles as they want it, we could effectively eliminate food insecurity overnight.

Then, if ramen noodles are ever in short supply for whatever reason (a ramen famine???), un-merge the companies and move them back to a profit-driven system to let the market fix the issue.

inb4 some dupe posts the version of the second image where the owner whines about "putting his ass on the line" and thus deserves all the monies

communism btfo

Always? In principle? How does this misuse of private property lead to to the conclusion that private property is inherently misused? What about this misuse makes me an aggressor?


If the socialist mode of production is superior to to the capitalist mode, then why switch them at all? You're admitting that private ownership is superior when you propose its use during emergency. You're saying that it is more efficient. So why shouldn't we use the capitalist mode of production at all times?

I don't think he's saying it's superior, I think he's saying it's more flexible.

Really, I think he's just making what is essentially a more aggressive than usual version of the natural monopoly argument. A free (or at least freer) market is desirable where competition is likely and innovation produces greater benefits than the harm and inefficiency innate to markets, but where that isn't the case, a mostly or entirely planned economy is superior for that sector.

Just by centralizing all the dysfunctional or weakly competitive markets, most necessities would be centrally planned, and markets would be relegated to only the most dynamic economic segments.

In what way these systems are efficient is the rub. If indeed capital accumulation is necessary for economic and technological development, then capitalism by its nature has the advantage, because the entire point is to concentrate as much as possible in as few hands as possible. The majority suffers for the sake of the few, who for the purposes of expanding their monopoly and entrench their priviIege reinvest a portion of those monopolized resources into the means of production. Steel producers lobby the government to subsidize railroads because they'll need tons of steel, etc.

Past a certain point, you no longer need to rely on the mechanisms of competition in order to develop your productive forces, and it probably wouldn't be desirable for one reason or another. Instead you can rationally direct the growth of economic development in order to meet the needs of the people. Capitalism has an inherent motivation to thwart this sort of development, because every dollar not being funneled to the bourgeois is a dollar 'wasted.' The desires of the few outweigh the needs of the many, which is exactly what we're seeing now.

One idea I've thought about is that you could have a type of hybrid market socialist/centrally planned economy where the actual organization of mass production is centrally planned (maybe using the types of planning algorithms discussed on p. 33 of pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0e3a/443d6fb314eb8b160576faa9928aa151d6fb.pdf ), but central planners don't have any say over what goods are produced, instead everything is made on demand by people who submit payment for whatever good they want (I'm assuming here people still work on jobs like services and programming and product design and such, and also that there's a basic income so everyone has enough for a reasonably good living standard), with the payment being set as low as possible without orders outstripping the rate at which a given product can be produced. To avoid wait times, there could also be retailers who order large numbers of various in-demand products so they can have them in stock to be sold at a small premium, but with whatever market socialist policies would work best to make sure that all businesses above a certain size are primarily owned by the workers.

Hello

planned economy is a Stalinist meme

Some market forces obviously will have to exist in socialism, the point is that they would be socialised rather than private.

See also the NEP during the Soviet Union and how they tried to work around the obvious problems of a planned economy and collectivization.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy

In a time before artificial fertilizers, almost definitely. Modern farms can pump out ludicrous amounts of grains crops with minimal labor. Food may still be a problem without markets though.

meant to say food variety

Well then I have a very simple question - why aren't we using the socialist mode of production? If your claims are true then a single instance of socialism is enough to convince the entire working class that capitalism is inefficient and objectively inferior to social ownership.

I think you're misunderstanding: they're both socialist. Markets aren't inherently capitalist.

You can have an economic system of publicly owned enterprises that must compete in the market to stay afloat. That is what I'm proposing here when I say market.

Also, there's no such thing as a superior economic system, that's like saying a car is superior to a delivery truck or vice versa. They both perform different functions.

An enterprise that is receives public funding as part of economic planning is able to meet societal needs, but is prone to growing lazy or inefficient due to the lack of requirement to compete.

An enterprise that is forced to fund itself by competing in the market may not be able to meet certain societal needs, but is forced to become efficient in order to stay afloat.

What I'm asking is: if a group of enterprises that are part of economic planning are no longer efficient or meeting it's quotas satisfactorily, why can't the community just revoke their public funding and force the companies to begin competing in the market again?

Marx advocated planned production you tool.

The NEP was capitalist as fuck, Lenin even said as much.


Literally state capitalism.

Why don't you just leave people alone and let them organise property in whichever way they see fit? If people want to pool services, let them collectivise. If people want to individually produce in a market, let them privatise. Whichever way is most efficient and most equitable will be determined by the people who benefit from that efficiency and equity (i.e. everyone).

Tfw Marx probably never ate a banana.

Anarchists, leftcoms, actual democratic socialists such as Allende, and Marx all supported planning, if in non-state-led forms. False dichotomy and pure ignorance on your part.
"no"
NEP was what Lenin called state capitalism and was never intended to be socialist. It would have been cool if it were market-socialist like mutualism (I'm still reading about Yugoslavia, idk if it was really marksoc), but it wasn't.

Marxhead is dead, m8
unless you really are him, in which case, welcome back

This is a good point! I believe the answer to that question is because such a system hasn't actually been devised yet. Trying to shill for some bonapartist adventure before such a system has actually been developed is a recipe for disaster though, as the tankies amply demonstrated by fucking up the 20th century for everybody.

funny that food shortages begun after retards in politburo implemented monetary reform
also funny that food was rotting in trains near the cities
video very much related
youtube.com/watch?v=tO7HXrhHOS8

...

it was shit
but it did not caused breadlines

i'm not the person saying it did (that person is retarded)
i'm the person saying it wasn't socialism, and wasn't even an earnest attempt at it

That's the entire point. A system that has both food on shelves and people starving in the streets, is not a good system.

How can you be sure that the lack of a "system" isn't due to the nature of implementing social ownership? It seems to simply fail as an economic practice. Each time that social ownership is implemented, it is done in a slightly different way, yet after the occupation of dozens of countries for the past 100 hundred years, we've never been shown any clear indication that the socialist mode of production is at all more efficient or more equitable than the average instance of capitalist production.

I would suggest that the socialist mode of production is emphatically something that somebody implements. Indeed, I'd say that acting like it is has been the primary problem with it. No real attempt has actually been made to implement it - a major source of economic information in the so-called 'socialist economies' was simply outdated commodity prices from the world market. I would contend that the communist mode of production is something that will be developed more fully under capitalism, and will be adopted when it is clear that it is in fact more capable of handling production than the capitalist system.

But that's a theory I'm working on based on a sober examination of the abject failures of the 'socialist' states of the 20th century. Also that's how the mode of production changed every other time in human history, despite extensive reading I never did understand why marxists insist it has to be different for the transition away from capitalism.

To supplement my answer, I think the communist mode of production is necessary because capitalism has created more prosperity than the market system is able to handle - regular intervention is required to keep commodity prices from falling to zero and crashing the economy. We need an economic system capable of actually handling abundance. The only way to do that is to discard the market, a thing that is entirely outmoded.

emphatically not* something that somebody implements

bullshit claim from austrians
there were plenty of closed cycle production processes in soviet economy
and neither of them had anything to do with the world market conjuncture

cry all you want, you still weren't building the lower stage of communism you tankie faggot

Then the only thing that's stopping us from social ownership is the government. If socialism is a better economic practice than capitalism then there's no need for leftists to support any government. If people voluntarily exchange property in a way that is more efficient than others, then people can do that. There's no need to have government, mob rule or forced monopolies on law.

What? You've spun off in a completely different and stupider direction. The only thing stopping social ownership isn't 'the government', it's the fact that we don't currently have a better method of administering social ownership without the market. I don't know who you're talking to in the rest of your post, I never said anything about supporting a government or whatever.

In a free market, modes of production would be able to compete with one another. If socialism is the most efficient, it will immediately be recognisably superior.

Sure, but a free market doesn't exist and is also impossible. I agree with your second point though. You'll have to await the development of such a system. We have to devise it.

Source and I didn't know socialism distributed knowledge back in time to past versions of itself.

Market Socialism is for lefties who were spooked by capitalist propaganda as children.

A market will always default to capitalism because capital accumulation is the natural state of market economics.

Mutualists are even wost because in addition to misunderstanding proudhon they also have no fucking clue about what they are talking about. At least Tito created a functional state capitalism.

Market Socialism is as contradictory as Not Socialism and it's time we stop defending it.

Why couldn't the state take an overseeing role to prevent a market socialist economy from degenerating into capitalism.

People really underestimate the amount of effort and intervention it takes to prevent markets from failing all the time, and how often they fail anyway. Planned economies have their problems too, but ended up getting very similar results to market economies, despite only being tried for a few decades in a few countries, compared to an economic system that has had hundreds of years of trial and error, research, and innovation.