Preventing emergent markets in communism

Made to order products are by definition not sold on markets.

What did he mean by this?

A single commodity, a good sold on a market is uniform, it is built for the purpose of being sold, and similarly, has the same price as all the other widgets sold in the same store. Made to order products are made for the purpose of consumption, for the sole purpose of being used.

if it gets out of hand, the worker's soviets/committees can send the people's militia to stop it

nothing wrong with it if it stays that small scale, really. I don't particularly want anyone to stop me if I want to trade books with some guy or something. personal property is not a problem, private property is.

Hey guys I have an idea (I promise I'm not a retard like OP) why don't we just build castles make ourselves lords and then round up the nearest 100 to be our serfs and servants? This would definitely work!!

This. The point of communism isn't to eliminate markets, but to eliminate their harmful effects. If markets are confined entirely to luxuries, and communism provides acceptable commodities to all, then markets can't actually hurt anyone beyond highschool-clique-tier social envy.

The only area where you'd end up with commissars seizing and socializing a market is if a luxury of some sort gradually became a necessity for large numbers of people (for instance, personal computers from the 1970s to 1990s).

Reminder that even Star Trek's Federation has money and scarcity, but they are almost entirely confined to frivolous luxury items and honorary positions. Further, particularly crucial scarce items, like capital ships, planetary colonies, and fleet positions, are generally controlled by the state.

Where is this guy getting the ingredients to bake his pies?

I'd suggest reading Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years if you have not already, as he goes into some detail talking about the historical emergence of markets and money throughout history.

The tl;dr of it though (and you'll have to excuse me for any misspeaking; it has been a while since I've read it) is that markets and currencies don't tend to emerge/proliferate without states backing them. While various societies have taken to recording debts using some manner of pseudo-money for various exchanges, the actual value of those debts to be repaid was often fluid as the pseudo-money itself often had only some manner of subjective value. Likewise the scale of the exchanges taking place in the economy was often quite limited when not state-directed. It almost always required state intervention to push some form of money from being just a marker for local exchange to something that was considered to have some measure of objective value over large and diverse groups of people, and it almost always did so through taxes. Historically speaking, as soon as that state recedes (unless it is followed by a new state that also enforces its own currency demands) the physical use of that currency also ceases. It should be noted that the use of the values set out by that currency system don't necessarily die under those circumstances, as it often continue in an abstract non-physical form (to use a theoretical modern example, if a carton of eggs was traditionally assessed as being worth ~$1, even if the US collapses and US bills are no longer in circulation, those eggs may still be valued as $1 even though the exchange for those eggs no longer involves the use of such coinage or bills).

The proliferation of the currencies as a universal medium of exchange almost always was preceded by the state requiring that the currency in question be the primary means by which taxes were paid. Through this manipulation, markets could also be formed as a means of supplying larger states with the supplies they needed to function. An example that was often seen in the historical context for states causing the emergence of markets was through the necessity of equipping and maintaining armies (be they modern standing armies or in some cases earlier forms). Lets assume that the currency of interest is gold due to its relatively generic nature.

As for the relation to Communism, the point is not necessarily to do away with all notions of informal debts or even small-scale exchanges. The point is more-so (at least at the economic level, not to speak of matters of class conflict) to do away with the capitalist system whereas the society at large produces for exchange rather than use. Small-scale exchanges may still continue, but that's almost always going to be for production or other labor that is undertaken by individuals rather than large groups, as the allocation of resources and means of distribution for those larger-group productions will still be set up for otherwise planned distribution channels. Anything beyond that is going to be relatively benign at the larger economic scale.

Somewhat off-topic: I've been wanting to read up on how a planned economy works. Do you have any links to articles?

So first off, this thread started off as a trainwreck thanks to the faggot that is OP, then others decided to take their autism into maximum overdrive and not only cause more train wrecks, but to slam them into nuclear plants and then decide to leave all of their autism unmitigated and proceed to not sage a shit thread.
So, with that off my chest:

Must be the superior white genes at play.
Why does a trade even need to take place? Why not arrange to get the hat made? If the guy made it himself, why not ask him to make one for you? If he's unwilling to make one for you unless he gets one of your pies, then why are your pies not freely available to him?
Do you have any idea how money came about in the first place? Could you at least learn how the system that you support and believe to be natural & inevitable came into being before coming onto a left-wing board and asking inane questions that are answered by reading communist literature?

Really made me think

Unmitigated autism.

Does communism only work when you have infinite amounts of everything?

Truly an infantile disorder.

You don't. The abolition of private property and scarcity makes it a moot point.

Computers can figure out problems like how to to maximize the output of tanks with a given amount of resources and production power.
But it can't figure out problems where the output is human happiness / satisfaction. and that's most of what it's going to be doing since food and shelter aren't going to be a problem.

I don't think you understand the marxist definition of commodity. It doesn't matter if a product is mass produced or made to order. If I pay a carpenter to make me a table according to a specific design, that table is every bit as much a commodity (in the marxist sense) as a table mass produced in a factory. We don't use the "uniform goods" definition that the marginalists use.

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I don't think people here appreciate how complicated planned economies are.
You generally want to make decisions as close to the information as possible since you can get something similar to a broken telephone effect when you funnel all that data into one place. Numerical reports don't cover everything, descriptive reports can be interpreted wrong, etc.

Wouldn't be surprised if I got banned for the porky propaganda, but this NPR piece does a good job of outlining the obvious short falls of centrally planned economies in distributing food donations. If it's any consolation it's not rare for them the cover the areas where capitalism falls flat on it's face.
npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/25/457408717/episode-665-the-pickle-problem

What about decentralized planning?

This is literally a straw man by Austrian economics, which are basically a literal anti-reality ideology.

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You're arguing against a strawman right now. Actually read it. Just go down to the article which I wrote. Here's a direct link to the article:

See the above response.

They are executed of course, along with any offspring.

Because order must be kept lest capitalist values corrode the system from within, and the capitalist 'gene' must be exterminated.

What if he wants a handmade pie by a better chef than the state provides?

The only real peace from capitalism is the grave.

DO YOU ALL SEE WHERE THIS LEADS???

YOU WILL TAKE AND ENJOY THE BOOKS AND PIES PROVIDED BY THE STATE, OR YOU WILL TAKE THE BULLET PROVIDED BY THE STATE

marginal costs of production of most consumer goods are retardedly now nowadays

data communism has already been achieved by free software, and when renewable energies are more developed we can have energy communism

*retardedly low

This is not how money happened. Learn how we developed exchange markets in the first place, then you will see how they won't emerge again under communism.

No one know exactly how money started since it was all BCE, but something along the lines of exchanging perishable goods for non perishable ones with some third medium probably isn't too far off.

The stock exchange? not the same thing, but as long as all the money users aren't thrown into the gulag it'll eventually come up again.

Don't link to an audio file if you have a transcript, it is more efficient:
npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=457408717

They use many words and say so little, it is bordering on babby talk. So, in short: Feeding America gives food to food-banks across the nation. What they delivered used to be often at odds with what people locally wanted. Solution: Daily chat with webcams and bullying autists out of all management positions. The center gives people fake money they can use to bid on a platform run by the center. Places with lots of poor people to feed get more budget.

The procedure uses sealed bids, highest bidder wins. Apparently they don't use Vickrey auctions, so the highest bidder also has to pay that and not the second-highest amount. Vickrey is the generic thing I'd expect an economist to suggest first, to reduce pressure to be tactical, and there where many meetings with professional economists involved.

Or maybe the system is based on a modification of Vickrey and the reporters were too dumb to get it. It would make sense because of different transport costs to different places: The center should subtract from each bid some amount based on the place-based transport cost, and look which bid after that subtraction is the highest, and that one should be the winner. The winner should pay then what the second highest bidders reduced bid is, plus the transport cost to the winner (Yes I know, the center can't actually pay for gas with its own fake money, it can make up some fake conversion rate, and this makes sense, trust me. I can give you an explanation if you don't get it. If you live in the US and know any guys in this food-bank system, you should tell them this, because it's better that way.) Have to go sleep now, I'll write a more clear explanation in the cybernetics thread later.

Can alternative forms of small-scale resource distribution be mutually-preferable and useful? I heard a mention of decentralised planning.

Distributor: who wants this shipment of cereal
Everybody: I do
Distributor: but who needs it the most
Everybody: I do

Yeah, a productive use of everybody's time

Now this is autistic levels of being nick picky.

The whole point of the fake money is to remove everybody from the feeling of capitalism, it's just for deciding who gets what. If anything the transportation cost is listed with each item and each food bank still has their own real money budget.

This is about as valid a question as asking how we prevent people starting fiefs under capitalism. (That's an analogy, not an insult.)

I mean, I'm sure there's probably something in contract law there, but the fundamental response is "Because who the fuck can be bothered? I mean if you're going to make the effort, just start a business so that you don't need to send knights to go mediate disputes over fucking potato fields."

Holy run on sentence this is bad. I feel like I'm reading some horrible Twilight fan fiction but for economics.

First of all, why do you keep saying blockchain? The only purpose of blockchain technology is to prevent people from tampering with a file. It's a security thing only, which is unneeded since you have a physical object to check against. and It doesn't distribute information any faster.

Prices aren't mathematically calculated, you can figure out the production cost easily enough, but you don't know how much utility someone is getting from an apple over an orange.
Prices are determined by trail and error with the seller raising or lowering until profits go down, there's no other way to figure it out.
You talk about supply and demand like it's some kind of voodoo magic. It's really just a very obtuse model for lots of people haggling over shit.

That currency stuff is pretty great right?

oh shit, now you have incentive to under produce luxury goods to keep people working difficult jobs. Better hope whoever is in charge doesn't fall into that moral hazard.

The best paying jobs are still going to be the skilled professions like doctors and engineers. Good luck getting people to go through the grueling 10+ years of training some of those need since apparently everybody already has everything they want.

Have you ever been near a university? Towards a New Socialism argues very correctly that under socialism education wouldn't net you greater pay because the state would be subsidising your existence through that time anyway.

In any case, the actual argument for paying trained professionals more money than unskilled labourers has always been the relative scarcity of their labour. Fuck off with that 'gruelling training' fucking shite.

Hey, maybe in a communism medical students won't have to study 10 hours a day 6 days a week when everybody else is working 2. Even less likely for them to work 100+ hours a weeks under residency. but they'd all be well into their middle ages before they graduate by today's standards.

If you think those residency hours are actually for training and not just to maximally exploit the cheapest medical labour available then lol. Also if you think the rote memorisation that those glorified mechanics do is not right on the verge of being almost totally wiped out by Watson then double lol.

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No shit, idiot, that's literally one of the main planks of Marx's entire economic and philosophical theory.

fucking capitalists using the wheel created under despotism
fucking capitalists eating food grown with techniques perfected under feudalism
fucking capitalists walking on land using techniques developed under the preideological late Silurian period.

typically, the idea is that if something new or scarce is being produced, whoever makes it just starts distributing it to the population at their own pace, like randomly choosing people out of the population or whatever

it's really up to society and whoever is making the thing to decide how we do that

and if somebody who gets a new kind of pie early wants to trade it for a meter long horse dildo with "$1 dollar" written on the shaft in sharpie, who cares?

Typical fucking landie, acting like your ideology is some sort of default that is above criticism. The bony-jawed swimmist school ripped your shit to shreds with Air-Breathing Millipedes - More Like Dick-Breathing Gay-opedes, you just refuse to accept it.

Thanks for the snarky reply to something which was literally marked as a joke.

That also does the trick, given the society that food-bank system operates in. But I wasn't merely thinking about this society.

And yet it's based on real work by Paul Cockshott and other computer scientists and mathematicians. Of course, you probably can't bring yourself to read anything more than a few pages, but here's the full essay if you're willing to read it.
In fact, it's a lot slower, which is why people proposed various solutions to the same problem with different technologies in responses to this early article. We need to keep everything accounted for on multiple levels and tamper-secure to ensure that the computer-derived, decentralized plan matches the real needs of people consistently.
God, you're smug and ignorant.
A) Marginalism has been debunked on multiple levels by Post-Keynesian economists. Yes, there's a world beyond people who know "basic economics" and those who don't! Who knew?!
B) Supply and demand are easily calculated in material terms. That's the entire point. Are you really that dense that you "crimestop" 1984-style when someone proposes an alternative and fall back on "MARKET GOOD MARKET INFALLIBLE GOD"?
And we don't argue against currency on principle. Even anarchist communes in Spain during the collectivization of 1936-1939 used pseudo-currencies to ration stuff. Once again, you're pulling up a straw man. Communism is something to be achieved where possible. Think of it as scaling towards it 1 scalar at a time, perfect communism being its bringing to infinity.
A) I suggested that because it's the conventional logic. I'm skeptical of it, to say the least. The article is, like Marx' program in "The Communist Manifesto", meant as a "let's try this first, then see where we go from there".
B)There is no one in charge. It's a computer network, not a bureaucracy, you dumb ass.
Already refuted by another guy responding.

spliddit.org/apps/tasks
Individuals give points to a given set of chores to do based on how annoying they find them (the more, the worse). The COMPUTERGOD then divides the chores among them in a way that everybody scores their individual task mix the same and makes that same number as small as possible.

For more counter-examples, see all sorts of software for doing polls.

haha they actually made a startup for that

thank you based ＣＯＭＰＵＴＥＲＧＯＤ

Wouldn't people just start gaming the system by ranking easy tasks as annoying or such to ensure they more of them?
(Depending on the exact algorithm used.)

I don't think that's an unsolvable issue (an ad-hoc solution I'd propose would be screwing with the algorithm every so often, so that - for example - if the system starts by balancing things by giving say, the best task and the worst task to ensure middling results, and people game it that way, you swap it to try and pick a series of mediocre tasks instead, and then when that's gamed you swap another way, so that the only consistently worthwhile rating system would be honesty. Alternatively you could just make the ratings public or something.)

revisionists get the fuck off my board RRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Isn't that true though?

I mean, the point of eliminating production for exchange isn't to eliminate exchange, but to eliminate the need to (produce for?) exchange. If you still arbitrarily want to exchange things for whatever reason, who cares? So long as there's no overarching outside need to do it.

Sure, as a thought experiment maybe. None of that work has actually had to face reality, let alone find success in it.

You're trying to graft file security on top of supply chain logistics for whatever reason, when it's pretty clear you have no experience in either. At least try to talk about what that file is supposed to look like.

I never brought that up? wait, fuck. You legitimately don't know how the price on your shirt was decided. I guess because your cult following doesn't let you read any "porky propaganda"? Well I'm not going to explain something you can google. listening / reading this will probably get you there faster.
npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/17/415287577/episode-633-the-birth-and-death-of-the-price-tag
There's more to it, but that's at least the history a simple explanation

Also value(standard definition) is subjective to the buyer. That one price your computer prints out may be the average of everybody's percieved value, but it's going to be wrong for almost every individual. Kind of not really like asking a bunch of people what size shirt they wear and then giving everybody a medium.

Some people here disagree, it's hard to tell you guys apart.

I would love to see an off shoot of people start a small community and try communism out. There are a few towns in Canada testing out basic income as a pilot project. Past all the theories and math, real world data is all that matters. But as far as I can see, communists are content with making noise and at least claim they want to try this "experiment" on a national level with millions of livelihoods on the line.

I would legit like to see how you'd expect to pull that off.

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That Planet Money episode is really interesting. It looks like the computer systems in these companies are finally fast enough to dynamically track demand and adjust production/stock accordingly. It sounds a lot like money is becoming increasingly obsolote, actually.

We're not opposed to informal trades, we're opposed to production for exchange and formal market exchange.

No one is going to exchange anything for your pies when they can get pies for free at the community store.

Who cares about small "black" markets? If the situation became exploitative then the pie master is well within their rights to stop making the pies, as contracts of private labour will no longer be enforced. The Soviet Union had friends and neighbours quietly doing this for vodka, say if you wanted a service done and wanted to skip the queue, you'd get your neighbour who can do it a bottle of vodka and then when he'd finish work he would come round, do it for you, and you'd share the vodka. Hardly the end of the world and a threat to the entire system.

obsolete*

What do I care if you swap things with your friends? The problem is not the market as such, especially in the literal sense, it's the fact that all social relations take forms of commodities that are trades on markets.

That's not what value is in classical economics, where it refers to price ratios that enable reproduction.
How can it be wrong if it is subjective? What does that even mean? You just said: subjective to the buyer. Whether John Galt or Joseph Stalin sets the price of a product, any person deciding to buy it subjectively prefers having the thing and parting with the money to keeping the money and not having the thing. In that sense, evil commie prices are just as good as any other.
If that was really your outlook you would argue from a more classical or Marxist perspective instead of neoclassical voodoo, my liberal friend.

It's a calculator. It works. Read the damn essay. Stop thinking that ideas are and aren't implemented in the real world on the merit of how well they serve people. It's sickeningly reality-denying of you.
Marginalism IS the mainstream neoclassical (capitalist apologist) view of how prices are determined via haggling. Hang yourself. The question isn't whether I've learned "basic economics" or not - I took AP Micro in high school and got a 5 on the test and an A in the class, and moreover used to read a lot on Post-Keynesian blogs (not as far out as Marxism and anarchism) about economic theory (mostly from a macro perspective, but sometimes reaching down to and refuting micro-based ones). The question is, do you even know what these terms mean and what they represent? Have you learned basic economics? Do you just defend the market because it exists right now? Pic related.

Look at a supply and demand chart. What do those lines represent? One is demand, other is supply. The way they're supposed to meet is that people argue the price back up and back down until they come to a conclusion which fits them both, narrowing it down as much as possible (this is ridiculous on the face of it, as it's really more of a "good enough" than an engineered "perfect" system in reality, as described by behavioral economists). Marginalism only works with a barter economy under very strict assumptions of both circumstances (everyone starts off equal) and human nature (see the article which I posted).
And they account for that in neoclassical models by measuring the area made by the triangle between the horizontal line passing through the equilibrium price and the demand curve; this is the consumer surplus. There is also producer surplus, the area between the supply schedule and the horizontal line mentioned above. That's how they claim it works, but for the moment, the only theory of prices with any hard empirical support which I see is the work of Cockshott and Cottrell on the Marxian labor theory of value's conception of how prices are determined.

That podcast about how humans have always bartered and prices emerged from there? I was taught it in school and later taught myself through research that it's bullshit. It's a myth coming from Austrians disingenuously expanding some idle speculation in a few paragraphs of Adam Smith, tarnishing his record like they've done in every other way. Listen to actual anthropologists and archaeologists.
nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money-–-notes-on-sex-adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function-of-economics.html

It's clear that you don't know jack shit about any of this. Have you even taken a normal econ class in high school?
(cont)

It's called utopian socialism and it changes nothing. Nothing at all, even if it works. We're not hippies. Read a book already, you illiterate, annoying, argumentative, anti-intellectual, unscientific, fallaciously-thinking nitwit!
You make a great "centrist" bootlicker, you know that?
A blockchain takes information and stores it in a secure fashion, aggregating past transactions as a decentralized ledger. It's perfect for what we're trying to do in the abstract, although its real-world efficiency is exactly why we've looked for (and found) alternative solutions to how to manage the data of an entire computerized world economy.

Bitcoin externalizes its economic calculation by using a market. Our set of blockchains (or single one with all the types of info) would send info back and forth between itself and the calculating application, itself decentralized and parallelized. They just store stuff in a secure fashion, yes.

Markets aren't inherently Capitalist. So long as this pie maker does a.) own a bunch of pie shops, b.) accumulate abstract value to reinvest in his pie shops, and c.) employ wage laborers who make a fraction of these pie's value, then I don't really see what problem I could have with a man trading pie's for random shit he sees on the street fam. Also, the idea that IOU notes could function like a circulatable and accumulable currency is beyond hilarious.

Yeah but they also aren't the only possible method of distributing scarce goods, hell they're not even a good method of doing that. Face it, technology's moved on, we have a great deal more information processing capacity now, we can do better than markets.

Well here's your problem. You learned "economics" in school. Better throw away that garbage soon.

I get that, but that's not what OP is saying here. OP is saying that a pie maker who starts bartering pies and accumulating IOU notes will collapse a Communist society back into Capitalism, I'm just pointing out that that's retarded, and only Liberals define Capitalism as "there are markets and people buy stuff", because that way they can argue everything is Capitalism, even ancient Rome and Greece, and Medieval Europe. Don't worry, I'm not a Market Socialist, I think they're cancer tbh

I did, or otherwise I wouldn't be here. OP is a dumb faggot and keeps going on about barter, but doesn't even know the (pseudoscientific) neoclassical representation of this mythos.

It's amazing how he's able to recite it anyways. It's unironically "ideology in its purest form". He has his head deep in the trashcan.

Does it? How do you know it won't just fuck up the economy? You mention how empirical it is later on;
"based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic."

Don't know why you keep bringing that up, nobody thinks it's that simple.
Not sure what you're getting at here, other than rambling about your econ class.

No it's not.

Part of why it's a very bad idea to have a computer run the government. The security part at least.
youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

What are the other options? that have been used successfully before.

As long as I'm dropping Planet Money episodes
npr.org/sections/money/2014/06/27/325912532/episode-549-a-teenagers-guide-to-doing-business-in-north-korea

DPRK is Juche ("self reliance"), it doesn't even pretend to be socialist anymore.
kys.