Libertarian Market Socialism is the only form of socialism the West can realistically transition to. Prove me wrong

youtube.com/watch?v=NKUdA2AsgXQ&t=17s

You are most right!

Are you a mutualist like I am?

This is the best left can achieve atm because marxist cant produce any realistic planned economy model.

maybe for marxist socialism, doesn't apply on non-marxist socialism

You dont even have "social" or "commune" in you system. So dont call it Socialism or Communism.

I can't.

lel

Sounds like lukewarm Scandinavian style capitalism to me.

really makes you think

Yugoslavia wasn't socialist.

"But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production. But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers. […] *With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.* Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history,pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. […] Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. *Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible.* The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. *In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master — free.* marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm

marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/
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marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/

Holy shit markets aren't Capitalism, stop being so shortsighted and sectarian. You can make the argument they're obsolete or inefficient, but to equate them to Capitalism is just being ignorant.

He talks like markets are some alien force imposing its will onto humans, when a pure one is simply a reflection of human desires and opinions, with prices being a representation of supply and demand. Current markets are obviously manipulated and irrational, and it's possible there's always the danger of that, even after Capitalism, but it's absurd to think has no relation to real human wants.

Just calling it socialist, doesn't make it socialist.

NK, even if you redefine socialism, and insist that's what you strive for, it's not what most people on this board want. Seriously just leave.

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It is not, correct.

Fucking hell man read Marx. Just pick up pretty much anything Marx ever wrote. Capital, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Poverty of Philosophy. Give it a go. Value production, exchange, it all has to go in order to kill Capitalism.

If yugoslavia was not socialist, how do you explain privatisation and transitional period that happened in 90s? Most of yugoslavia productive forces were socially owned (društveno vlasništvo) and during transitional period had to be privatised.

Yes, user. Marx is god and invented socialism.

Everything he said is gospel truth and the rest of socialist tradition is just undialectical heresy.

id love to hear about something that isn`t market socialism but is still viable in our modern world without millions starving, something thats sustainable in the long run

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How do markets existing prevent workers from controlling the means and products of production?

Every time I see these fucking yugobabies shitting up the board I cringe so hard I lose two years of my life, 9/10 times they are either yugonostalgics from some ex-yu armpit or they are retards who have taken a superficial glance at the yugo state and it's historical state of affairs and said 'ebin', proclaiming themselves market socialists.

I say this as a Serb who has lived both under yugosocialism and under the ruthless liberalism that followed. I can argue when I come back but I am off to the factory now, uncritical Tito cocksucking is the worst cancer of pocket leftism.

They don't. Unfortunately, worker's control of the means of production isn't socialism no matter how many times you liberals want to claim that it is. Socialism is the abolition of commodity production in its entirety. Having the workers produce commodities for exchange on the market doesn't make it socialism. Socialism is possible only when their labour is directly social, and not mediated by the commodity-form.

Why on Earth would you faggots claim to be socialists if you haven't actually read Marx? A huge amount of his work is dedicated to tearing this vulgar misunderstanding of his work to shreds.

No socialist theorist following Marx has come up with a convincing argument for jettisoning Marx's identification of production for exchange as the basis of capitalism. If you jettison that you're not contributing to socialist tradition, you're abandoning it.

When mls defend sssr as socialist and not state capitalist they quote stalin sayimg that ssr developed heavy industry more then lighz industry that was more ptofitable.

If only initiative in yugoslavia was profit motive it is in contradiction on actual economic policys of yu, for example import bans, especially in agriculture where it was necessary cause domestic production could not produce efficently enough to compete with foreign products. This is clear examplr how yugoslavia developed certain industries not because of their exchange value.

While I agree that yugoslavia wasn't socialist enough, calling it capitalist is absured.

But commodities are good.

It's a shame that Socialist Yugoslavia was not libertarian tho.

Tito makes for good memes, and there's no flag for market socialist ideology, so Yugo flag is as close as it gets.

Pretty sure titoism is generally accepted as the catch all term for market socialism, since its one of the few that succesfully did it, if not the only one. Most commie ruled countries were a variation of stalinism.

No, goods are good. Commodities, and the society predicated on their production, are both bad. Read this: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
and also you are a shithead

Just because the basis of your society is capitalist doesn't force you to strictly do everything according to profit motive. It is acceptable and common to invest in industries that don't necessarily provide the highest rate of profit.

The fact that you're operating with concepts like 'investment', 'profit', etc does mean that your economy is capitalist, though. Why?

Because you are still producing commodities for exchange. That's it. That's the thing. That's the thing that Marx considers his main contribution to the study of political economy. Commodity production is the thing from which capitalism grows. You can dress it up all you like but if you still produce for exchange, you're still capitalist.

Back in the land where words have meanings, calling a state that produces commodities for exchange 'capitalist' is not absurd because that's the definition of the term. You are free to say that Yugoslavia was a very good capitalist state that helped promote workers into a position of self-exploitation if you like, but calling it 'socialist' is at complete odds with Marx's entire body of work.

No that sounds perfectly good and fair.

listen to this man

Market socialism literally still has private property. Just because it's owned collectively by a group doesn't make it not private. The MoP need to be socialized, ie put in the hands of society as a whole, either through the state or some other means, not just put in the hands of groups of private individuals as opposed to single private individuals.

That being said Market Socialism is still a good idea and a major improvement on conventional capitalism and imo could relatively transition into actual socialism through natural progression and relatively minor direction. It's also much more realistic a prospect in North America and could even scoop up the "we need a mix of both" crowd. Opposing it because it isn't muh 100% pure fully automated luxury gay space communism is retarded. It's progress.

I am not sure if it is just a lapsus, but only isolated individuals produce goods for their own use. There is no problem with exchange if your aim is to buy another commodity that you don't produce, but producing goods strictly for their exchange value is a different.

My point was that yu industry was organised not according to principle of maximising profits but was democraticly controlled by workers (to some extent) that produced according to what was socially necessary (use value). Economic policys like what i mentioned insured that and workers controlled insured that production forces where organized not according to profit motive but what was "needed".

What is your view on sssr? Why weren't they market socialist or state capitalist compared to yu.

You are free to think that - a majority of people do - but you have to know that if you think that you aren't a socialist. Commodity production and socialism are counterposed. They're totally incompatible. The phrase 'market socialism' is a contradiction in terms.

Again, it's fine to advocate for a capitalist state modelled after Yugoslavia. You can do that, I'm sure it had many positive features. However, you should know that if you do that you aren't advocating for socialism.

I don't really understand how it's not socialist though. I can see how it's not Marxist or communist but it does still seem like a form of socialism.

The workers control the means of production. That is basically the socialist mission statement.

Because socialism is more than worker control of the means of production. It also requires the abolition of production for exchange and of private property, which marksucc doesn't do.

That being said I wouldn't call it capitalism either since it definitively ends the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, wage labour and the exploitation of the worker. Imo it's something in between. I would call it mutualism if I knew more about the specifics of mutualism but I'm pretty hazy on it.

Socialism is worker control of means of production. Problem is that if goods are produced according to anarchy of market forces. I dont agree that was the case in yugoslavia. See >>1660859

Market socialism is term used by people who have no knowledge of actual policys of sfry, and they heard some stalinist propaganda or have read article on wikipedia stating that sfry was market socialism.

sfry organized its production on marxist principles and drew its inspiration from marx writing.

If by any miracle edvard kradelj is translated in english read ‘The System of Socialist Self-Management in Yugoslavia’. And you will see that its main inspirations are certain passages of marx, i.e. -

When, therefore, capital is converted into a common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. it is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character. Communist manifesto

P.S. I am still waiting for reply, on how you defend sssr from being state capitalist. I guess I didnt get answer cause it would be with contradiction with line of logic that yusgoslavia was market socialism

Scandinavia has capitalistic welfare state. In market socialism workers own the means of production.

sure, the only way to create planned economy is taking over backward feudal kingdom, something which cradle of technological advancements of mankind can't do.

Markets are bad

Triple dubs confirm!

best answer in thread

How can you have a market without private property? Even if every company was a cooperative you'd still have massive inequality. Some cooperatives would control lucrative capital while other's would control next to nothing. The cooperatives that controlled the best stuff would grow while the one's that didn't would go away. Over time a few cooperatives would control everything, effectively forming an oligarchy.

hold on
if we designated production for use as "marxist socialism" and "democratic/worker ownership/control of the means of production" does that mean "capitalist socialism" could be a thing? (and that thing would basically be co-operative..ism.)

Read based Paul Mattick:

"Government regulations of a rather complicated nature circumscribe the self regulatory powers of the workers’ councils. They are partly introduced by government decree and partly by local authorities in conjunction with the workers’ councils. A system of taxation determines hat part of the individual enterprise’s income over which it may itself dispose and therewith its range of decision-making as regards investments and wages. Profits are siphoned off by government to cover its own expenses and to invest in government enterprises. The government determines the general rate of increase of personal incomes, but, while demanding adherence to a minimum wage, it allows for incentive-wages and bonuses to increase the productivity of labour. The social security system diminishes the workers’ gross income by more than half. Investments or disinvestments are determined by the profitability principle and are steered in the desired direction by price, interest and credit policies. In brief, in so far as possible under these conditions, overall control of the economy remains in the hands of the government despite the limited self-control on the part of the workers’ councils. While the latter cannot affect the decisions of government, the government sets the conditions within which the councils operate.

What is far more important than the relationship between councils and government, however, is the objective impossibility of establishing genuine workers’ control of production and distribution within the market economy. It comes up against the same dilemma which harassed the early cooperative movement, even though, in distinction to the latter, it cannot be destroyed by private capital competition if the government decides otherwise. “The workers forming a cooperative the field of production,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg, “are faced with contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur – a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production cooperatives, which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.”[10] Operating in a competitive market economy, the Yugoslav workers have to exploit themselves as if they were exploited by capitalists. While this may be more palatable, it does change the fact of their subordination to economic processes beyond their control. Profit production and capital accumulation control behaviour and perpetuate the misery and insecurity bound up with it. Yugoslav wages are among the lowest in Europe; they can increase only as long as capital increases faster than wages. The measure of control granted the workers’ councils promotes anti-social attitudes because fewer workers have to yield larger profits in order to raise the income of those employed. Workers are unemployed because their employ would not be profitable, i.e. yield a surplus above their own reproduction costs. They roam all over capitalist Europe in search for the work and payments denied them in their own ‘market-socialism’ integration of the national into the capitalist world market subjects working class not only to self-exploitation and to that of a new class, but to the exploitation of world capitalism by way of trade relations and foreign capital investments. To speak of workers’ control under these conditions is sheer mockery."

marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1967/workers-control.htm

No.

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they're not antithetical if we use the definitions in the post, that's the point being made. "marxist socialism" would be antithetical to capitalism but other models built on democratic control would not.

Capitalism isn't a mode of management. It's a mode of production. Switching out an autocratic boss for a workers council doesn't fundamentally alter the production process. Socially managed capitalism is still capitalism.

Workplace democracy is a feature of socialism not it's essence.

Fucking Karl Marx doesn't own socialism. Grow a pair, it's been 200 years.

My point was that if you specifically define it as workplace democracy (and segment off all the other factors as necessary) then it's not fundamentally incompatible with socially managed capitalism.

I mean, it's closer to the mark than most uses of the term.
it also fuels my paranoia that capitalism is like some horrible demon that will inevitably hunt down societies and consume them. Not "human nature", but essentially a process where people who think they're free are constantly enslaved by capital, along the lines of the continued production for money under socially managed capitalism slash capitalist socialism.

That is his point, democracy in capitalism will only lead to the bourgeois "democracy" that capital already forces on us through the state apparatus.

Marx wasn't right because he was Marx. Marx was right because he was right; because he fundamentally argued and laid out what makes capitalism capitalism and what would make socialism socialism. You can now either rebut his arguments, meaning reality might start giving a fuck about you, or you can whimp out behind the claim that people who refer to Marx are appealing to authority instead of his actual arguments (the same arguments that put all of his contemporaries in the dustbin of history, never to be taken seriously again, including proto-"market socialists" like Lassalle).

I don't know if that's necessarily the case, at least insofar as all reformism is doomed because the world is a horrible place.

If we assume for example that a new universe was created out of thin air with all of this in place already implemented, it doesn't immediately follow it would degenerate into the theatre of modern politics now. You'd still wind up with workers slaved to capital and the market, of course, and their democratic decisions in the workplace would be shaped more by this knowledge than by anything else, and if I understand correctly then most fundamentally they'd be producing for money instead of for use, but that's at least a little bit away from actually having a porky at the top. Instead, Porky is decentralized into all of us. Which is actually much scarier.

That actually ties half neatly into the idea of Porky as another victim of capital, mind you.

Says fucking who?

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You're assuming the West will be socialist one day. It won't.

Your argument is a non sequitur, communist theory is not deterministic, it's founded on an analysis of how our actual reality has taken place, not some theoretical alternative plane of existence. There could be a universe in which Holla Forums is right for all I care, what matters is that it's not this one.

Sorry Proudhon but there's no flag for statist market socialist ideology.

I'm 99% sure there's some communication error going on here but my interest in hypotheticals that don't involve Harold Wilson beating Margaret Thatcher to death with the commons mace, deporting Edward Heath to Amin's Uganda and making Tony Benn head of the ministry of (torture) technology/min(t)tech is fleeting.

Fuck that
All I want is my fair cut for the work I do
You people with your heads in the clouds
Abstaining from the market won't make it go away

If you think you are going to get the full value of labour in market capitalism just because no boss XDDD, you're delusional. Your company still has to reinvest in capital, so you are doing more than you are paid for.

You faggots are just poorly veiled social democrats.

Oh no. You need to part with some of your produce so that your workplace can stay open. How horrible.

Truly on this basis the bourgeoisie are the most exploited of us all.

You are producing commodities and having to extract surplus value to keep your company producing them. How this is socialism is beyond me.

This is what is meant by self exploitation, but you would rather do like a spoiled baby and cry "nuh uh, muh socialism is just ownership of da mop and shiet".

The thing you must understand is that there's no realistic alternative. Without JUSTing the entire economy or waiting until our moral matrices are so different and information technology so advanced that markets are obsolete I do not believe there is another way in which we could feasibly seek maximum possible empowerment for the working class.

Having to pay to keep the lights on seems like a worthy concession if it means having democratic control in the workplace and making more money.

Why would the part of the world where advanced technology is abundant enough to use for entertainment not simply computerize the economy for decentralized planning? The infrastructure of a single major web company would be enough to effectively plan for an entire continent, down to the arbitrary needs of a single citizen.

How do you do that?

Translate economic issues into math, and math into software. Internet infrastructure allows for real-time communication and data aggregation, which can theoretically make it easy for people to participate in economic development on a regular basis. Complex, but easy.

if I can tag on in an idea-guy fashion, where mathematical ideas aren't particularly simple or intuitive in providing a solution it wouldn't seem impossible (with the ubiquity of smartphones) to just buzz messages person to person.
the central planner of the future could be buzzing around a city investigating factories and shops themselves, not stuck in an office thousands of miles and two languages away from the people they're working out the needs of.

But you will need to know what are the needs of every citizen to do that, so it implies some kind of mass monitoring.

This sounds better.

That's basically what I meant, a purely opt-in system where people request goods and services they want, and production is planned accordingly.

No. Production for exchange is to be banned. Either have a spontaneous global revolution to abolish the state, money, wage labor, and private property all at once, or have none at all.

This is stupid. Because I have to go to work?
Because a society can't exist in a bubble?
What planet do you live on?

Some day we might not have to do anything and robots can wipe our assholes.
That day is not today, so what do we do? Just pretend like our shit doesn't stink?

I love this thread.

Because you have to go to work to produce shit you don't want to earn shit you don't want so that you can buy the shit you want, instead of just going to make the shit you want.

At least that's how I understand it in basic principle.

That sounds nice and all, but not really something to lose sleep over.

Why do Marxists hate the market so much? You can't just abolish it, that's like wanting humans to only have sex for reproductive ends.

You're entire argument is that "It's not Socialism in a Marxist sense", and that's probably true, but that doesn't mean it's not Socialism by the definition all other Socialists agree too. If someone sees the main problems of Capitalism as wage-labor, profits, non-democratic workplaces, etc., then Market Socialism is a perfectly fine way of eliminating those things.

Only by defining Capitalism as that can you possibly say Market Socialism is Capitalism, and only by ignoring the major definition of Socialism as "Workers' control of the means of production" can you say Market Socialism isn't Socialism.

You're using a Marxist definition and saying that's universal.

By defining Capitalism as production for exchange, you're effectively using it as a synonym for markets, which have existed long before the 19th century.

Divesting some of your labor to maintain the infrastructure would be necessary regardless of whether markets exist or not. The point is under Capitalism your labor is unnecessarily taken from you just to benefit a parasitic individual. By definition you cannot extract your own surplus labor.

That's where you're wrong kiddo

I must confess I don't know much about mutualism, but I know I'm not an anarchist. I use libertarian because I believe that society should be democratic, and that people's personal lives should be largely unregulated. I do however believe in the necessity of the state.

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Stay mad

This is what I meant in the original post.

Realistically, that will never happen. And you know it. Complete global hegemony is impossible. But keep your head up your ass if it makes you feel better.