Why do you think mutualism is just capitalism with worker co ops?

Georgism…….mind fucking blown

care to elaborate?

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

The beauty of Marx lies in the fact that he showed exactly what makes capitalism capitalism, and thus set the criteria a mode of production must meet in order to truly qualify as post-capitalistic (socialism). We're almost one and a half centuries after his death and no successful attempts to break this ontology have shown themselves to be worth looking at twice before tossing them in the trash, and in practice all those that ignored him have all but shown their "socialisms" to be little more than perfectly congruent with capital or incapable of distinguishing themselves from it, going on to dissolve. Marx just reminds us of the fact that in reality, worker/democratically-managed capital, is just capitalism, and will go on to be nothing more than that. The first step to challenge Marx here for the "socialism" dibs is to challenge his ontology. The only other alternative is a stubborn struggle session with the reality of value production.

I'll never understand this board's fixation with leftcoms as the mortal enemy of the marksuccs. Left communism doesn't have a particular history of trashing it at all (mostly because Marx already buried it decades before), and left communism doesn't uphold as true anything more than generic Marxism.

because they fear freedom

The socialism before Marx wasn’t anything like Mutualism.

Why is worker/democratically managed MoP still capitalism?

law of value still exists :^)

what's wrong with that? be specific

the value form of products contains in embryo the entire capitalist mode of production. You also get endogenous crises and structural unemployment, have to fall back on voluntary charity to take care of the sick and elderly etc. Capitalism is perhaps the ultimate expression of market-based society, although perhaps that is a pathological view.

...

In a sense. Goods and services are still produced for profit rather than need, right?

Also, who prints the labour vouchers and where does their pay come from? And if a central bank gives out loans, will you still need to have good credit? What happens if you start your business and it flops, who covers the cost?

Proudhon supported a consumption tax in his later years to avoid this

pls respond

Without a state what we know as capitalism couldn't exist.

>Without wage slavery, there’s nothing most people would recognize as capitalism.

Not a mutualist, but this is a good source on mutualism/left market anarchism. c4ss.org/

People would still be under the tyranny of markets and the law of value.

i just realized leftcoms probably hate law of value because they don't want to get their asses out of their armchairs and work.

because that's literally what it is.

Mutualism is what ancaps wish capitalism could be.

mutualism doesn't allow them to be part of The Chosen Few who can Lord Over All Their Lessers though.

He showed how capitalism works. But in respect to unique aspects of capitalism compared to previous modes of production, and to what is strictly essential to calling it capitalism, I find Marx at certain points. reduce everything to the law of value, as leftcoms and other marxist strains have, and you completely leave out an understanding of capitalism as class domination essential to dialectical/historical materialism.

No one denies that the law of value is a part of capitalism. But the strange thing is, that in order to transition to communism, Marx describes a situation almost identical to the one of Proudhon's mutualism. That either the abstract society, or abstract worker become at once the role of the capitalist, universalizing private property, and eventually overcoming this role by the negation it causes. Whether you want to call it authentic socialism or not, the place of "market socialism" or "mutualism" is a place in historical development if you want to reach communism.

paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/why-law-of-value-really-applies-in-socialist-economies/

Not if you have a state to fix those problems. The state has always been there to rescue capitalism from crisis and could fix unemployment if it wasn't for the capitalist need to create a reserve army of labor.

nothing new under the sun

my dude, I used to use that flag. stop ruining it. please.

I forgot to turn it off earlier, but just because you asked, I'll keep it one

But not the same, read critique of the gotha program.

The reason labor vouchers and also a competitive market don't abolish capitalism, is pretty obvious. If there's competition, various coops will make their businesses more efficient thru automation, working harder etc. So one cooperative will sell their wares for less labor-price/cheaper and the other coops will have no choice but to match their competitors in working harder, Labor is still being disciplined by muh market. There will still be accumulation of surplus value. Plus even in the equilibrium case, according to the labor theory of value, prices tend to cluster around labor content anyway, so even prices wouldn't be that different than under capitalism, so market competition will basically end up negating the purpose of even replacing money with labor vouchers to begin with. But say instead of labor vouchers you have a free currency, what then? Actually its even worse, because say you have a high tech company like amazon,etc. and it employs 80 employees (mostly software engineers) and makes 80 billion a year. Do they each get $1 billion? What about the small retail coop which makes $500,000 a year and has 30 employees? they each get $16k. So inequality will be almost as bad as under capitalism. Plus all market systems produce unemployment. The normal disequilibrium of a market economy still applies, a market socialist economy could still have periodic crisis/business cycle as well, planned economies don't have recessions, however the market socialist one in yugoslavia for example did. What about dealing with environmental externalities? Won't competition induce coops in competition to cut corners on the environment? And without a state, whos going to stop them? Market socialism is basically implies that the solution to capitalism is for every worker to become, essentially, a capitalist. The only difference between cooperatives-market economy and capitalism is that ownership of capital is more evenly distributed. In this sense, market socialists are non just non-statist succdems. A labor voucher economy can only work in a planned economy, as soon as you introduce a market the law of value applies and your labor voucher starts to become alot more similar to any normal capitalist currency.

I have a great deal of respect for Cockshott but this is not one of his finer moments: he confuses the value form with labour content in general. By this logic the law of value would govern feudal production as well.
To quote Marx:

I have, which is why I mentioned what I did, although he also speaks similarly in the 1844 manuscripts. Unlike Proudhon, however, I'm not an anarchist, nor do I believe labour vouchers are compatible with competitive markets. the point, however, you were making, was that mutualism turns society into an abstract capitalist. I'm saying, that's hardly something we should critique!

In regards to labor vouchers, labor vouchers imply a certain level of centrally controlled prices. at the very least, it is impossible for everyone to be paid the same for producing the same good, and for market competition to exist, as there would be no need for competition in that regard. Labor vouchers only really make sense in the context of a centrally planned economy in the vain of something Cockshott proposes. Proudhon himself, from my understanding, was ambiguous on the need for labor vouchers.

Most of the work in regard to software is done via govt sanctioned monopoly. Open source would be the only way forward in a market socialist society. What's more, Amazon only makes about 700 million in profit each year, which is a vast improvement from negative profit only a few short years ago.

Also, I think you underestimate the sheer amount of money that many of the big employers throw at stock owners through buybacks and dividends. The average employee at Mcdonalds would see their pay increase by 50% if they were the owners. Much of wealth stratification in this country comes from this sort of stock, absentee ownership. Bill Gates, for examples, passively generates so much wealth through investment it would be almost impossible for him to spend all of it. Workers are much more numerous than the few sods who have big stock investments. The top 10% of americans own 90% of the stocks, bonds, trust funds and equity. The amount of inequality generated by workers owning the place they worked would be microscopic compared to what we have today.

Like I said earlier, I am not an anarchist. To believe the stage of universal capitalist development, of society and the worker taking such a position, should be an anarchistic situation, is entirely utopian. On the contrary, it relies on the state. The political consciousness of the worker turned supercapitalist is compelled towards proletarian interests by the material reality of his workplace, family, home, ect. He is compelled towards capitalists interests only in the abstract. In a political context of radical proletarian democracy, which side do you think wins out? A worker with power over his state will fight to keep his environment clean, exactly because he lives in it.

Furthermore, think about what the law of value entails: the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The need for constant reinvestment because of competition is at once what drives automation, and what drives profits down in the long term. in a market socialist society, this is something that would be celebrated, not demonized as it is now. After all, as we approach full automation, we loose the need for any ownership of the means of production, as according to the logic of a market socialist society, ownership of productive forces only comes from the labor use of them. Perhaps a state, or perhaps an independent fund which everyone owns will increasingly take control up to that point, a point at which the goods produced are rationed for free according to demand and the supply of natural resources.

I acknowledge that a planned economy with labor vouchers is a possibly alternative to this. But I think market socialism is much more feasible, and a more libertarian solution.

That is Cockshott's argument. The problem with Marx as that, at times, his description of the law of value veers very closely to the natural law he just described in that quote.

Here are the emails we exchanged on the topic.

Ancaps + idealism = market "socialism"

ancaps already have idealism, dumbass. Market socialism at least can be understood as a real possibility in terms of material development, whether you think it deserves the name socialism or not.

Anarcho-capitalism could never stably exist

Sure, but it only takes on the form of value in the context of market exchange. In either case the real issue is not whether or not such a law regulates the consumption of consumer goods (as is the case in Cockshott's arguments), but whether the law of value regulates/determines production as it does in capitalist society, as it is this that leads to the various pathologies of capitalism (the falling rate of profit, immiseration, misallocation of resources, etc).

So basically, market socialism -> FALC? If so,I agree but i would put the cockshott/labor vouchers in between, like:

Capitalism – Market Socialism/Coops –
Cybernetic Labor Vouchers/Cockshottism – FALC/FULL COMMUNISM

Personally I think a labor voucher economy would be good in the medium run. FALC only possible in the super super long run once we've dealt with the environment, etc. Its gonna need to be market socialism as an alternative to partial capitalism/NEP for a few years and then labor vouchers until star trek becomes reality

You ignore though, that they mostly pay out dividends and such when they have run out of ideas. The main bulk of the money is reinvested into capital, not simply given to investors, that's why amazon didn't turn a NET profit until recently - they were busy expanding production.

So then if a falling rate of profit causes capitalism to go into crisis, wouldn't your market socialist society be bounded by the exact same limit to profit and reproducing the system? and if a falling rate of profit causes capitalist crisis, why wouldn't it also cause a market socialist system the same?

Automation under the law of value only makes sense when labor is more expensive than the total cost of automation, therefore a process like exploitation will still be occurring, where labor is undervalued. This is what the system of labor vouchers is meant to eliminate, and automation would be more economically rational to the socialist labor voucher society than one using the law of value. Just as capitalism was more rational than slave society because it made employers/owners use labor more efficiently because they bought it hourly rather than all at once as a sunk cost, labor-voucher socialism will be more rational than economies regulated by the law of value, as labor will be rationally costed at its 'full' value, incentivizing automation more.

Maybe, but competition will force workers to either cut corners or go out of business just like a capitalist firm, unless there is a state to regulate it so every firm/coop can't pollute. Capitalist companies don't pollute because they are bad, they pollute because the logic of the market compels them to, and the same would apply to coops.

But in the meantime, you will still have business cycles, persistent unemployment, environmentalproblems/growth, etc. I'm not willing to deal with those problems waiting for star trek FALC to happen, when a planned economy could fix them in the present. AI proponents, etc. have a long tradition of over-exaggerating when its going to come, strong AI could take a thousand years for all you know, in the meantime we should have a planned economy, with market socialism only a transitional phase from capitalism at best.

this

In what way do I ignore that? You think there will be an endless supply of business moves in market socialism?

Which, as I have repeatedly said, is a good thing! Reinvestment brings us innovation, automation. You would still need reinvestment on a social level in central planning, this is unavoidable. And there is at least some benefit to a diversity of economic strategies that come about in market competition, as opposed to the single economic strategy of all industries in central planning. Perhaps not all industries, but not all industries will be private cooperatives either. You will still have state owned industries where it is the most efficient, for railroads, healthcare, ect.

the falling rate of profit is not in of itself the thing that causes capitalists crisis, but rather the root cause. Much like how the body's immune response can often be more deadly than the disease itself, capitalist crisis comes from attempts to evade the falling rate of profit through the use of deregulation and large injections of credit. This problem would be greatly reduced in a cooperative only economy, considering the profit motive is subsumed by the desire for job security. Stability is prized above all else. And, if you have an independent non-profit central bank, the issue of excessive credit is easily dealt with for the most part.

There are different short term and long term prices of automation. It is almost assuredly cheaper in the long run, and therefor, many companies have been historically willing to invest in them even when running a loss.

What you strangely call exploitation here is only the effect of competition on other firms. The law of value would imply that if one set of workers with higher productivity due to greater technology, yes, another set of workers with lower productivity due to lesser technology would have to work harder or for less pay to make up for it. This is simply how the law of value works, if you insist on everyone receiving the same pay for producing the same goods, regardless of productivity, you're going to have less productivity, and you will be less capable overall of meeting society's needs. Certainly, a smart state would in this situation do its best to encourage investment in machinery to keep overall productivity high, with low interest loans or subsidies for example. But if you want productivity to stay high to meet people's growing needs and wants, you will have to let some of these firms go under.

And don't act like similar forces wouldn't operate in central planning. If they didn't, you would be admitting that socialism is vastly less efficient than capitalism. Cockshott himself admitted that both political pressure and measuring a persons labor against the minimum needed to make a good would be required, and guess what, if a person falls far beyond the mean, he shouldn't be making that good anymore! The problem with central planning in this regard is that if an entire unit of production, a factory or plant, is falling behind and they have significant political sway, nothing is going to change. The social costs and fragmented, while the benefits to those at the plant are concentrated. Whereas, in market socialism, the loosing industries and workers at large only need to fight for the laws being equally applied to everyone.

This is doubly a problem for central planning when it comes to reinvestment. At once, if there is little direct control of the people in planning/over bureaucratic officials, we will see a tendency to overinvest, as we saw in the soviet union. Resources were constantly pumped into flashy new projects while little was done to maintain existing infrastructure and technology. If there is intense democratic control, we will likely see the opposite, with very little being reinvested and much more being simply handed out in the form of immediate benefits. At least in market socialism, we can have intense democratic control of the state, and intense democratic control of the workplace, while the law of value generates a need for constant reinvestment, if not at a pace considered intolerable, as this would generate political blowback.

And it will be in the interests of all workers to craft environmental regulations to prevent it from getting out of hand. The beauty of the market socialist system is that there is an authentic outside to check economic activity, the outside being politics free of class domination.

No, no, and no. The state has shown itself to be a reliable solution to these problems when capitalist interests are forcibly rejected.

Meanwhile, in planned economy you could simply replace the business cycle with the political cycle, lower productivity, and have even less individual freedoms.

Well, now we're getting into crisis theory, but why would the profit motive be subsumed? you need to make as much profit as possible even if you're a worker coop, to have money to invest in additional machines, etc. to compete against the other coops because if another coop makes more money than you, they will expand their production further, thus getting ahead in competition. The drive for profit is a basic part of any market system.
Well, it comes from the fact that if they don't use those methods, they won't make a profit, thus going out of business. Your argument is basically to say the medicine is worse than the disease, therefore the disease itself isn't a problem.
Again, I i said:
(long run). I'm not sure you understand my argument here. Labor isn't really being paid it's full value since there is a rent/exploitation by capital.
Yes it is, and societies based on the law of value are exactly what Marx analyzed in 3 volumes of capital and critiqued.
Where does Cockshott say this, exactly? if a certain good isn't selling then they will reduce production of it, if it is being sold out, then they will increase production of it. This is simple math, no crazy political decisions or 'bailouts' are needed. Labor time is not like currency, it is simply a resource like machines, etc. Except it is the most basic resource since all other commodities are made using it. A labor voucher economy is only one step of abstraction removed from an in-kind economy. There is no rational reason for workers to hang on to a dying industry, as in a planned economy, full employment is guaranteed by the state, while in a market system, the worker is beat with the stick of unemployment. If a certain industry dies, the workers will simply be shuffled around to other jobs, with their retirement intact and guaranteed by the state, on the other hand in a coop economy you will always have frictional unemployment, plus the normal 4-5% natural rate of unemployment you have in any market system, maybe even more nowadays with automation. You say the state will fix it… but how? Some full-employment policy like post-Keynesian/mmt economists advocate? If so you are hiring workers for a state run business, thus you are actually introducing elements of a state run economy, except a crappier and non coordinated one, without any of the optimization methods a cybernetic planned economy would have.

In the soviet system they heavily invested in heavy industry in the beginning, but was that necessarily a bad thing? it allowed them to rapidly develop the industrial base of the country, which in turn allowed them to survive WW2. You really can't conflate the idea of a planned economy with the particular decisions of the central planners, in any case. What happens if the algorithm for investment is adjusted so that there is an equal amount invested in new projects and reinvested in maintainence? I agree more research needs to be done into economic computability, this is something that would need to be empiricially researched in a planned economy ultimately, and the ratio of investment to reinvestment would be adjusted to what was empirically determined to be the the optimal levels.
The market = politically neutral? BS. Markets create capitalism, not the other way around. The thing about markets is that both planning and markets are simply computational processes to adjust prices, but the difference is as explained by cockshott, that a market is much slower and crappier. On one hand, you have the process of market competition and individual firms adjusting prices to the equilibrium level. On the other hand under central planning you have a sparse matrix algorithm implemented on a computer or network of computers. The market solution can take months, the computerized solution takes minutes (perhaps hours or days at worst), in fact there's ways to instantly adjust prices in real time, way faster than a market can respond. Furthermore there are economies of scale, we all know that a big firm like Intel for example has the ability to make much better computer chips than anyone else because of their expertise in engineering accumulated over years. You are seeing markets in the idealized 'libertarian' way, they are not this way in real life. When an industry is new, there are a bunch of businesses competing, as it grows older they are merged into fewer and fewer firms until there is an oligopoly or monopoly. Socialism says lets take that logic to its conclusion and have the single company controlled by the workers. Market competition is a historical process, not some abstraction you can simply implement in any system at any time.
As i explained earlier, costing labor at its full price would result in a greater incentive for automation, not less.
What exactly is a political cycle? Handing over control of the economy from being controlled by market relations to direct political decision of the people is the essence of socialism. By saying market socialism = abstract capitalism and this is a good thing you have basically conceded OP's point: market socialism is capitalism. As socialists we want to abolish capitalism. Your whole argument seems to be that the process of market capitalism is still historically progressive somehow, but you want to make capitalism better by having more equal ownership of capital itself, this is peak social democracy. Plus, some weird sort of communization theory where at some indeterminate point in the future when robots have taken over we will somehow jump to FALC.

Finally, I will add to the point about that in a planned economy where planners have everything owned by essentially one firm, its possible to do optimal allocation of resources in a way thats impossible if all the resources are controlled by their own firms. As Remak Argued, the economy in reality is a system of inputs and outputs of real physical things, the problem with a market economy is that the price vector is a subspace of the actual flows of an in-kind economy, not the other way around.

An example using the environment: In capitalism and other market systems the only way to regulate the environment would be like using things such as cap and trade, and you need an agency of environment to go around enforcing it, this is a very ad-hoc way of doing environmental regulation, it just as firms under capitalism avoid these regulations much of the time, the same will apply to coop-capitalism, where lack of information, etc. will make it difficult for the environmental agency to even know if their regulations are even being violated. On the other hand in a planned economy, every 'firm' is part of an interconnected software system where analysts can instantly know the levels of pollution, etc. As simply as you would search in google. One can concieve of current techniques of big data mining / data analytics being applied to this, allowing us insights into the economy of for us to get ahead of problems such as pollution, agricultural land use, natural resource constraints, etc. rather than in the short-run/short sighted and reactive way market systems do, which is why the markets under capitalism are dragging their feet with regards to going green and global warming. In a planned economy you can simply set the target for say, reducing the production of carbon-emitting fuels by 2% this year. Then you would add that as a constraint to your system of inequalities and linear program it out. In a market economy, you would have to set some cap and trade system, then the regulators would have to go thru the tedious process of checking various firms for their pollution levels again and again, not even being able to check them all because it would take way too long, letting some of them fall thru the cracks and end up polluting more than the regulated amount. This is an ad-hoc systems and the planned solution is way better.

Wow, there's been a metric fuck ton of articulate well thought out responses but almost none of them actually address any issues in Mutualism.

Mutualism in not meant to be capitalism with worker co-ops that's what I was getting at when I first made this thread.

You're conflating a capitalist market with a Mutualist market. The volatility in prices under capitalism comes from the extraction of surplus value and is not inherent in a market socialist system.

Amazon's profits in our capitalist system come from a variety of different mechanisms to extract value none of which would exist in a Mutualist society>>1698020 look at this

The whole premise of Mutualism is peer to peer networks of laborers exchanging with each other.

They would if Mutualsim was just capitalism with co-ops.

I absolutely agree. However, in a worker coop, the profit motive does not come above job security, because each individual worker owns the firm. Thus, they couldn't make money, in wage or profit, if they weren't working there. In this way, a worker co-op is perfectly capable of operating at zero profit long term in a way capitalist firms cannot, given they would begin to loose investment and credit.

I think you misunderstand the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The tendency is not for the average to constantly decrease at a steady rate, but for it to constantly move towards zero. Firms can operate on zero profit, only not negative profit. And like I mentioned, when credit is no longer controlled by commercial banks and for-profit institutions, the use of credit to create crisis is greatly diminished.

Except the total cost of automation is almost certainly less than the long run cost of labor in nearly all cases. The only issue is that it can be seen as a risky investment because it's a gamble whether the firm will have enough available credit to survive low, negative profits until it is profitable.

Not at all. Reread Wage, Labor and Capital. The rent, exploitation of capital is that which is by the capitalist, the reinvestment of capital can hardily be called rent when it must happen under every system.

And no one, not even Cockshott or Marx, has proposed a concrete alternative to escape from the law of value that didn't involve something along the lines of massive automation.

I discussed this with him here

sorry, the emails are in the reverse order.

This isn't what I'm talking about. I'm quite aware of this method of rationing goods and calculating supply and demand. What I'm talking about is productivity. Without some method to discipline labor, you will have lower productivity, a lower overall capacity for the economy. in terms of socially necessary labor time, how do you figure out the SNLT of a good without some method of discipline (the place of the market in capitalism). If there was no similar force, then you are admitting that the social average of labor in socialism is far longer than the social average in capitalism, a vast inefficiency. Cockshott seemed to imply that both political pressure and administratively judging workers labor time against the minimum would do the trick. Either way, it's not really a fair critique to say that markets discipline labor. There must be discipline in any system. Unless of course, labor is not the cause of most production.

I won't be "introducing" elements of a state run economy. Every capitalist economy has had some level of state control, coordination. Capitalism needs the state, not just to operate, but to operate well. That said, I do fear the strength of such a centralized state, whether it is under the direct control of all society, or worse, a handful of party leader/bureaucrats. It is a similar horror to the state under capitalism, where those who control all economic power, also control the state. I want an authentic outside to state power, to pure economic power. Something, anything to give refuge to the individual. Many people will seek out something similar. There is never power without resistance to that power. Your fatal mistake will be to centralize all power under the name of socialism. That means that all resistance to power will immediately become anti-socialist. The only way to create authentic socialism is to make both the center of power, and the resistance to it logically lead to a socialist society.

This tendency extended far beyond WW2. When the Soviet Union needed to be developing smaller consumer goods, there was still a fixation on larger projects. There were common shortages in spare parts for things like heaters, washing machines, refrigerators other house hold implements. There was once a story in Pravada about a machine that doubled the efficiency of making shoes, or something similar, I forget exactly, because "we live in the age of sputnik, who cares".

Then you are admitting that the economic planning of socialism is profoundly undemocratic. Either people have a say in the way society invests in the future, or they do not. The fact is, sometimes you will have investments in the wrong things. At least in market socialism, you can blame a particular firm, a particular government, and not the system as a whole. Under central planning, the people won't be blaming themselves. They'll be blaming socialism.

I never said as such. I said there was a political outside to the market.

No, the Bourgeoisie created capitalism through political revolution. Lest we forget it is men, and not logic, that creates history.

Equilibrium is a false god. It is impossible to achieve, in either markets or central planning. It is an abstraction, an ideal, which a market tends towards, but never reaches. Even in Cockshott's vision of socialism, equilibrium will remain unattainable because of one simple fact. People have a choice where they buy things, and by this I mean actual geographic location. Having supply meet demand isn't actually feasible given at least some measure of freedom of choice, since you can even have the exact amount of supply for the amount of demand, but it wouldn't be distributed correctly because too many people went to one store/distribution point over another.

And contrary, to what you might believe, I don't think of markets in such an idealized libertarian way. Economies of scale do happen and I believe that the more a single firm takes up market share, the more it should be publicly owned.
jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/
I think Seth Ackerman puts some good ideas forward here.

The precise reason I see the law of value as a progressive force is because of capital accumulation creating larger and larger companies exactly as automation increases. It naturally and dialectically brings us closer to the very society you are envisioning, to full communism/socialism, whatever you like.

I believe this would be a much more secure path than simply trying completely reorder society into communism after a revolution, since, like I mentioned earlier, if any experiment you try, or decision the socialist system makes, turns out poorly, they are going to blame the socialist system, making it much more unstable. There is a reason liberalism has proven so durable, it's because of it's ability to deflect blame away from itself politically. We need to harness that power. A system of market socialism in radical proletarian democracy can do just that. It would be in very few people's interest to reintroduce capitalist parasites, nor will it be so easy for either the state to dominate the democratic power of the cooperatives, or for any single moneyed person to have power over the state. If catastrophe occurs, one party goes out, a couple firms die, but the system stays alive and marching towards communism, not back towards capitalism.

Here you're thinking of socialism in capitalist terms. The cost of labor here, in terms of resources, is only the share of general consumption that is not welfare compared to reinvestment. In terms of raw calculation, I don't see any significant difference inherent in the difference between Cockshott's socialism and market socialism. The supposed "rent" you seem to be pointing out is only is only the cost of reinvestment. and a check to bring the social average labor time down, bringing productivity up.

Well, is your socialism controlled by people, or is it controlled by strict algorithms? When I say political cycle, I mean that decisions, like reinvestment for example, when dictated by the masses, you leave at least some things to chance. Not everything can be left to a cold, unfeeling program. Don't get me wrong, I want democracy, I want economic democracy. But you should think about what the structure of this power means. It means, in the structure you desire, that you will have no idea whether allocation of resources will tend towards more automation or less.

And the dictatorship of the proletariat is still capitalism, does that mean it's not worth supporting? You yourself, simply described your vision of socialism as a single monopolist firm for all production, I'd say that has the same effect. Cockshott himself says the law of value would continue in his vision of socialism. And if I'm forced to choose between to visions of a capitalist dictatorship of the proletariat, I'll choose the one which is both guaranteed to result in greater automation, and has the most individual freedom.

Social democracy did nothing, and wanted nothing to do with ownership of capital, only redistribution of resources through welfare, regulations, ect. you can either believe that A) Capitalism dialectically leads to communism and B) The Working Class must become the ruling class to make it happen, or not. If you do, you should support market socialism.

I believe there would be a clear legal framework in which, as firms grow and automate, public ownership, and not even necessarily state ownership, increases.

It's just as possible for a single firm to grow complacent without competition, without an outside to hold them accountable. Similarly, even the center is not a point at which you can see everything. Necessarily, planners will see summary information, aggregates, ect. People in the then and there, in the thick of it, will see much more of the particulars. They can see things people in the center will miss. That is not to say that I don't believe there is a place for central planning, but it won't always be the most efficient method of production.

As for the environment, just saying that in a socialist economy, technology will mean people won't cheat on environmental regulations, must I really need to remind you that the most recent scandals in evasions with car emissions wasn't just caused by firms lying to the government, but by them actually tampering with the technology that reads the emission levels. Technology is not infallible, don't think it's a full proof method to prevent cheating on regulations. You also seem to imply that there would be perfect information in this technological system, that everyone would be hooked in. We shouldn't forget that upgrades like these take time, resources and manpower. If your goal is to limit carbon emissions, in order to know for sure the levels, you'd have to implement this system on every car on the roads, a near impossible task. Cap and trade has it's limits sure, but I'm skeptical that cybersyn provides that much of a leg up on it.

I think it's important to realize, that as much of an intelligent economist and coder that Cockshott is, he is not much of a political theorist. This is why I keep bringing up the issues of stability, democracy, political cycles, blame, and system failures. Any socialist economy must reckon with it's political implications, and be prepared to deal with some great measure of contradictions and human volatility. I don't believe any centrally controlled system can do that for long.

bump.

Mutualists get thrown from the helicopter last imho

Make sure to take off and land from a secure location.

u domn cowmeys yo so fukeen damb du yu now wut hebinin ef u gow to schile if yu sei """"om cowmunist uwww lewk ot mi"""" rite u get gigd out ov a elocopda woul u leik deee????? I ving u shou jusd reed sawm basig egonomigs!!!! Cowmeynusum jusd killed abut 4 bilion bebol en u sdil leek cowmeynusm???

I'll never understand this board's fixation with leftcoms as the mortal enemy of the marksuccs. Left communism doesn't have a particular history of trashing it at all (mostly because Marx already buried it decades before), and left communism doesn't uphold as true anything more than generic Marxism

It's because we're the only faggots on this board that understands larping over dead revolutions does no one good.

Reading Wikipedia articles and posting about how great Catalonia/USSR was does not a revolution make

why would the extraction of surplus value, create volitilty

I still would choose mutualism over your evil feudalism at anytime

Because it doesn't represent the true value inherent in a good or service rather it's an artificial value which will fluctuate unpredictably and cause externalities through out the market.

Look at the Amazon example several posts above yours.

The claim is that a company like Amazon has 80 employees and makes 80 billion dollars ergo each employee gets 1 billion dollars.

Virtually none of Amazon's profit comes from actually creating anything so why would it exist in a Mutualist society? Maybe as a distribution platform but that's it.

This is an absolutely brilliant observation

Explain dis

Perhaps an even better example would be the financial industry, particularly the derivatives market. Even the excuse of generating interest doesn’t hold water, since the interest is supposed to go to investors, not to the financial industry itself to the tune of trillions of dollars a year in profits for glorified middlemen.