F R E E ☭ T I M E

I dont see why you would institute a market socialist system if you already have the power to change the mode of production.

t. Used to be a market socialist like you.

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Communism confirmed for time travel.

The only way to directly implement central planning is to use state power to do so. If you're using state power to implement central planning, then the state must be democratically controlled to avoid Soviet-style state capitalism and all its failings.
So you would have to somehow both get the people to vote for a clean break from markets, and get them to CONTINUE voting for your permanent revolution through the upheaval that it would cause, while quelling those who rebel against the new state of things and try to sabotage it.

You could do that by consolidating power into the hands of a few and forcing compliance, but then you're no longer socialist. You're authoritarian.

So market socialism is the only way to transition into socialism that allows for workers ownership of the means of production and democratic control of the workplace throughout every step of the process.

I see what you mean but tbh I kind of see this as eerily similar to late capitalism's tendency to abolish the boundary between work and "free time" to the point where you're actually constantly working in one way or another — being contacted through cell phone or e-mail, networking, etc.

I oppose market socialism as a goal but this argument of market socialism as a transition towards socialism proper is actually compelling.

Word. Here's your Yugo flag.

The perception of time is highly subjective and has varied greatly across different ages and cultures. Nomads and peasants had a cyclical vision of time, as their lives were measured in terms of seasonal rhythms. World History is a relatively recent phenomenon that truly came into being with the expansion of global capitalism. Unlimited growth and progress with no endpoint is the myth of capitalism. The uniform empty time in which we live in is the time of the commodity, time that is either sold as labor or purchased as leisure. Communism will break open the prison of time.

That's how they get you

fuck off, red capitalist

Nevermind, you're not a regular red capitalist. You're a fucking ancap. Yugo nostalgia is worthless.

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Do you know what "dictatorship of the proletariat" mean? Socialism and "authoritarianism" aren't mutually exclusive, socialism is authoritative by default. You enforce the rule of one class (the proletariat) over the other (the bourgeoisie).

Thinking that you can use democracy in the middle of a fucking revolution is delusional.
Furthermore, you need to be "authoritarian" in order to enforce market socialism too.
Lastly, by conceding control over the means of production away from everyone to a few individuals, you limit the power of the collective proletariat, which makes it very easy for reactionary elements in society to revert back to normal capitalism. Remember, the state is being upheld and funded by the bourgeoisie to enforce their class rule. It might not be in the interest of a market socialist cooperative to fund a state, which would leave them powerless against both military invasion and capitalist just starting capitalist businesses to out-compete you.
A capitalist can just undercut you easily, a coop supermarket may buy their product to make more profit, which leads to the collapse of a cooperative. Then a capitalist supermarket starts, which undercuts cooperative ones, and oh look where we are, capitalism station, inhabitants, you.

Oh damn, and here I thought socialism was a classless society where everyone owns the means of production.

Alienated labor and alienated free time are two sides of the same coin. Think about cruise ships and beach resorts and their use of a pseudo Polynesian leisure ideology. Reified leisure is a consumer product, a poor substitute for authentic experience. capitalists don't want to abolish the work/leisure distinction but to perpetuate it.

Is it just me or do yugofags have to point out in every thread how based market "socialism" is, despite being BTFO a million times?
I always get a good laugh when they say market socialism is "non-marxist socialism", reminds me of this Adolf guy who used to say the same.

Forgot to add:

You cant have socialism without a dictatorship of the proletariat and you cannot establish communism by having wage labour and production for profit.
The koombaja of market socialism is a pipedream, you still near violent enforcement of socialism, you cant just "be democratic" about it, this doesnt work now and it wont work then. A reactionairy party will just get funding and help from a capitalist nation and oh look we revert back.

No that is communism. Socialism is the transitionairy period. Communism is also moneyless and stateless, which implies that socialism does have money and does have a state.
Now before you bring marx into this, I know he never distinguised between socialism and communism, instead he said "lower" and "higher" stage. But he never once argued that a capitalist economy, with private property controlled by a subsection of society (the cooperatives), production for profit and wage labour would establish a socialist means of production.

Also I am by no means defending stalinism, im merely pointing out your idealised market socialism doesnt work like you think it does.

Not even once has this happened.

Marx did say that even if the entire means of production were in the hands of a single power, it would not be socialism unless it was controlled by the workers and subservient to the needs of all humanity. So clearly a Soviet-style DotP doesn't fit the bill.

Hoo boy

Nice delusions

Thats what I said. Socialism can only happen once all the means of production are in the hands of all the workers (not a few) and subservient to the needs of all humanity, not the demands of the market.
I never defended stalinism. Soviet style DoTP did however serve for need, not for profit or exchange, which gives it a step up again. It could have been more democratic, but you cant have democracy during a fucking revolution, and neither can your titoist fantasyland.

So you're advocating removing democratic control over the means of production as a way of implementing democratic control over the means of production?

Then you are too new. Production for exchange, wage labour, the law of value etc. all still operate in your "socialist" economy. See the Zizek quote that this anarkiddy posted

How can we remove democratic control over the means of production in a revolution? We dont have it right now. We overthrow the bourgeoisie to gain it. During that overthrow we cant just allow the bourgoiesie or their brainwashed followers and election riggers to vote to not give us power.

The reason that capitalism exploits labor, accumulates wealth in the hands of a few, and is indifferent to human suffering is because the system demands this because of the interest of a disconnected third party, the capitalist. The owner of the enterprise.

If the ownership of the enterprise is not a disconnected third party, if it is the workers themselves, then it is the worker whose interest the enterprise is subordinate to. It cannot exploit labor, and it cannot accumulate wealth from the people into the hands of the few, because both ends of the system are controlled by the same people.

Let me put it another way, then. Currently, the workers at least have the ability to choose which enterprise they enter into wage slavery with. Under a DotP and state-manded central planning, they don't. It is a step backward for the worker.

The workers represent themselves, otherwise it's not socialism. There can be no such thing as a politician under socialism.

Entirely true.
At the moment I'm currently reading a history of Britain in the 1970s and the thing that has most captured my imagination thusfar is how comfortable the 3 day week sounded. I mean, it's a bit shit as well to also only have 3 days of electricity a week - but 3 days work a week sounds positively heavenly, even if leisure activities in the other 4 days are constrained and even television died at 10:30.

Now (as is noted) it was never sustainable economically (since it wasn't just moving individuals, but entire industries onto a 3 day production week) but in the general sort of spirit of austerity (the good WW2 kind not the miserable modern kind) and rationing of the times, it creates that sort of nostalgia for things never experienced. Now neoliberalism wants you to work a 7 day week and spend your leisure time waiting for your boss to call you in…

In b4 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧self exploitation🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧.

I like yugo poster. I haven't read any books specifically about market socialism, but I came to the same conclusion in a non-rigorous, common sense kind of thinking about it. He is the only one I've seen make that argument as well, and I've never seen anyone actually refute it except with sort of dogmatic, ML screeds and indirect attacks about how "still capitalism, you're a revisionist" etc.

You're still competing with other co-operative firms, all laws of capitalism apply. Have you actually read Marx?

oh boy i sure love diy capitalism!

pic related
What a fucking load of shit. The fact that you buy into the neoliberal meme of "you have the choice of your slaveowner" makes you laughable.

Even with direct democracy, the power of propaganda, media and paid opposition and voting fraud can easily make you revert back to capitalism.

Read Rousseau

See

without exploitation of labor, without bourgeois control of the means of production, and without artificial scarcity

So what's a viable alternative?

Look backwards to pre capitalist forms of social organisation. Most traditional societies had markets, but can not be considered as market societies, markets existed mostly at the fringes of society, dedicated to trade between groups. Mutual aid was the norm within communities.

So a revolution has happened yet we let Fox News still broadcast? What the fuck are you thinking?
There is no voting. Democracy happens face-to-face, not through a ballot box.

What about the crisis of overproduction? What about cartels? What about competition between different sectors (farmers hoarding grain to screw over industry workers)?

One firm buying up another gives the workers of the first co-operative firm leverage over the others. "We'll buy up your firm, but your wages will be lower than ours!"
Over time this will lead again to increasingly sharp class distinctions. Your idea of socialism would be catastrophic, a reset button on capitalism so that it may last longer and nothing more.

Not very democratic of you.
That is my whole point. You cant let the reactionaires have free reign, but yugopost says thats "authoritarian"
How the fuck are you going to have face-to-face democracy for a population of 7 billion people?

Results in the collapse of one cooperative which is taken over by another. See my first argument about the trend towards consolidation.
Only happen because the owners of an enterprise collude to consolidate their power, which makes it exponentially less likely to happen with the addition of each owner. 7 billion owners = no cartels
Why would they do that when they all need each other's production?

Once they've merged, each worker gets an equal vote. There is no class distinction since they all have equal power and equal ownership.

Makes sense, since people die quite a bit when forced into 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧communism🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 (a rose by any other name), working hours, on average tend to plummet. You did it!

This makes no sense.

I disagree. The more the capitalist can get out of his workers, the better he fulfills his objective role. Colonizing every sphere of daily life with work where there once existed a mutually understood boundary between work and leisure is of significant interest to the bourgeois manager. In a sense, sleep is the final obstacle on the bourgeoisie's path towards turning everything into a non-stop valorization device — which is why everything is now to be made available 24/7.

That makes no sense. The opposite makes more sense than that.
Economies scale to population, but due to mass production and jobs like producing information goods, the larger the population, the lower the workinghours per person.

I'd actually argue that cartels, if they did happen (which doesn't seem totally unlikely), would more or less be made for the sake of further control for the worker-owners.

Right now a cartel is formed to benefit the big shareholders of large corporations, or the handful of owners of private businesses. The primary goal is to control the market to increase profits. The incentives are different for a authentically worker owned co-op, because obviously making greater profits means further exploiting yourselves. Presumably the workers benefit through making a little more money than they would in a traditional company, but they have to be competitive by working harder and still investing profits back into the company.

Which is all just to say that forming a cartel could seem lucrative to beat the market not so that everybody can profit more, but so that the workers can be freed from the dictates of the market. They can then more directly vote on things like less work hours, more pay, more benefits etc. without worrying about being outcompeted because the entire cartel is agreeing to do this, which is to everyone's benefit. And any company that breaks the cartel will actually be losing benefits through doing so.

and of course this would all play into what you were talking about before, the natural impetus on the part of market players to want to control the market, but in a market socialist context this would just be a steady process of consolidation of as many firms as possible into a monopoly or some kind of cartel that just plans production for the workers, by the workers.

You just need to make a law that anybody who works for any company has to be an equal owner.

That's what a true cooperative enterprise is.

Fucking wrong. Cartels control the market. Cooperatives can just as easily control the market and jack up prices and thus prices, while not having to put in any more work.

So some workers start a new cooperative to undercut the exploitative cartel and the price returns to normal. The way that capitalism prevents this from happening is that the capitalist is willing to take a loss in one sector of his/her portfolio to drive out competition.

The worker is not going to put forth their labor for a loss just to fuck over another set of workers, so the competition will actually occur unlike in our current system.

Ah yes because that works so well in capitalism right?
No, thats stupid. A worker wouldnt undercut the others. The reason a capitalist can undercut a cartel is because due to exploitation they can increase their profits many times. In a cooperative, in order to undercut the competition you need to sell it for less, which means less money for you, and in order to get their marketshare you need to do more work, hence more workers, which due to being a cooperative, means no increase in wages. Theres litterally no incentive to fucking with a cartel and every reason to just go along with it.

For all the marksuccs itt claiming Market Socialism would be good as a transition to communism, would'nt it make more sense to aim for full unionization of the workforce instead. Capital and Labor will always ve in contradiction, and turning proles into capitalists won't solve this contradiction, just turn everyone into petit-bourgs invested in their firm and trying to beat out their fellow proles in competition. If you had one big union covering most of the workforce, most proles wouldn't give a shit about their firms and they'd be given enough organizational success to advocate for their interests as workers (like reduced work hours across the board) instead of racing to the bottom to compete against their fellow worker in your market socialism scenario.

You literally had to ignore the very next sentence to make that argument.
Perfect example of this cartel behavior is OPEC. The OPEC nations are willing to produce oil for sale BELOW cost for short to moderate periods of time because they know that it will cause their competitors to shut down entirely, which allows them to charge whatever they want later. They are only able to do this because they have enormous capital that is lying in reserve, hoarded away from the workers.

Again, you had to completely ignore what I said to make this point. The worker wouldn't have to operate at a loss to undercut the cartel, they could just charge a reasonable price and force the cartel's price to return to normal. And again, if the cartel is owned by the workers, it would not have the capability of operating at a loss to force the new cooperative out of business.

Gotta burn that candle from both ends. Bring more cooperatives into existence to create market pressure against the capitalist enterprises, and unionize the wage slaves so that the capitalists are not able to increase exploitation to compensate.

And capital and labor only exist in contradiction because they are in the hands of two separate groups. Again, the market's tendency toward consolidation will eventually result in a single cooperative producing for the needs of the entire human race which constitutes its ownership.

Making greater profits is a matter of exploitation when you're talking about a normal company that has to be competitive in the market to make profits. But you're right that monopolies and cartels are a means of circumventing that rule.

I don't think the market itself can solve the problem of price gouging, because price gouging already occurs that can't be solved by the market due to high barriers to entry into certain markets. Also there is rent-seeking in certain sectors of the economy that just inflates because there is no way to compete (think real estate or natural resource extraction, where title to a certain plot of land can't exactly be reproduced).

But, I'd say that this can be worked out through normal state regulatory channels or through what would end up being a price gouging war that would not really serve anyone's interests. For instance, the initial act of forming monopolies and cartels in the United States was often justified as "stabilizing the market", which I think was actually true in a sense. It obviously benefited the owners, but they would implement uniform price standards in certain areas of the economy and more consistently planned, vertical integration of the supply chain into whatever their initial spot in the industry was.

So lets say an industry makes a cartel. This could be an entire industry such that the vast majority of the supply chain is consumed (which would be a pretty large cartel). This could be something like steel or whatever. They start price gouging, and in retaliation another cartel that has formed in agriculture starts price gouging on food. Food is not traditionally an input for the steel industry in the manner that mining or trains might be, and in the traditional capitalist economy this kind of retaliatory price gouging wouldn't really make sense because a rich guy isn't going to be upset that his bread costs twice as much. But in a co-op economy, such a price war would make sense because every single worker-owner in the steel cartel is benefiting from its price gouging, and so attacking them with higher prices of basic consumer goods is a form of leverage.

This would not be a good state of affairs, but it actually has an odd resemblance to international trade in that these co-ops are starting to behave as almost anarchic micro-economies in the macro world economy. The reason I make the comparison is because regular trade wars between the first world countries isn't so common. They eventually see them as not beneficial and try to stabilize through an open borders approach for capital. This isn't NECESSARILY the case of what would happen, but I just imagine that a cartel price war inside a nation-state is going to result in a compromise where the cartels start basically making deals with each other to not price gouge each other.

But aside from that long mess, I think you could end up making regulations to try to curb this kind of behavior because the state will obviously still be an arbiter in all of this. As it is people don't like price gouging, even when they are outside to the entire thing, neither benefitting nor losing from it. They just don't like it morally because they know it is wrong and mucks up the economy. I think this will probably still be the case in a co-op economy, so I'd propose trying to increase the visibility of price gouging, and increase accountability. There can be a regulatory function of the government that still watches for negative market activity like price gouging, and in much the same way that voting is public right now the larger market players should have to make publicly available their votes and financial info. So it can be seen when the workers are voting to increase prices, as well as how much profits the co-op or cartel is making anyways. If there is obvious price gouging then the public can respond by turning to the state, the regulatory body can review it and strike it down.

This might be a solution too, but it could be in combination with a co-op economy. I mean you can make your national union along with worker owned co-ops, so that the entire economy of workers essentially has oversight over any individual co-op, but the co-ops also have their autonomy. But the entire gist of this is what structures do we put in place to check power when the traditional, small and powerful clique of bourgeoisie are gone, but some set of workers or bureaucrats or whatever might unite to form a new ruling class.

Why would they do that? What is the benefit to them to sell their product for less than the cartel? Why wouldnt they just go with the existing price and make more money? They cant gain superprofits because theres no exploitation.

I don't think that people who say that automation under capitalism will necessarily lead to socialism due to machines making human labor obsolete

Every job I've had I was never allowed to stop working when I had done everything I needed to. I've had to "look busy", occupy myself with pointless, or work at an extremely slow pace. If the ideology of work till you dead continues I think we'd be more likely to see people being forced to dig holes and fill them back up in order to " earn" a living rather than socialism

tbh at this stage i'd take digging holes and filling them over the current trend towards "if you can't get a job you're lazy and just need to fucking die"

give me strawman keynesianism over the "plenty of jobs xD" lie. simple repetitive tasks have been a tantalising prospect since the invention of the walkman.

Scenario 1: New coop undercuts the cartel's price. Everyone buys from the new guys. Cartel is forced to reduce its price.
Scenario 2: New coop tries to sell at the same price as the cartel. Cartel drops their price to force out the competition.
Scenario 3: New coop tries to join the cartel and is told to fuck off because they're diluting the market share, which reverts to scenarios 1 and 2.

Doesn't matter how it plays out, the price returns to normal once the competition is resolved, and there is a floor due to the fact that the workers will not intentionally labor for a loss.

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Because it might make them more money. It's not always the case that selling high is going to make you the most money. If a new market player has the opportunity to win huge market share by selling lower than the competition, they could actually make more money than they would have charging twice as much and just being a second rate alternative to the big boys.

But that isnt true, because in order to get a huge market share you need lots of workers, which would split the profits. In the end, you just end up with less money than you would have made if you sold at the cartels price.

This. I like this. I think we're moving towards an actually novel leftist economic theory.

I'd add that a market socialist economy would have to be predicated upon the distinction between private and personal property - that is to say that squatting and speculation are prohibited by the concept of the cooperative only having ownership over those things which it actually puts to use.

This is to prevent the producers of natural resources from simply squatting on unused deposits to prevent competition.

Why would the cartel allow their market share to be eroded by someone selling at the same price? The logical response from the cartel is to drop their price and use economy of scale to force the new guys out, which defeats the point of trying to distort the market in the first place and resets the price for the consumer.

Plus if they get too out of whack, the other sectors of the economy can penalize them like until they get their shit straight.

Im still not buying it.

Remember, the goal is absolute consolidation of production so that the single remaining cooperative is owned by the entire world population, and produces for its owners' use.

I'd say this is all kind of vague because I imagine in certain cases this could swing either way. I don't doubt you might be right that in some industry if you calculate it out you'd find that there is a particular amount of workers and a particular price that maximizes profit for those workers, but where that lies is uncertain. For one new business it might be at the right spot such that they would benefit from having more workers and a larger business as a price lower than the cartel, and for others it might not. I mean if you have an agriculture cartel selling bananas for $2 a bunch, and then some 8 person farming operation that could increase their sales by a huge amount selling their bananas for what they cost now (about 50c in my area), it might be more lucrative growing their business to like, 20 people with new farms and splitting hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than splitting a couple thousand at the local farmer's market from your $2 bananas.

But I don't think that it is a solution to rely on the market completely, we'd have to think more about how viable different regulatory functions might be. Like someone else said, a national union could serve as a non-state regulatory body to the activities of individual co-ops, or maybe the way the state functions would change in a co-op economy such that it would actually serve worker's interests more since the mega billionaire and millionaire capitalists aren't a huge lobby anymore. I honestly don't fully know, but I can imagine the problem could be worked out and solved in some way.

This tbh is the most consequential change between market socialism and capitalism.

in a market system, that is your prerogative.

Market Socialists are faggots tbh. I mean, coops are nice as an entryist, "babby's first socialism" sorta thing, but it's still Capitalism. You still have commodity production, you still have surplus value, and the rate of profit is still gonna fall. The logical conclusion of a Market Socialism is just democratic planning, so why not just argue for that instead so commies actually take you seriously?
Market Socialism is like training wheels for commies. You use them when you're a little babby who just watched Richard Wolff and doesn't know what "dictatorship of the proletariat" means, but at some point you gotta take them off
t. former Market Socialist

"Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your *time*, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?" — Bob Black

This is already the case. Many employment plans being thought up involve pointless jobs for the sake of people being employed, regardless of the job's content.

Yeah, but as you said there is a new contradiction in that the kind of competition which would normally drive a capitalist to exploit workers would drive the workers to exploit themselves, and this contradiction being glaringly in the hands of the workers themselves would result in:

The reason to fight for market socialism is as a transition to a more authentic planned socialism, though I guess some people might actually just think market socialism is authentic socialism. I'd prefer reaching FALC one day, but that obviously isn't happening in our lifetimes.

But I'd support anything that is more beneficial to the workers than the market is now, with no backsteps. We need to march forward, if any centrist or neoliberal dipshit wants to talk about why we need to take step back because it is "actually a good thing to be a capitalist wage slave!" they're an enemy. My only sticking point is democracy. I'm not going to vote on or support a socialist dictator because I've already seen enough dictatorships be taken over by ruling class bureaucrats to be wary of it. If the electorate votes for a democratic, state planned socialism off the bat I'll support that. But I think market socialism has some ideological advantages that can really play to certain class-cucked tendencies in places like the UK and the United States. You can play it up that there is still a market economy, that this is about hard working americans who aren't taking handouts controlling their own lives and earning what they make with their own work at the companies (though I do support what many americans would call "hand-outs" like single payer, among other things). And, ultimately, hopefully, it will set in motion a forceful, natural pull towards an abolition of the market economy as we know it.

What the FUCK did you say boy?

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place tongue here

No! Imagine all the benefits for "society" once the ultra efficient free market makes all those millions of people engage in voluntary exchange of their labor time or be shot.Productivity through the roof with those new 14h workdays.The Future at our doormat. Come join us in the future! Where men are slaves, women are slaves, children are slaves and shut up and go back to work.

Have I told you about cooperatives. COOPERATIVES! . It's wonderful! Dont you hate your boss? Dont you hate working long hours so the factory can pocket the majority of the value? How about working those same hours but competing with so called "leftists" instead,and you get to see the value invested in the factory instead,so you can work harder and compete better? Sound good?
Oh come on! You know its a small price to pay for ousting your boss! Come here disenfranchised worker and join us in the cooperative pocket dimension, where every day is strike day! (no lunch time though)

vs

The choice is clear, anarkiddies. I'm not in it to enable the worst aspects of humanity.

vs

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if you only diverted the energy you use for shitposting into fighting capitalism we'd be already exploring spess now.

We do indeed live in a world in which the participation of all in the labour process really isn't required to provide for everyone.

What? But that doesn't fit in with my labour fetish!