I keep hearing this even from people that kinda "filrt" with the left; how much of this meme can actually be considered true?
Can someone post some pro and cons about this kind of economy and how it would be implemented today?
(pic totally unrelated but that's a pretty work of art so enjoy)
Centralism is when the government does everything in the capital, so it's not good
The communist parties must achieve an organic centralism which, whilst including maximum possible consultation with the base, ensures a spontaneous elimination of any grouping which aims to differentiate itself. This cannot be achieved with, as Lenin put it, the formal and mechanical prescriptions of a hierarchy, but through correct revolutionary politics.
The repression of fractionism isn't a fundamental aspect of the evolution of the party, though preventing it is.
There's a LeftCom flag, you know.
It's completely wrong. Society will be restructured anew, and all the ´´bullshit´´ commodities and jobs of this era will vanish. Society will be then centered around arts and scientific discovery, instead of gluttonous consumption.
contrary to what some people on this board want you to believe, central planning isn't communism.
Central planning, for all intents and purposes, 'worked'. The stories of mass shortages are mixed exaggeration – if the shortages existed on the level some people claim, there would be no reason to militarily fear the Warsaw Pact nations because the inefficient production would have left the armies unsupplied. How well it functioned is up to debate, though. I've heard from a Russian friend that, going off of info from his family, shortages of certain luxuries were constant, though shortages of general food have been exaggerated.
I've also heard that there was a conflict between the central bureaucracy and the people in what was produced. As a semi-example (yes yes, Tito bad and all that, but Yugoslavia still utilized limited forms of economic planning behind the scenes and co-ops were drastically tied up by bureaucracy), I've read that Yugoslavia's economic agencies refused to fund or produce female hygiene products because it saw them as pointless despite demand.
underrated post
Im hiding after getting btfo
Sound like average Holla Forums daydreaming, only flipped over
AnComs making fools out of themselves again
production must be ultimately guided by the workers themselves not some bureaucratic fuck send by gubmint
The problem with "socialist" states was insufficient central planning, not too much of it.
Why would the USA and the UK have engaged in rationing during WW2 if central planning was so inefficient?
at this point i think it is pure propaganda. i fail to see how markets allocate resources and get services to people who *actually* need them more efficiently or effectively. they will insist the case is closed but to me the jury is still out on that one.
centralized or decentralized, i don't care how it is done initially, but to say planned economies don't work is total bollocks.
in my view, the US economy is planned. we have institutions like the fed that raise or lower interest rates to fight the boom and bust cycles as much as possible, and put an 'invisible hand' over our desire to spend or save.
every business has projections for what they expect for growth, and what kind of production they will look forward to for the year.
corporations are constantly planning and (when necessary) sharing information with one another to protect their own industries.
hedge funds are always looking into the future and performing their own forms of planning.
Basically, the US economy is far more planned than people who "oppose planned economies" really want to admit is all I'm saying.
in other words, central planning 'doesn't work' when communists do it, but when capitalists do it: 'central planning is ok, and by god we all have to contribute our fair share so you should just be lucky you have a job you lazy fu-'
I see the question of central rationing vs the market allocation of capital goods as entirely separated from consensus mechanism for decisions on what to produce
I don't see why consensus mechanism can't be decentralized but actual rationing centralized
bump
Read Cockshott Towards a New Socialism he adresses lots of critiqes, misconceptions and errors about it, and also explains how it could be implemented/improved
Up until at least the 50s, central planning was considered a perfectly viable alternative to a market economy, due to the preposterous speed with which the USSR developed. From wartorn, bankrupt arctic wasteland to world second nuclear superpower in 30 fucking years? Not even gommies stop to think about this, but it's a feat that might never be surpassed in the rest of human history.
But as everyone knows, the pace of the Soviet economy only got worse after Stalin kicked the bucket. Now there are a million correlating factors here, and we can debate till we're blue in the face which ones were causal factors: Stalin's administrative acumen (noted by Lenin in his political testament), his low regard for the human cost of collective economic development, maybe central planning just plain works great with industrialization but not with consumer goods and services, sheer incompetence of his successors, perhaps central planning necessitates totalitarianism in order to work etc. etc. But in the end, between the stagnation that set in during Brezhnev and Porky's propaganda, central planning came to be seen not only as inferior but as a joke, not a competing model. Thus we got TINA.
Holla Forums has floated the idea that computer simulations could and should have been the next step in centralized planning, which could then be decentralized. I feel that if mankind ever sees a 2nd wave of leftist revolt, this might prove to be a crucial issue.
You also might want to see post 2029992 and its responses here: web.archive.org
Such an awesome reply, thank you
The only thing im not really getting at all is how computer simulations would fit in centralized planning though
Because the computer can simulate the economic situation of the country until it finds the optimal solution. You then enact that.
Corporations plan everything internally, it's not like they run internally on market and price mechanism principles. We probably have a higher % of pencil pushing bureaucrats and managers than the soviet union did because there really isn't much of a dichotomy between "market" and central planning.
There's a lot of money in developing enterprise resource planning systems. When you keep in mind that some corporations have larger internal economies than some countries, you have your proof of planned economies working.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention
>>>/gnussr/
Here's an archive of the amazing thread that originated that board: mediafire.com
Like said, simulations are run over and over and the best one is used, basically. Using iterative calculation for optimizing a system is a traditional method now (pioneered by a Soviet cybernetician called Kantorovich, incidentally), the internet lets you wire every factory, distributor etc. together for real-time data collection, and modern computer processing power should make these real-time, repeated simulations of a complex economy possible. If you see the "read Cockshott" meme around, this is the gist of it.
Thank you for your replies
I think i already have a copy of Cockshott's book sitting on my hardrive, and this thread inspired me to finally give it a read; is there anything i should read before in order to get a better grasp of the concepts?
GOOGLE DE LEON
deleonism.org
One of the issues people seem to raise with economic planning is that the modern form of globalized market economy is way to complex for economic planning to subsume, and in a way they are correct. The key here is then that economic planning should also be joint with a push towards simplifying the economy. A higher degree of tiered local autarchy would be a lot simpler to handle through planning and would also remedy the absurd amount of wastage inherent in globalization. Producing shit in china and shipping it half-way across the globe is extremely inefficient in terms of expended labour and resources, the only reason it is profitable is due to differential advantage. Greater local self-sufficiency would help with food security, make planning more feasible, and increase the power of community control.
it is quite an easy read I think
And of course, also forgot to point towards our current Cockshott thread: