Been here for over a year, would like some questions answered

That's anarcho communism user.

Why are you so rude?
ok
And what would be the efficient way? A state controlled one according to you? The USSR wasn't very good at it.

Yeah I should have said socialism*, I couldn't be bothered to type out all of that.

Not responding directly since that would be taking the bait.

Anarcho-communism isn't different from communism. The idea of that communism is different is bogus. The idea of communism is the abolishment of capitalism. That is why the end goal of communism is always the same, while the method of achieving is different. This is because the dialectic will not stop until everything which causes the division of human beings has been resolved. While human psychology is in favor of centralized power structures, due to humans often being lazy, not wanting responsibility, or wishing for abstraction. There will always be those who wish for freedom. These voices will pierce through at some point unless if they are silenced by force. This creates a rift and an opportunity for a dialectic to occur. The new society then bears its own demise. That is why in the end communism, as described as a form of anarchy, is the only fully developed form of communism. While the others are merely the early stages, where conditions haven't been met to reach the end.

Also
Australia and Canada didn't steal from Africa, Switzerland didn't either, nor did Scandinavia or Singapore. Europe also didn't plunder the Eastern Block or from Southern America (or at least not in the same way and degree). I don't really get the Africa kneejerk response when there's a clear correlation regardless of which part of the world you're looking at and regardless of the particular history of the country. And wasn't it Adam Smith, the guy who's hailed around here so often as a critic of capitalists, one of the first economists to say that the colonies aren't actually profitable to the common people, good for the rich few and are only a drain on the country as a whole?

And, you know, what if the opposite is true? What if a lot of this wealth a result of production and not plunder?

It should be fairly obvious that maintaining a colony is less profitable than importing cheap resources to increase production. The latter only requires a crew able to extract resources and ship them away. It is the production process which keeps capitalist growth going and eases the process of surplus extraction. A boosted economy would then benefit the country which took the resources. The colonies themselves could only use it for infrastructure or local capitalists could use it for surplus extraction.

They were/are part of the British Commonwealth, and the better end of it too.
If native depopulation didn't take hold and the British colonized the Americas like they did Africa (subjegation instead of complete replacement), they'd be fucked and in the same position as Africa because instead of "loyal British subjects" would have the Canadians simply be labour to use.

I thought this goes hand in hand, otherwise how would they control the resources for shipping to begin with? I don't imagine off the grid operations would be very manageable on a national scale when there are native governments.

alright, but the rest of my point still stands.

IHDI doesn't seem to have an universal correlation with economic freedom.

Botswana seems to be the same kind of shithole of their surrounding neighbors, Argentina manages a decently high IHDI despite having one of the lowest economic freedom index.

And by anecdotal bullshit, I know for a fact the average Argentinean lives better than the average proletarian here in Chile and IHDI seems to corroborate it.

But they're the same color.

*I mean, the cost goes hand in hand. Shipping in resources still wasn't profitable because of the requirement for a colony.

My take on the Great Depression is that it was caused by how self-referential markets are, and how that means bubbles are the norm for things that take long to produce and durable assets (especially land). For things that are quickly and flexibly produced changes in demand can be quickly addressed with a change in quantity. For other things the evaluation of future market value affects the current price a lot; so let's think of a durable and not quickly produced thing that is a factor of production, and land being the prime example, so let's use that. When there is a widespread expectation that the monthly income stream you can have from renting out that land will continuously increase in the future, this gets baked into the current selling price, so when that expectation gets checked by reality, and not even in the extreme sense that rent plummets, but merely that raising stops being feasible against the common expectation, then selling price doesn't merely cease to rise, but collapses.

Given that companies are entangled with each other, bankruptcies are not independent events. E. g. when your company is a specialist supplier of two or three other companies, one of them going bankrupt can break your neck. When you are in debt, you are in panic and sell what you have to get money, and you can't afford to wait to sell at a higher price, especially when you have to pay high interest on your debt. Many being in the same situation at once means they drive down the prices, which means they pull more into the situation they themselves are in.

This. Spurdocaust when?

The western world uses economic blackmailing. There have been several cases with the IMF where they lend money to poor countries with absurd conditions attached. Which are essentially nothing more than bait so that they can blackmail the government. In return for dropping the debt, the countries are obliged to let western companies import resources for dirt cheap prices. Although most of that is in the past. Different techniques are used. Often depending on coercion or trickery.

As true as it may be, we (at least I was, assume the rest as well) were talking about the colonial period.

You are dumb as shit my dude.

link.springer.com/article/10.2307/3342145?no-access=true

articles.latimes.com/1986-06-07/local/me-10010_1_socialist-countries

I was already corrected that they reaped the rewards of colonialism through Britain. But I wouldn't be so fast to assume it was that of a crucial contribution to their development, because it implies that Britain imported substantial resources from its African colonies to its at the time still not fully developed colonies instead of itself, and, that there was actual overall profit from these African colonies.

I appreciate all the genuine answers here that explained the great depression, but that really was only a side question. I'm more interested in what you have to say about my first one.

The Soviet state behaved like a giant corporation. Instead of working for a private owner, you worked for the state. Instead of being bossed around by the manager, you were bossed around by a bureaucrat. Instead of the capitalist class, there was the bureaucratic class. Instead of many capitalists, there was only one capitalist - the state. In short,nothing fundamentally changed.

All of this was all predicted by Bakunin, who warned Marx and the Marxists about half a century before the Russian Revolution that if they attempted to establish socialism using state power they would get a dictatorship worse than that of the capitalists.

In short, the MoP were never truly in the hands of the people. You can argue a million different ways as to why and how this happened but that's the truth.

Not OP, but since I have a question I might as well ask it here. How does capital lose its value once the state is abolished?

This probably doesn't help, but I don't necessarily think it is. It operates, and I don't think "capitalism" in the abstract is necessarily incapable of functioning mostly in an equitable way. But, what it requires is a lot of control. The price mechanism ensures a certain kind of limit to corruption, it disciplines the acquisition of wealth by grounding it in production for distribution to the ideally the widest market possible, but it has its flipside. For one, inherent in those points are already issues. What if it tries to make its own market? In a crude way, we see this with advertising all the time. What if corruption arises as an obfuscation of injustice inherent in production, its perpetuation, maybe even its pursuit to drive down prices? We can see this in the entire fossil fuels industry, the healthcare industry or the defense industry. My abstract notion of "capitalism" is directing production through maximizing a certain value related to other values across the system. In a way, I don't know a fundamental issue with that. But the edifice around it has a lot of problems. I know in the USSR there was research into constructing systems around "shadow prices". I think Cockshott goes into that too, though I haven't fully read him. In this way, I don't think there is anything wrong with markets as a tool, but they have different expressions. Our society often thinks of markets as something natural, outside of us.

bump

I'm looking for more answers for my first question

A completely meaningless metric which is basically just a measure of how much the Heritage Foundation likes your country.

Capital does not necessarily lose value. However, there is no government preventing you from taking a piece of land and creating your own means of production. Without a state, there is no real incentive to become a wage worker, unless if you lack the skills to farm and build a shelter.
The police force and military force protect the relations of capitalism (protecting private property from revolting workers, preventing people to claim their own land without money), while capitalists benefit politicians directly with bribes, and capitalism benefits the state indirectly by accumulating wealth.

were can i find hentay of the pic

My particular branch is cockshottism though.

But centrally planning the industrialization of a nation, IE building more productive capital and producing almost solely for the growing of your productive ability to do it again, is much more efficient than letting a market do it. As you have seen with Cockshott, given sufficient information planning is more efficient, always. But planning for industrialization is easy, because you dont need to concern yourself too much with consumer goods, only the demands of industry, the industry which you yourself plan. You thus know exactly how much stuff you need to make.

Only towards the later stages, because they got stuck in the dogma of "more growth and growth for the sake of growth crank up dem numbers and quotas tovarish". This dogma and the fact that there was not enough computing power and information to plan a consumer-service oriented economy lead to its inefficiencies. They tried to make consumer goods with the same logic that they used to make forges, which didnt work quite as well.

All a market is, is the same kind of calculation, decentralized according to very slow price fluctuations (read: waves). But this slow as shit stuff is still faster than tenthousand buraucrats trying to numbercrunch the economy of a whole country. Numbercrunching is what we made computers for, its not a task humans are very good or quick at.

Growth
Since a planned economy does not rely on trying to nudge an "other" entity, the strenght of a planned economy depends on its total labour force in hours, the natural resources (which highly determines the labour power vs resulting use value, ie iron is hard or easy to mine), its productive capital by which it multiplies the productivity of the workforce and its trade relations. Productivity in one area vs another in a particular field vary thus according to the natural resources and the productive capital present to aid production. The better these are, the more can be produced with the same labour power. The growth of an economy is determined by how much of the capital produced is put into increasing productive capacity.

Bussiness cycle theory
Doesnt exist in a planned economy, but when it doubt for capitalisms "official" workings, 9/10 times refer to keynes. Though I am not sure what the fuck "animal spirits" mean.

Inflation
Does not exist or has no real impact on a planned economy. Inflation in capitalism only exists to encourage people to spend their money on purchasing stuff, rather than hoarding it, which increases growth in a capitalist economy. In a planned economy, money is either directly labour time or not that important. The central place would just tax as much as it spends, keeping the supply of money equal. Over time, deflation would naturally occur due to the growth of the productive capacity of the society, making peoples money/time worth more stuff IE society produces more per hour worked.

Structuring the economy
Everything is controlled by society and industries are grown or shrunk according to the directly measurable demand and productive cost to society, as well as democratic decisions by all of society (IE stop producing some bad stuff that people still buy because its cheap to make or make more condoms than you should according to demand to make sure they are cheap as fuck)

Short answer: Capitalists stop investing because ROI is low, people get fired, demand lowers, ROI lowers, repeat. Lots of shit to make, lots of factories, mines and fields to make it in, lots of people who want to make shit, but nothing happens because the people who own the factory dont want to do it because the market tells them not to. The solution then was for FDR to step in, forcibly take money from the people with the factories, make people build loads of shit like big ass dams, just so they have money to spend on stuff that the people with the factories dont want to produce, making them want to produce again.

Load of shit. When the whole capitalistic system collapses the only way to boot it up again is to tell every child with a tophat to do exactly what the government says and coordinate the whole house of cards again, hoping the Koch brothers wont pull out their card pillar to fuck over Soros and get their card.

e-hentai.org/g/958656/78de34da54/

Thank you! Very informative. I was hoping for other ideologies to give their answer but Cockshott will have to do.

How many times you gonna repost thus, son?

this is the first time I made this thread

I think the leftist perspective on capitalism is pretty much equal among everyone on the left, with maybe some slight deviation from market-socialists/mutualists. A full leftists explanation of capitalism is usually keynes mixed with marx, because keynes and marx dont describe the exact same thing in their works. Keynes describes the abstract and how to manage a capitalist economy, while marx explain how and why capitalism works on all its levels, where everything comes from. As I see it, keynes is a users guide on how to drive and maintain a car while marx is a mechanical explaination of how all the parts of a car work and how they interact.

no it isn't you disingenous faggot. You'd know this if you actually lurked for longer than 5 minutes and read a single fucking book, pamphlet, wikipedia article or even a fucking dictionary definition

I'm here for close to two years now, and it IS what is most commonly tossed around here. Maybe not communism, maybe socialism is the more apt description for what I said, but anyway no need to get angry because I didn't write a thesis.

close enough to what I said

Why don't you read a fucking book? You could have had all your questions answered had you bothered to read some foundational economic and political texts.

Crises, wasted labour, provision of use-values through exchange-value mechanisms, the expropriation from the workers of their surplus-value into the hands of unaccountable private individuals, the usurpation of usufructuary rights in order to impose perpetual individualistic private property rights, externality effects, fetishisation of money and the distortion of social value that goes along with it leading to non-value creating activities returning profits (waste of Capital), Labour-Capital contradiction and the crises it begets etc.

The USSR did remarkably well through to the 1960s as far as efficiency goes; to ignore the fact that Russia started as a backwards agrarian poverty ridden nation and ended up as an industrial powerhouse with massively increased living standards is ridiculous.

1. Rate and mass of surplus value define growth provided Labour-power is paid for at its value.
2. Immanent contradictions inherent in Capitalist production and distribution are to blame for "business cycles"
3. Inflation is caused by an oversupply of currency, distorting the normal function of money as a measure of, and claim to, a certain quantity of social value
4. Societal control over the means of production, the elimination of exchange-value considerations in the provision of use-values, the distinction between private and social labour in production thus ceases to exist, and the application of surplus product to societal needs is established.

Oh, and as for the Great Depression, it was jus another sharp bust cycle in chaotic Capitalist development. Workers are attracted, and then repelled, alternately.

But was it better than the West?
And why wouldn't it yield better results if it were capitalist?

Maybe because not all of us have time to read 15000 pages of competing leftist tendencies just to find out a few things?

The austrians were on damage control after his book?

Since when? His book is nothing but speculation, not hard science.

Yes. Russia achieved a level of industrialisation in two decades that it took the Capitalist powers over a century to reach.
Because such swift expansion would be unprofitable.

Capital Volume 1 - Abridged by Oxford World's Classics
Capital Volume 2 & 3 in their entirety
Finance Capital - Hilferding
Imperialism - Lenin
Accumulation of Capital - Rosa
There's your introduction.

If you'd rather read something shorter, pick up one of David Harvey's books on Capitalism and Marx. Very accessible in addition to providing new and influential insights.

READ SHAIKH

Austrian economics sure is harder science than whatever Cockshott writes, you can predict the market with it.

Smell like bullshit.
More bullshit, look at up the Marshall Plan.

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Nice argument.

It just means that people don't make sophisticated mathematical analysis all the time, whether we are talking about investors or consumers. People make spontaneous gut decisions, and follow the herd. And even the ultra-rich are in a herd, just as smaller one. When everybody around you is very optimistic, this usually infects you with some optimism, too.

TANS is a sketch of socialism, it doesn't claim to be about predicting capitalist markets. Though Cockshott and colleagues have written elsewhere about how capitalism works, and done studies about the correlation between demographic development and profits, the price of basic food and riots, and the distribution of income etc. Surely, you can use some of that for predictions.

Can you give an actual example of Austrians predicting things? When I have these discussions with their fans, it usually boils down to some grate thonker making an extremely vague pessimistic remark about something, and then this gets "proven", if you will, by current happenings. But without giving a time-frame and without specifying the size of the drop, it doesn't amount to more than saying that things don't always either improve or stay the same, which is not really a very profound statement. There is a saying about Marxists that they successfully predicted 30 of the last 3 economic downturns. I guess Austrians are better, since they predicted 60 of the last 3 downturns.

The austrians can correctly predict when the market forms and when the market bubble bursts.

Cockshott's book is purely wankery meant to "inspire" people when it does nothing to teach people how to achieve/do things, which are typical of marxist books starting from Marx.

I mean, marxists were waiting for the economy to go to shit. So far, their predictions are hit and miss, since the market always rises up after the bubble bursts.

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mods, requesting ban for fags like this who shit on newcomers who argue in good faith, they're most likely Holla Forumsyp or SJW saboteurs:

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I have to ask you first: what do you consider to be an optimal allocation of resources? What is your metric? Because this is a very common rhetorical trick of capitalist propaganda, it's one its pillars: it judges capitalism by capitalism's own standards, thus it will always pass with flying colors. Optimized resource allocation in capitalism is whatever makes capital grow the most, and that's obviously the very goal of capitalism itself in the first place. Capitalism has no goals beyond self-growth. It promises nothing and makes no claims towards a world without poverty or illiteracy or hunger or whatever, and concurrently, whatever benefits it does deliver to society are treated as manna from the heavens and proof the system works. In measuring itself by itself, any final result is the optimal one – or rather, in hindsight, it can see flaws and how results could have been quantitatively better, but it never questions whether the results could and should have been qualitatively different. So the final result of optimal resource allocation according to capitalism is not only (nigh) optimal, but inevitable. Do you see the devilishly clever sophistry at work here? By setting itself as its own yardstick, capitalism perfectly normalizes, even naturalizes itself; "capitalism is just the way societies work", "it's just human nature" and similar claims can be made without any proof. It's just viewed as as part of the background of life, something that always was, is and will be there, and there's no point fighting it any more than you can fight gravity.

The textbook example of the dubious capitalist standard for resource allocation is probably utilities. As far as I know, not a single country in the world has had its sanitation network installed by sheer private initiative, simply because it's virtually impossible to make it profitable by itself i.e. it's not an optimal allocation of resources as far as the capitalist is concerned. Yet it's one of the biggest improvements in living standards that modern civilization affords, so governments have had to foot the bill. So capitalism's claim of optimization very clearly diverges from social value here, which I think you will agree, should stand above the former when allocating resources.

Another, more insidious example. Pharmaceutical industries ignore cheap and effective meds, including for depression and even autism, because to them, optimal allocation of resources means putting all those PhD employees and expensive lab equipment (and it should be said, its generous government grants) to use in giving amostly "cosmetic" tweak to old, soon-to-become-generic drug, so they can get a patent on it and use marketing to set it as "the new standard", even if the old one is just as good or even superior. Again, social value diverges from profit, so capitalists unsurprisingly chose the latter.

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Then you look at other industries and activities and start thinking, how much does optimal resource allocation converge with social value for this or that? And eventually you'll see that the logic of capitalist allocation of recources makes for optimal profit but purely incidental social value. Adam Smith's old dictum about the butcher, brewer and baker says exactly that. Then you look at an industry like fucking fidget spinners which has absolutely zero social value and you realize the social benefits are not just incidental, but virtually irrelevant as far as capitalist allocation of resources go.

In defense of capitalism, one might look at my pharmaceutical example and say, "yes maybe the social value is incidental, but optimizing resource allocation towards profit makes the industry so large that this indicental social value is higher than it would be if resouce allocation was optimized towards social value itself". It's a very common argument, and seems to make sense on first look, but presents several flaws. First of all, it's purely hypohetical. Second, it can't be disproven, because there (sadly) isn't a socialist Earth out there with which we can compare results. Third, the closest comparison we could make was with the USSR, but data collections in scientific areas are not easy to come by, were not nearly as thorough back then, and most importantly, resource allocation cost-benefit analysis is easy to calculate when prioritizing profit, but very difficult when prioritizing social value. Indeed America outpaced the USSR in sheer volume of pharmaceutical advances, but the USSR accomplished a lot with much, much fewer resources because of their different prioritizing. This includes them studying things that, thanks to our "naturalized capitalism", we can't, or rather aren't allowed, to even contemplate. You know how the Western media talks about antibiotic-resistant bacteria like it's the end of the world? It shouldn't surprise you that they're talking out of their asses, because an alternative has existed a century called phage therapy. It had a rocky start due to low technology of the time and careless research, and as soon as the "miracle cure" of penicillin showed up, the Western pharmaceutical industry virtually abandoned phages completely because of, you guessed it, "optimal" resource allocation. Meanwhile, the Soviets kept investing in phage research, and now it's not only viable, but may quite literally save the world one day. (As a fourth flaw, I could point out that the communist countries never managed to perfect economic planning and thus were not nearly as productive as they could have been, and in fact shunned the one thing that could have saved it, cybernetics. But I reckon this too is a hypothetical.)

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