Cockshott General

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To keep company with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thierry_Coquand

This is a lovely exchange about Marxist economic explanations and the "alternatives" (lol at the wind-god thing at the end): paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2018/03/06/reply-to-harris/

I have a vague memory of Cockshott talking about automation and how it doesn't increase productivity, but I'm not sure where I've heard it.

You still need to make sure you're not wasting resources and that's what the Mises "millions of equations" problem tried to point out. Cockshott solves this by simply reminding his opponents that we're in the damn 21st century, where even a network of home computers could feasibly plan the whole economy (see: ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2017/01/02/blockchain-and-the-material-foundations-for-socialist-institutions/).

He makes a similar point in the post right before yours - rather, it increases productivity by reducing labour costs.

I get where you are coming from but this problem already exists for enterprises in capitalism, and while capitalism is pretty wasteful, I don't see capitalist enterprises wasting tons of resources, their risk only evolves arround profitability. Let's take Mises' railway problem, if the state issues a private company to build a railway from city X to city Y, the railway company can lay out in detail how much time they will need, how many resources, etc., and they did so 100 years ago just as well.

Companies don't use calculation in kind, right?

They do, but they also use money prices as well. It's almost impossible to have such a large production infrastructure and not account for items in kind.

But even without a cybernetic network wouldn’t each individual factory/shop only need to keep track of its input/output ratios? If you have a bonus system where every percentage increase in output relative to input for each factory is met with a similar bonus in payment, then wouldn’t that incentivize them to constantly look for the most efficient methods of production? After all, corporations centrally plan inputs and outputs and supposedly, due to market pressures, always find the best results by process of elimination (inneficient firms go out of business). It seems to me the only thing missing in a socialist system would be the proper motivational mechanisms encouraging them to find better input output ratios.

damn, got my unhealthy fascination boner up for nothing.

But what about market socialism?

Read Cockshott

It inevitably reverts to full-blown capitalism

Not even at MarkSoc but if market socialism leads inexorably to anything then its proper socialism, not capitalism. The laws of the market gradually centralize market share in fewer and fewer hands, thus replacing individual coops with massive worker controlled combines, which can then be put to use as socialized industry.

Except history shows us this is bullshit. Not only did the presence of market forces in the former "socialist" states lead to their disintegration and collapse into run of the mill liberal capitalist states, but co-ops in general tend to degenerate into joint stock corporations. The only thing "market socialism" leads to is monopoly capitalism. Just like every other kind of capitalism.

youtube.com/watch?v=kTl4b0w6mpk

Markets are a waste of labor.

Thoughts on what he said about "Bukharinite delusions"? I think Cockshott's take on the topic of free shit makes a lot of sense.

Please tell me this is Photoshopped

For everyone asking about money a pay increases and calculation problems, watch his fucking videos, you lazy fucks he addresses all of your questions and puts mises and Hayek in the fucking ground where they belong.

It's real but it's ironic.

I didn't think of that kind of "shot". Rather,

Honestly this.
The "market" isn't some sort of fucking magical entity to begin with. While humans on an individual level are quite unpredictable when it comes to details, predictions and forecasts tend to generally become comparatively more accurate the larger the sample becomes.
Naturally "fashion" and different spontaneous fads, which are absolute exploitative cancer under capitalism, are be a more difficult to predict, but that's not a thing a capitalist market, and a capitalist market alone by some fucking miracle would manage to precognitively detect either.
Businesses always react with a delay anyway, always noticing trends only once they've already started to take off. A cybernetic system with a wide and general overview of the economy might notice these fluctuations at an earlier stage, or at least fast as current predatory businesses do, but it'd be quite the shitty system, or it would be terribly incompetently used ,if it'd take somehow someone longer to spot these developments despite the powerful tools at their disposal.

youtube.com/watch?v=kTl4b0w6mpk
new Penileprojectile

Video was already posted though.

what is this, an image for ants!?

Did a gif

slides

There are these guys under his new video trying him to get him to debate Sargon - can you fucking stop, why would he do this? Do you want to torture him or anything?

This. Tbh the constant "HUEHUE WHO ELSE LEFTYPOLE HERE COCKSHOTT SHOULD DEBATE SARGON AMIRITE GUYS" is just fucking annoying and seems like it'll drive the guy away from doing videos if nothing else.

The Soviet Union implemented normal market reforms that allowed limited private ownership, they didn’t mandate that these enterprises be entirely worker owned. In short the USSR implemented capitalist reforms, not market socialist reforms.

Then make ownership in the enterprise be conditional upon employment there.

Did Cockshott remove all the posts you're talking about, or are you seriously exaggerating?

A co-op monopoly isn't explicitly socialist in anyway. Those workers still have the interest to keep their property away from the rest of the society.

True but negotiating the nationalization of one or a few firms is easier than negotiating the nationalization of thousands.

Cockshott is a gift that keeps on giving.

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noice

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He should post the original slides.

Is that Gilbert Strang bottom left? What has he done?

In a sense meat is extremely subsidized even in capitalist countries, because pollution is not adequately taxed. Butchering animals every day seems to also have negative effects on the mental health of the people doing that, they have a much higher rate of suicide than the population average (got that from Mexie's podcast). I don't understand why insect farming isn't more popular. A government like Venezuela should do that at least as a ready fallback in case of embargo.

kek the absolute state of vegans

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researchgate.net/project/How-the-world-works
Cockshott is writing the ultimate book on historical materialism

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I'm sorry guys, I was just memeing when I mentioned it in a reply to some guy on Sargons channel. I'm sorry for the spam from other people. :(

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At least we now know marxist sargonism is irrelevant in academia.

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I'll repost the apology one last time on the next upload to make certain it reaches the intended audience.

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Only at least 8 people in my life have joked about it.

Is that you, comrade Cockstroke?

its a meme that refrences the fact that someone called logic/math a dogma and reactionary

SAVAGEEEEE

not to downplay it, but

Can't cock shot the Cockshott

New video: youtube.com/watch?v=EE-kCZnlGZU

Made by Cockshott gang

Hopefully Cockshott-senpai fixes the buzzing in the next video ;–;

WTF is this weird shit that appears everytime when I watch a Cockshott video?

Also, props to the guy explaining to Cockshott he really shouldn't debate Sargon and it was just a meme.

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It's God making sure you won't complain when you die and have to face him for judgement. He did warn you after all.

Unironically spooks, Insects are thought as dirty.
Although you could use them indirectly, to feed cattle…

I love Cockshott and I think every socialists needs to read Cockshott, but holy shit this guy works on supercomputers and can't figure out video audio problems. I guess I can't blame him for probably being too busy/can't be fucked to redo the presentation over again.

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I'm so glad I'm not the only one who finds that ironic. Guess A/V isn't his forte

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even a relatively quick noise gate, or FFT EQ (such as with ReaFir) would help get rid of the noise quickly. I guess it's just that he's not a power user on consumer technology

He replies to all comments so why don't you leave one on the aforementioned video outlining the A/V issues and perhaps offering him some advice or links to guides?

Before that, TallRedFox says:
TallRedFox either lies or misremembers fictional examples with demand curves (indeed standard econ textbooks are full of those) as real ones. But that picture without the rest of the conversation does not make Cockshott look good. I'm pretty sure that Cockshott does believe in the rule of thumb that people tend to buy lower quantities of a good when its price is raised, it's just that we don't have data about how much the quantity changes with price, and because of all sorts of dependencies having the full data about that (which economic actors aren't asked and don't have an incentive to actually accurately tell you) wouldn't be something neatly fitting into a thinly drawn curve. E. g. if I'm in the habit of making a snack of certain ingredients, and ingredient X gets more expensive while ingredient Y gets cheaper to such a degree that on a whole, the snack gets cheaper, I might buy more of ingredient X even though it got more expensive. Also, expectations about future price changes affect how I act today, and it's not that I compare the price to some inner invariant (genetic?) measure of what a "just" price is. I don't even know about all products out there that are similar to what I regularly consume, so if there is a drastic hike in price for such a thing, I get an incentive to look for alternatives, then maybe I find something that I end up strongly preferring, so when the original thing goes back to its old price, I don't come back to it. There are more complications.

I just thought the comment was funny and it shows he has a sense of humor, making him look bad wasn't my intention. Anyone curious enough can easily find the context on his blog.

Is that you Mr. Cockshott? :^)

I don't think any sane Marxist denies this. Marx himself repeatedly stated that supply and demand do have an effect on prices, but it only causes temporary oscillations around the actual value.

kek

HOLY SHIT COCKSHOTT BTFO I'M LITERALLY s h a k i n g HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED

anyway
wew, lad
WEW, LAD

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Yeah, I've read that weeks ago. Why are Lolberts never reading the theory they criticize? I've never seen a Lolbert not using a strawman or a misrepresentation in their criticism.

Proofs Billy?

Literally one of the best known and well respected works of lolbert/neoliberal “theory” is a high school tier “socialism is when the government does things” strawman.

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My favourite bit of right wing "theory" has to be pic related. It's literally Molymeme-tier ad homs dressed up as a critique.

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Is there anything more pathetic than right wing amateur psychoanalysis?

Anyone know where his LTV video went?

meme review, meme review

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It's not even psychoanalysis, just a bunch of random ad hominems like he said. Even Mises' economist peers thought he was a smug manchild back then.
The only reason it managed a resurgence is because burgers are brainwashed to associate anything involving the word "capitalism" with feelings of safety and peace.

Why the fuck would he delete that one? It was literally the perfect digestible bit to redpill liberals on the LTV.

There's at least one massive assumption behind this that mentioned but the Austrians either didn't see or pretended not to, which is to say: according to whom is capitalism optimal at anything? What's the reference? And therein lies one of Porky's most powerful rhetorical (maybe "axiological" applies here) victories in the previous century. See first pic for a post of mine about it.

To summarize: the statement that capitalism offers "optimal" results has a hidden fallacy in it, because they will always be optimal if your frame of reference is capitalism itself.

Well that's basically how they did it, and it was a mammoth task indeed, especially considering until the 60s they had only old-ass mechanical calculators at their disposal. But there's a basic problem here: the more an economy grows and develops, the more variables you have to deal with, and each variable interacts with several others in a network like manner. In other words, as the economy grows, the number of variables involved in modeling it grows exponentially – and that's without considering the absurd dimensions and large population of the USSR into the calculations. Back at the start of the 1st 5 Year Plan, the economy was mostly agrarian, which is much to model and calculate than the industrialized economy of the 80s, whose array of consumer products as well as intermediary commodities was immense. When with a small economy, it's already a complex task to calculate the optimal prices of commodities (prices are the most important part of the planning, as far as I'm aware), and even then they were frequently flawed, ergo all the various shortages. As the economy becomes more complex and the number of variables increases exponentially, so does the number of errors in price stipulation. Like you said, capitalism just leaves price-setting to the market, but that's a big no-no here. If you have each company working towards profitability as a goal here, you just replaced capitalism with co-op capitalism, so you still have capitalism's shortcomings

On the other hand, imperfect tho it is, the market does provide workable prices for most things. What to do? One solution, would be to model the economy itself and see the results obtained with certain prices. Then tweak then, and simulate again, obtain new prices etc. etc. until eventually you reach those much-sought-after optimal prices, without having to use a market economy, indeed even simulate one. These are shadow prices, and cyberneticians in the USSR who proposed this had to fight off busybodies acccusing them of retarded claims of capitalist restoration.

But you simply ouldn't run such simulation only with pencil-pushers. They could barely guesstimate the prices alone, let alone have a realistic simulacrum of the entire economy running, let alone repeat that time and time again. At first you might get better results bby hiring more people for your planning committee, but inevitably, there comes a point when simply hiring more planners still isn't enough to handle the immense amounts of data involved, because you still have the bottleneck of the planners having to communicate with each other. Thus what you need isn't an army of regular minds, but one single mega mind capable of tracking all variables at the same time. And that, you guessed it, is the cybernetic network

We're still in a scarcity economy, user. We don't have enough materials for everyone.

Ditto as above, when I mentioned the socialist companies working like mere co-op capitalist companies.

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Ahem.

I think our needs and wants for the most part are fabricated and/or made worse by capitalist society though.

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just in case you missed it:

can anyone upload his LTV video that he took down?

He reuploaded the LTV vid: youtube.com/watch?v=emnYMfjYh1Q

Don't tell me what to do

In TANS, Cockshott brings up the problem of directing work to unfilled positions or crucial industries, something the Soviet Union had problems with basically through its whole existence minus unpopular Stalin-era policies of cash incentives (flying in the face of socialist principles of equality of income as well depreciation of labor voucher value) and forced labor (which to this day discredits the entire socialist project).

How should this issue be addressed? Or should it be addressed? Maybe unfilled positions and selective labor shortages are simply the stress-point in the socialist mode of production which encourages planning authorities to innovate.

Lolberts just live in their own little world huh

Fucking neoliberals literally use their strawman "not real socialism" bullshit THEMSELVES as a means of defense when you present them with an actual socialist model. Like poetry.

Can we please keep feeding lolberts Cockshott theory? Watching them flounder with semantics and ad hoc shit as well demonstrably not even reading the text is a great way to discredit them.

This may surprise you, but you will not find much about that principle in the writings of socialists, especially not as a short-term goal right after WWII. A short term goal is getting rid of rentier income, and that certainly can be done. (It also happens to be the case that the highest incomes tend to be of that type, go figure.)
I need to pay rent to have shelter and I need to work to be able to pay rent. How is that not forced labor? Does it not count as forced according to you because many distinct people who don't know each other are engaged in leeching off my energy in a somewhat random and spontaneous way as opposed to a conspiracy? If the big bad difference here is supposed to be the specific forced assignment to a specific task task instead of a general compulsion to work, this problem can be reduced. Freedom here can be increased by using task assignment algorithms that take into account individual preferences for doing this or that task (just changing who gets assigned to which task, while the plan in terms of person hours allocated to this or that activity stays invariant).

*cockblock the Cockshott

lewd

intellectual opposition that the Austrian school face from the left
Why does he say concede? Why does he say that like it's a good thing that there is only one coherent intellectual opposition to the Austrian school that the left has?

Literally the first fucking point. I can't believe this. This Brewster retard literally made the left blow itself the fuck out.

>>>/gnussr/501

youtube.com/watch?time_continue=29&v=o_FKKJUj9eE

Jason is Cockshott Gang

So it begins…

now I feel bad for liking Ck

As for the issue of complexity and variables involved in planning, couldn’t this be solved by a syndicalist planning model? Where each economic sector plans production for itself and itself alone? It would seem to me like this would form a self regulating web of production that would be able to meet the needs of the entire country.

For example, an automotive factory and a rubber plantation would form an interdependent relationship. They would each plan production according to past trends of consumption for consumers, but would also take each other’s demand into account. So the auto factory would take into account the use of vehicles used on rubber plantations into its production, while the rubber plantation takes the rubber consumed for tires by the auto plant into its own production. In other words, rather than centrally planning the economy on a national scale, each sector of the economy centrally plans production of its own goods, with their output taking the demands of other syndicates into account, and their consumption of base materials providing the data for other syndicates to base their own production on.

except that minus the whole "different syndicates" thing this is how the ussr worked, it leads to a world where nobody knows how much of a particular thing is going to be produced, only estimations, because to know that you need to know how much others can produce in the future, but they have the same problem, and all because nobody does labour calculations which would require a central agency that knew what it was doing.

But isn’t this also the case with capitalist societies? Why do they not experience shortages like the USSR did then?

the answer to this is price, even though poland in the 60s produced more meat that scotland per capita there was never meat in polish shops, why?, it was too fucking cheap, in capitalism things get more expensive the less there is , which means that even tho people can't access things, in practice there is not a shortage, the other bigger thing is labour assignment, in the ussr the movement of labour from one sector to another was shit, so in the above example if people needed more meat, the goverment couldn't effectively assign more people to that sector, while capitalists have the reserve army of labour, in both cases you need a good central agency to tell you both how much to produce, with how many employees, using which equipment, and a way to make demand equal supply, it just so happens that the ussr was an example of what happens when planning fails repeatedly