Itt we shit on market socialists

No. Fuck you OP. You have no idea what market socialism is!

Neither do most market socialists. A free market economy made out of cooperatives is not market socialism, its mutualism with a state.

Daily reminder that tankie FDCKs know dick about communism

Soviet socialism most certainly was not

The Soviet Union was "committed" to establishing socialism, but they didn't actually implement it. They could have had state socialism, if their government had actually been truly democratic, but it wasn't. They were in a weird turd position not that one that was neither socialist nor really capitalist. I have a PDF about this at home, I'll post it later.

So, you guys who oppose market socialism, do you have a solution to the calculation problem? The practical problem of planned economies continually having shortages and inferior products and slow technological innovation is the main argument for having some kind of markets IMO, I'd be happy to accept a more top-down form of socialism if I believed it could avoid these problems.

Gonna venture a response.

I can sympathize here. But bear in mind, there is an ongoing process towards destroying the division of labor, towards creating the total man, etc. People may not know the ins and outs of your profession but they should all gather and try to learn from each other. That being said an ignorant person has no reason to tell someone with a technical job HOW to do the job, but with the social ownership of MoP, communes (councils, democratic bodies, whatever form the proles organize in) should be able to tell the workers if they are producing too much, too little, or if, in the case on construction, where and when the construction ought to be done (of course, the construction workers themselves get to negotiate and agree) but the point is that the transitional state should mediate workers of individual professions/workplaces and the greater society or commune. I can only imagine it will take several generations to abolish the division of labor but it should be our goal, aka self-negation and whatnot.

bruh are you stuck in 1930 with this meme

Thats the only thing i would disagree with

.t simulated market socialist

Are you retarded? That is not at all what socialism or communism is about.

The performance issues with the Soviet economy were due to the fact that Gosplan had no mechanism to allow firms to fail and have their capital repurposed.

This is a different problem altogether from the one of state/worker ownership.

...

This guy is right actually. The most important aspect of a functional economy is a low-as-possible barrier to entry into any industry and a way to let companies fail and put their capital back into societies pool.

The division of labor has only been increasing. I think there is something to be said for this "total man" thing, but that sounds like something that can only really be achieved in a post-scarcity society.
Anyway, the method in market socialism for determining whether you've produced too much, too little, etc., is…the market.
The only kind of mass-planning society I could stomach would be syndicalism, where each industry determines what it will produce. Even then, I'd much rather have a market, to maximize gains from trade and (hopefully) avoid the potential threat of catastrophic planning miscalculations.

I assume you mean gains from trade with bourgoies states?

Trading on its own doesnt produce anything, its merely exchange.

Hence why market socialism is based. Markets are just a pricing mechanism, there's nothing -inherently- capitalist about them.

I agree.

Article archive.is/L7E2j

What you believe is irrelevant. The rest of us have seen enough of capitalist economic crisis, imperialism, and oligarchy to put an end economic anarchy. Some of us even recognise the achievements of former communist societies and want to build on their success. We don't bother making any concessions to capital, the only reason you people even exist is because the self-confidence of the socialist movement evaporated in the mid-80's.

Wrong. You want to extend the lifespan of the capitalist mode of production by temporarily raising the wages of workers. Whether you're making them shareholders or just increasing the minimum wage is an irrelevant distinction.

Your obsession with federalism and local micro-control belongs to those who fetishise the 19th century United States, not socialism. What does any of this even mean in practice, what specifics could you possible care about? What you want is to be rewarded well from your work, and good luck getting that in a society dominated by surplus-value extraction.

Quit pretending like you've actually read Marx. I don't believe that, but I do believe Marxists are the only socialists that aren't a complete waste of time.

I understand how market socialism works because I've been living in a capitalist society all my life, one you seek to preserve with a near-religious conviction. Your definition of capitalism is nothing more than "when a few people control a firm" compared to the socialism of "when a lot of people control a firm." When the firm exchanges ownership of goods on the market, where labor is a commodity, capital is still the driving force of the economy. You can dress this up however you like but when a means of production is monopolised by a distinct part of society to be used against another it still functions as private property, the fact that you're unconformable calling it that is irrelevant.

Most people who cite the ECP usually have no idea with what it actually means. Economic planning dates back to the palace economies of Mycenaean Greece and the near-East. But Mises argued this was impossible in an industrial society, not because of anything to do with complexity or the mental limitations of humans, but because a "socialist" economy would be completely incapable of generating the mathematical equations in the first place. This bizarre argument was destroyed by the existence of the Stalin-era planned economy. There have been a variety of defenses of Mises, some claim that they leached off the West and calculated their economy based on foreign markets, some of the even less-educated confuse the centrally-coordinated market of the late USSR with the earlier planning system. Either way, it's all nonsense.

You could go with Hayek's less extreme argument though that, while not technically impossible, socialist planning is difficult to realise in practice because of human limitations. It's beyond me too totally debunk this so I'll just post C&C's text again.

thecharnelhouse.org/2013/01/30/on-communism-and-markets-a-reply-to-seth-ackerman-by-matthijs-krul/

No. That's a frequent topic in international economics, but gains from trade are realized all the time on every scale, from local swap-meets to mass purchases of staple goods.
Example: I have twenty oranges, but I only want a few. You have ten gallons of milk, but only want one or two. I want milk for my cereal, you want orange juice to go with your eggs. I give you some oranges, you give me some milk, we both walk away with more total utility than before. That's a gain from trade, and it's one of the very, very good things that markets provide.

But thats not an actual gain compared to how it would end up with any other system. Society doesn't gain extra oranges or milk by trade, it merely distributes them.

So, central planning niggers, how do you keep black markets from arising?

Both you and the person you reply to is wrong.

A capitalist economy made out of cooperatives is not socialism, the means of production are not owned collectively by all workers.

What actual market socialism is, is that society collectively owns all the means of production, any profit made belongs to society, the workers manage their own workplace and get paid a wage. Workers can never own means of production other workers can't own, a group of workers can never privately own the means of production.

This allows for competition among different groups, while not having a profit motive, while negating the negative impacts of failure of company at the hands of competitors, while also have a market system which semi-autonomously assigns an exchange value to all products, and limit the access of goods per individual, to ensure there is no cases of scarcecity of some, but not of others, while also encouraging paid labour, because every hour worked is extra income on top of the baseline dividents/basic income every citizen gets.

Weak argument, if you are able to make a functional centrally planned place, needs are met, and there is no black market.

Stopped reading there.

...

We get it, man, you think communism is the one true path, and literally everything else is capitalism. You're wrong, though. You (and most other hardline Marxists) just think that any economic system in which production is undertaken by independent, competing units is capitalism. Fine, you can use that definition if you want. But the definition that I (and many others) use is this: an economic system in which owners of capital use their ownership of that capital as justification for taking possession of the the product of others' labor that involves said capital.

Abolishing private property and ending class distinctions by putting workers in charge of the businesses where they work is not reformism, no matter how much you stamp your feet and insist otherwise.

Put more words in my mouth, faggot. I believe in a unitarian state. (Though I do think that constituent provinces should be permitted to secede at will.)

In a worker cooperative, the firm owns the capital, and ownership in the firm is non-transferable and contingent upon working there. So who exactly is extracting surplus value from whom? Hint: It isn't happening at all.

I wasn't "pretending like I've actually read Marx," I was mocking obnoxious Marxists like you. I'm reading through Capital now, by the way.

If you were projecting any harder, you'd be a movie theater.

Wrong, see above.

You mean the workers? The greatest proportion of the population of the Earth? You fucking idiot. Who are they "using this against," anyway? There'd be no more bourgeoisie, because there'd be no more private property. You have this entirely backwards.

Yes, it is. "Gains from trade" doesn't mean that you put x units in and get x+n units out. It's a way of showing that trade increases both parties' total utility.

plz, even you should see how that sounds retarded.

But riddle me this: In another system, the goods dont belong exclusively to an individual, but to society, so there is no gain from that perspective.

Thats besides the point of course, because "market socialism" where the products made in the means of production belong to individual workers, rather than society at large, is not market socialism, its cooperative capitalism. The market in actual market socialism is merely there to distribute resources somewhat well according to individual needs and production needs in society.

This doesn't make sense. If workers manage their own workplace, then they (presumably) set the prices of their goods, and decide how much of the revenue to devote to reinvestment and how much to devote to wages. This precludes government (or commune, whatever) control, since the workers will simply pay themselves the money that would normally have gone into the bourgeosie's (or government's, in your example) pocket.
And if this is not the case, and the government makes these pricing, reinvestment, and wage decisions, then there is no competition, since fixed prices and wages would prevent businesses from using price to compete.

Again, yes, there is. Returning to the oranges-and-milk example: Society (being an aggregate of individuals) is you and me; we both end up with higher utility (either as a subjective qualitaty, or a quantity of either money or abstract "utils"). Society (i.e., you and me) gain (utility) despite no additional production having occurred. That's what "gains from trade" means. Any basic economics course will teach you about this.

Are you referring to capital or to consumer goods?

you sound like an ancap

The Stalin-era economy was focused on heavy industry, not consumer goods, of which there were much fewer than in capitalist economies during that era. And when the USSR tried to switch over to more focus on consumer goods, there were continual shortages and goods that were inferior to those in the West, and from what I've read the same was true of every other planned economy. The math behind the difficulty of dealing with the calculation problem is apparently solid and not something you have to be a follower of Hayek to believe in, see the article at archive.is/XHl3m by statistician Cosma Shalizi (who seems to be in favor of some kind of market socialism though he thinks it's unlikely to happen, based on his review of 'A Future for Socialism' at archive.is/gFAsI )

This Jacobin article at archive.is/L7E2j also has a less technical discussion of the calculation problem along with a good review of the historical evidence on what planned economies could and couldn't do:

Commodities become capital once they are used for production. There is no distinct difference between them, other than that some commodities, like bottles of water, are not as usefull as capital as others.

Then it is not socialism mate. The workers privately own the means of production, rather than the means of production being in the hands of society as a whole. In a market socialist system, all means of production are owned by society, often via a state. The workers manage their own workplace, but they can't privately own and profit of them to the disadvantage of the rest of society, who are all part of the production process.

Except there is, since you do not compete over price, but rather over efficiency and demand. For any homogeneous good, when one company performs badly enough compared to the other that they cannot pay their costs if they have to produce and sell at a set price, they will have to stop producing and their capital is given up and put back for sale (if possible) or to the government. For any non-homogeneous good, the same goes but it contrasts with comparable such brand A cookie vs brand B cookie. If cookie brand B performs so well that brand A can't produce effectively anymore, they will stop.

Similar to the current market, this will favour larger, more efficient companies, while also allowing their less efficient competitors. The larger efficient ones will be able to produce more and possible expand more, if the state allows for reinvestment of some of the tax. But at the same time, a failing large business will be able to be pushed out of the market by a new, more efficient competitor. By giving a range of allowed wages, you allow for a little bit of wiggle room, giving more efficient producers a little bit of extra income.

Listen to yourself. The condescending way you say this places you on the same level as the liberals you think you're above.

I don't care what your own personal definition of capitalism is, capitalism is just the religion on top of capital and capitalist society. Capitalist production though is characterised by the exploitation of wage-labor by the demands of capital, and that's something you seek to preserve without apology.

If capitalist production with higher wages isn't reformism then nothing is.

I didn't put anything in your mouth. Anyone can read your post and see what you said so I'm not sure where you're going with this.

They extract value from themselves. I don't know why you're even trying to debate this when you clearly have no idea of what you're talking about. You can keep insisting that increasing the amount of shareholders will somehow fundamentally change capitalist production if you like but the rest of us with basic cognitive ability are going to keep laughing.

There you go again, using Marxist as a pejorative. How many more concessions to liberalism do you plan on making? The only thing you've proven ITT is that this board is a fucking disaster, you people are the cancer Holla Forums deserves. This place has potential but it's going nowhere as long as you dunces and the anarkiddies are allowed to roam free.

You should just stop posting, this is embarrassing to watch. You openly advocate for competition then ask who they're going to use their capital against. Use your damned head man.

I never said that at all, numb nuts. Markets have always existed and can even exist in communism. But what the market socialists propose is not that, it is capitalist society with a red paint job.

I was trying to make sense of what he was saying, not trying to get in a discussion about how capital and consumer goods are both commodities. (Which they obviously are.)

Maybe a proper name would be: degenerated worker's state?

And what's wrong with that

Then under your definition of socialism, there can't be competition.

If I'm part of a plumbing company, and the government decides how much my services are sold for, and how much I'm paid, I have no incentive to provide a better product than anyone else. Same goes for my company as a whole. There can't be competition without reward.

Doesn't really count as a worker's state when the workers can't vote in free and fair elections. But I see what you did there.

Nothing at all.

You're the one projecting condescension on it, not him. And bringing liberals into it when they were irrelevant…

Are you hiding insecurities?

Competing worker's cooperatives is the only socialist solution to the Gosplan-induced monetary overhang. MLs are just butthurt they never thought of it when they had the chance to save the USSR.

Except that there is a range of wages you can get paid, and the more efficient you work, the more wage you can give yourself. The state doesnt set your wage, thats just what you think that I think. There is just an upper limit of wages, and competition is supposed to drive down wages, which is not an issue due to having a basic income.

Soviet managers were as autonomous as their market counterparts. They set their own plan targets by disguising their productive capacity and overstating their resource needs. Soviet planners served primarily as supply agents for enterprises, endeavoring to supply the enterprises with sufficient inputs to fulfill their gross output targets. The system of material supply could seldom perform this task, and Soviet factory managers made barter arrangements with one another and produced their own inputs. This activity led me to the conclusion that the Soviet economy, like a market, was organized polycentrically and not hierarchically as a planning system. The “central plan” was little more than the summation of the factory managers` individual plans.

The Soviet manager`s success indicator was a measure of gross output, such as weight, quantity, square feet, or surface area. Gross output indicators played havoc with assortments, sizes, quality, and so on. Nikita Khrushchev complained of chandeliers so heavy “that they pull the ceilings down on our heads” (qtd. in Roberts and LaFollette 1990, 8). A famous Soviet cartoon depicted the manager of a nail factory being given the Order of Lenin for exceeding his tonnage. Two giant cranes were pictured holding up one giant nail.

If weight was the plan indicator for nails, the assortment would be heavily weighted with large nails; if the plan indicator was quantity, small sizes would predominate. The Soviets experimented by adding other indicators, but in the end a gross output indicator always determined the manager`s success or failure. When I first examined this system, it was clear to me that signals interpreted by managers constituted the main difference between the Soviet economy and a normal market economy (Roberts 1968b, 1969, 1971a). In a normal market, managers organize production by interpreting price and profit signals. In the Soviet economy, managers interpreted gross output indicators. The critical difference is that gross output indicators are irrational from the standpoint of economic efficiency.

Ackerman is one of the clowns I was mocking when I said this.

Capitalism is what doomed the USSR, not communism.

Epic post and all dude but I'm not the one making concessions to anti-socialists.

Yeah, I bet Yugoslavia had fun with all that unemployment and millionaires popping up. The same kind of fun the USSR was having in the 70's after they followed your advice.

Also

Modern companies are managed by non-owning CEO's, their salary hight has not shown to have a significant impact on the performance of the business. In fact, the only place where monetary incentives seem to do any good is brain-dead manual labour.

There was a black market in Yugoslavia too, though, m8. Zizek talks about it even.

No argument, understood.

You know that's a tautology, right? It's also not very scientific socialism of you.

Objects can't exploit people, friendo. Only people can exploit other people. In a cooperative, who is exploiting whom? If I cut wood for a living and use part of it to make an axe handle (a contribution of the product of my labor to capital), have I exploited myself?

It certainly is. Fortunately, I'm talking about something else.

You pulled this talk of federalism and "micro-control" out of absolutely nowhere, so yes, you did.

OK. My surplus-value is extracted from myself and goes to…myself. And I even set my own wages, so I guess all my pay beyond subsistence level is just the fruits of me exploiting myself. What horror.

That's not what I'm arguing for. Being part of a worker cooperative is not like owning a share. Your (equal) vote at the table can't be bought, sold, or proxied, and you lose that vote if you quit or get fired. I'm talking about the abolition of private property (and thus bourgeois society), by removing the distinction between work and ownership.

I wasn't. I was using "obnoxious" as a pejorative. There are (some) obnoxious Stirnerites here, too, and I'm willing to call them that, but that doesn't mean I hate Stirner or something.

I'll let you know when I start making them.

>>>/marx/
I'm not even shitposting here, I genuinely think you'd be happier there, if you think Holla Forums is really that bad.

I was not aware that providing a better product at a lower price was exploitation. Mostly because it isn't. A world of competing worker cooperatives would not produce the staggering wealth inequality that we have today, because an investor wouldn't be able to receive indefinite returns on a finite investment (which is how shares work).

Keep using your preconceived idea that he's a liberal to retroactively justify your belief that he's a liberal.

Then they also can't receive the totality of my profit (excluding taxes), since any money not put into reinvestment will be paid as wages (rather than dividends, in a capitalist firm).

That's reasonable. Though I would put it on income in general, not just wages.

I guess there's a lot, like this, that you never really specified in your post then.

We were talking about market systems, friendo. In market systems, money is the only incentive. Profit does not care about your personality, and the profit motive does not (necessarily) operate on an individual level, yet it does operate nonetheless, because firms are structured to maximize profit, regardless of the wills of any members.

You completely misunderstand the system im describing.

No, there is no "profit", if you make profit, it means you do not produce at the optimal production size, or that the price set is wrong, in latter case the price will change so you do not make "profit" anymore.

We really should come up with a better term than market socialism for people who want mutualism without labour vouchers.

Just kill yourself, you ancap sounding motherfucker.

Socioeconomic structures superseding the will of the individuals within them is one of the most important discoveries of leftists, including Marx. You have no clue what you're talking about.

Your original post talked about the profit motive and "any profit made belongs to society," which I assumed to mean that the government would set wages and prices. I guess I was wrong in that assumption, but now I have no clue what the fuck you're advocating.

I do have a clue what I'm talking about. You are just too retarded to envision a market system as anything else than a system where individual firms compete with each other for profit.

HINT: A market doesn't fucking have to be about profit, you can have a simulated market which uses a market to set prices to distribute resources and measure the demand of each good comparatively to the others.

The "money = incentive" comes from the fact that owners of corporations do none of the labor. In a democratic cooperative policy would be voted on, and making more money may merely be one of the goals the workers are looking for. Perhaps they would like to work less or improve their workplace or do something else.

No, you don't have a clue.

Nobody is going to vote to make less money. Yeah, you might have altruistic things like donating to charity or selling to other cooperatives at a discount or something. But the decentralized, competitive nature of market-oriented production means that maximizing revenue will always be your main goal at the end of the day.
Now, you do have a point that they would want to work less (probably) and improve their workplace. That's the whole point of cooperatives in the first place–making your own work better, and having control over it. But the relative relationship between hours worked and dollars earned is still very important, and nobody is going to want to reduce that ratio. That's my point.

You have no idea what a simulated market is.

I'm talking about a real market, though.

Yes things tend to increase or decrease and turn into their opposites. And I'd go so far as to say that it hasn't increased in the last few decades, but global capitalism has been reallocating and redistributing labor. As for 'total man' and 'post-scarcity', can't you see we have the means of affording every living human being a better life? Resources are not finite of course, and there may be too many people here, but things could be vastly improved with the materials and means at humanity's disposal. It will take a long time to satisfy every need of course but it's part of the goal…which comes in many linguistic flavors and tones, that I think may even to a certain degree transcend culture and history, in analogous forms (and only if interpreted from the correct class-perspective). The goal! Liberation, moksha, the Kingdom of Heaven, nirvanna, emancipation, appropriation of species-essence.

Then please tell me what it is. I don't want to aim at the wrong goal.

Yeah and I'm not, dumbfuck. But you insist on strawmanning my position because of your obsession with wanting to make profit.

Look, seriously, you need to stop posting. I know I will after this. I'm not sure what can be done with someone who rejects Marxism despite a complete lack of understanding of it but I'll bother with this one last point just to appeal to your common sense.

A surplus will always be extracted, and you may have a higher share of in a co-operative, but even the best economic conditions cannot separate the capitalist mode from exploitation. Yes, you exploit yourself by living your life serving the demands of capital. As long as there is wealth to be accumulated you will be forced to repress your own living conditions for the sake of continuing the firm's existence in a competitive environment.

I never said he was a liberal. Now please go take your shitposting somewhere else.

This thread made me remember why I dont call myself a market socialist.

That's a pretty general statement.

I strongly disagree. There are people whose only job is to write stock trading software, for example. Or to trade debt. Or to maintain Web servers, or develop management strategies. Labor is, I think, more divided than ever before.

I agree. By "post-scarcity" I mean world in which the production of basic necessities is fully automated. We aren't at that point yet; we can give everyone a better life, but we still need lots of labor in order to do it, so the obligation to produce first in order to consume later is strongly in effect.

I do agree that we can have a better social arrangement with existing technology, and that's why I advocate socialism. I just think it will take lots of time and research before we achieve a full communist utopia.

Then why the fuck are you talking to me?

You started replying to me m8

I haven't rejected it per se. I'm still learning about it, and making up my mind.

Let's assume that you're right: I don't understand what your alternative is. You know that production requires capital goods, right? And if you're talking about financial capital, i.e., equity, it doesn't exist in cooperatives.
I'm going to be generous and assume that you're talking about freedom from the obligation to produce. This just isn't technologically possible today. Maybe it will be eventually.

And before the digital age, we still had dedicated phone operators! It's okay though, it's not a very important distinction and I may be objectively wrong.

Nobody is going to vote to go out of business. Not the same thing as voting against making more profits unless you believe that literally all money made is reinvested into production, which even in capitalism, judging from CEO salary, is not the case.

marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch07.htm

Yeah no shit next you're going to tell me socialism in one state isn't viable.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Prone to forgetting which ideologies you don't subscribe to?

What if there's a revolution, and workers seize the property of the companies where they work?
Basically, what if unilateral, unified, decisive action by the workers quickly turned the economy into one in which there were no capitalist firms for cooperatives to compete against? Wouldn't cooperatives fare better then?

No we're fucking not it's just more of that "capitalism = competition = bad, mmmmkay" that any liberal believes socialism is about.

We're getting somewhere because that's a well-reasoned argument. I'm not totally convinced, since it doesn't really apply to an economy entirely made up of cooperatives, but it's a reasonable assertion. And I'm the pro-cooperative sperglord.

The fact of workers being forced to "take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur" applies for any type of market competition, be it socialist or capitalist.

If you presuppose a state in which only coops exist, the laws of competition would still force workers to be more and more harsh on themselves in order to be competitive.

Oh no, the horror. Look at how horrified I am.

Most market socialists are just people who want capitalism with cooperatives, not people who want another form of market.

Lolk

Are you just shitposting or do you seriously not understand the implications of that?

Then explain to me how exchanges dominating production and competition only apply to capitalist markets.

Real world politics are pragmatic. Striving for ideological purity has been the cause of tyrannical socialist government to begin with.

Pragmaticism presupposes that goals can be reached using "pragmatic" methods. Otherwise they aren't pragmatic.

Wow, you mean if you own your own means of production you have to figure out what to do with it? Shit!

You didn't answer my question in the other thread, buddy. Who will set the prices in your "simulated market"? Who will decide the destination of the goods?

No. Production requires means of production. Means of production are NOT capital.

I really hate how so many leftist's here and in the real world fetishize the USSR.

ITT: but da market is capitalis coz thingz can own me

Neverless, an conceding a point to our fellow burecratic economy fans, most defenses of market socialism rely on a pragmatic approach.

At most, mutualists and the like go on the "individual liberty" tirade that, given the foundations of such positions, have certain weight. The same argument pulled out bu Selucky and Brus are a weaker version of it, just considering it as a way to have individual liberty under socialism through the accomplishment of individual choices, which is a mere rephrasing of the pragmatist approach.

If any, there is a moral ground for markets under socialism?

itt: people who know fuck all about econ arguing econ

specific criticisms?

Capital is one of the factors of production (along with land and labor).
Are you talking about financial capital?

Proudhon was a moralistic wanker. Next.

He was also a, not a market socialist.
Also, the opposition to all morality by you scientific-socialism types is highly amusing.

...

...

You are the reason why eastern bloc collapsed.

This. Centrally planned command economy or death. Both Marxism and history has taught us that.

More like centrally planned command slavery and death. Youre worse than capitalists.

top kek

How about no?

Fuck off tripfag

How about no?