Socialism Calculation Problem

It's fucking reality.

Look at how many co-ops are compared to corporations or even small businesses.

Because co-ops are not supported by our current system, unlike corporations. Also the fact that capitalistic businesses are the default; you can't make a co-op if you don't know it's an option.

Laws allow both.

This is why there's still co-ops.

If co-ops are outlawed the same private business was banned in the SU or Vietnam or China, then you might have a point.

what does this even mean? co-ops have leaders, but the workers elect them and have the power to negotiate wage ratios. it's not a direct democracy.

honestly it sounds like you tried to apply the standard justification of autocracy (it's more efficient) to the workplace.

look at how few people even try to start them. couldn't have anything to do with the fact that we live in a capitalist country.

Direct democracy is a slow process compared one man making a decision.
Because it is more efficient, thus it destroys the less efficient method.
Capitalist countries allow for the creation of co-ops, socialist countries did not allow the creation of private businesses, when socialists country allow private businesses, everyone jump to private businesses or national businesses, see Russia, China and Vietnam.

if you're starting a business are you going to choose the model that allows for higher personal profits and is widely accepted or the one that is unconventional and requires some personal sacrifice?

the former is justified because we live in a capitalist economy. people are taught that it's moral, and since it's the model that benefits them the most, why wouldn't they want to believe it?

i said co-ops are not direct democracies. they're indirect. janitors do not vote on how the company will invest its money or balance its budget. they vote on who represents them and negotiate wage ratios.

Business is about fucking profits.

If co-ops make more profit than private business, everyone would just jump to co-op.

Look at the Vietnamese, they are taught that bourgeois are literal evil landlords, but after the new deal in the 80s, they go straight to private businesses as if all that years of education and "morals" went down the gutter.

And this direction of voting your landlord is going to cost more time and effort than having your landlord just hiring workers in the first place.

This is why co-ops lose.

they dont make more or less necessarily, but one benefits the person at the top more. there are plenty of examples of successful co-ops. look at mondragon. they even work with microsoft and apple.

you're not even worth talking to if you seriously think a worker voting for who represents them every year slows the business down. if anything it increases productivity since workers are more satisfied and have a greater since of purpose.

Mises and neoclassical economics' conception of the problem is totally bunk. What problems of filling demand the communist bloc had was created by people not being able to spontaneously enter and exit markets, not by central planning of firms, as for what the firm's produced they were allocatively efficient.

jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/

There are more successful examples of private businesses than co-ops, that was my point.

The still living co-ops are basically corporations at this point.

But are co-op's subsidized in the same way capitalist enterprises are? Do the workers get the enormous tax breaks that capitalists do? Is there anything done to compensate for the fact that co-op's don't move their enterprise to the place with the cheapest labour and exploit their workers? No, no, and no.

Also, there are major coop's around the world. You just don't hear about them.

But that's not true in reality.

Voting is in fact a very slow process, and after you finish voting, you have to do it again if the current guy is bad.

Studies have shown co-ops are just as productiveand last just as long as their capitalist counterparts

There's one by Brookings that you should be able to find by googling Brookings coop productivity

If the co-ops are successful, then they would be granted all those muh privileges, after all, these are granted by bribery i.e. having money.

I don't hear about them and they do not matter to me.

Yeah, because the world is run half by corporations and half by co-ops right now.

These studies do not mean jackshit in reality.

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Top kek.

To be frank, the average consumer does not know about Mondragon.

I only know about them via Holla Forums.

Wealth in a coop is more dispersed by nature of everyone being an owner

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Tell that to the people in the Basque Country

The people in Basque country knows Microsoft, Apple and Starbuck.

But the people in Asia are not going to know about Mondragon.

You sure about that?

I'm sure, I live in fucking Vietnam.

Vietnam ain't the Basque country, mate.

Economic calculation problem is fairly trivially not an issue in the modern world. An economy with 1 billion different variables to optimize that take on average 10 million operations per variable to calculate can be optimized comfortably once per day on fairly average server.

The point I make is that corporations have been famous internationally, not so much co-ops.

They remain local level.

Well yeah, because Microsoft, Apple and Starbucks are everywhere, and Apple probably has factories in Vietnam.

This speaks of the success of corporations over co-ops, especially when Vietnam was ALL co-ops in 75s to 80s.

Why are you guys arguing about co-ops VS corporations exactly?

Not exactly surprising, but I doubt people are better off working in a sweatshop than they were working for a small local co-op.

Dunno, I guess the conversation just flowed in that direction.

Uh, in the end, corporations make more money thus they sustain themselves and expand themselves greatly, unlike co-ops.

It's to prove that marxism economy doesn't work out like in theory.

A marxist wouldn't call co-ops "socialism" in the first place.

So would a marxist call corporations "socialism"?

Of course not. What makes you think so?

And autocracies are more efficient, but you don't see many people arguing for those. Why is that people protest against dictatorships in the state, but they're perfectly fine with them in the workplace?

Why wouldn't a marxist call worker-owned enterprises socialist?

Hey, I have this crazy idea. How about we agree to conduct experiments and try different methods over a period of a year or two, and see what has the best results. For some things central planning is obviously better (e.g. health care and infrastructure), and similarly markets may be better for other things. Let's take a scientific approach and test different methods if there's a dispute. Once we have real-world examples that everyone agreed to test with, there will be less room for "nuh-uh, my way is better because [pure ideology]"

ooga booga where da markets at

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What would he? Socialism is a classless, stateless, moneyless society; it has nothing to do with who "own" an entreprise.

Or, to put simply: seizing the means of production is a way to get to socialism, not socialism itself.

thats communism, you fucking inbred

That's communism you… you…
MOLYNEUX

And here we go again…

Lenin, The State and Revolution
K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha programme

Communism is what comes right after capitalism. Socialism is the first stage of communism.
In other words: socialism is communism!

People don't argue for more co-ops.

People are gonna whine about shit then they get back and work for a corporation.

Literally the only other alternative, are you going unemployed now?

What is the only other alternative to what? I don't get what you're trying to say.

do you have autism?

...

Do you have arguments?

To co-ops.

Holla Forums doesn't even speak for 1% of the world.

Certainly not "more co-ops". This would be a mean to get to socialism at best.

Socialism is not "classless, moneyless society". It's a transition between capitalist society and communist.

It clearly can have money and still be socialist.

I demand triggering explanations if you don't like it.

Within capitalism, perhaps.

But capitalism itself is not the only alternative: there have been many different types of societies in the past (feudalism, for example), and there will be communism in the future.

Well, it was not Marx's and Lenin's opinion on the matter, as I exposed right above.

But fine, believe your revisionist thing if you want.

Basically my problem with the tract was that it takes certain historical bourgeois ideas as eternal laws…ironic, that this was part of Marx's critique of political economy.

Mises believes in the separation of manual from intellectual labor and the eternal nature of market exchange.

Lukacs is helpful here, discussing class-consciousness;
"The situation is even clearer in the case of the modern bourgeoisie, which, armed with its knowledge of the workings of economics, clashed with feudal and absolutist society. For the bourgeoisie was quite unable to perfect its fundamental science, its own science of classes: the reef on which it foundered was its failure to discover even a theoretical solution to the problem of crises. The fact that a scientifically acceptable solution does exist is of no avail. For to accept that solution, even in theory, would be tantamount to observing society from a class standpoint other than that of the bourgeoisie. And no class can do that – unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely. Thus the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological. The class consciousness of the bourgeoisie may well be able to reflect all the problems of organisation entailed by its hegemony and by the capitalist transformation and penetration of total production. But it becomes obscured as soon as it is called upon to face problems that remain within its jurisdiction but which point beyond the limits of capitalism."

Feudalism is just a corporation.

Heck, corporation is pretty much neo-feudalism.

You most certainly did not.

Stalinists confusing the transitional period with socialism (the lower phase of communism) again.

Jesus christ that image gave me cancer.

Arguments would be nice.

Most allocation today occurs inside corporations and isn't priced on a market but directly managed inside a corporation.

The most important asset of any corporation is simply its expected future earnings capacity which is intangible and its price is determined by pure social expectations about the future and the management of perception by marketing/advertising experts [i.e. propaganda].

The capitalization by corporations upon their intangible corporate assets is what gives corporations their spending power today which allows them to actually reorganize markets and set market prices.

I don't know how anyone can take Mises argument seriously when financial markets allocate billions of dollars to iphone app makers that employee less than 50 people and evaluate companies like instagram to be more valuable than companies like toyota which employee hundreds of thousands and has a ton of physical assets in the form of fixed-capital worldwide. Finance capital is empirically shit at allocation of societies resources.

– Alan Greenspan him, motherfucking,self

Read anything on Veblens conception of Capital:

bnarchives.yorku.ca/254/5/nitzan_y6285_04_veblen_handout_2008_9.pdf
geocities.ws/veblenite/txt/oncapital.txt

Can you elaborate on why this is a good BTFO?

bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles

Come again?

What don't you understand in "the first stage of X"?

It's one dude controlling the lives of peasants.

Nothing.

Because you are incapable of presenting a logical connection. There is one statement and there is another statement. And there is nothing in-between.

By any chance, does this mean "if Socialism is called the first stage of Communism, it has to share all the properties of Communism"? Because this might be this connection you failed to enunciate, and the one I have to guess. But I cannot know it, because you are not telling.

Of course it is what it means! Are you retarded or something? "The first pahse of X" is part of X, and thus have the characteristics of X.

Are you trolling? Are you even the same user I'm talking to?

Because I prefer to believe that people aren't that dumb.

People are so much dumber than this, my dude.

Says the Stalin poster

OK you're definitely retarded.

Right and it isn't a direct democracy. The workers elect who they want to though.

And polls across the eastern bloc show people preferred socialism to now.

You're actually retarded. The studies compares the productivity of a capitalist one and a co-op. Look at REI and MEC they are both big companies and they're both co-ops. Is this how retarded ayncraps do? And this has little to nothing to do with the first question. Then it would make sense that a centralized economy would be more efficient because it comes down to the the decision of leader's.

No you are. Socialism is the TRANSITION to Communism. It does not have to have the characteristics of communism you inbred fuck. Also a capitalist business is not determined by how efficient it is. It's determined by how much capital the CAPITALIST makes. This means that when there are two companies that are just as efficient as each other, the one paying the workers less will be making more profit. It has nothing to do with efficiency. The Khmer Rogue wasn't socialist either bud.

No no, you are retarded. The firt phase of something is part of said thing, otherwise it's not the first phase of said thing. That's just simple english. Simple logic actually.
Socialism is NOT the transition to communism. If anything, it's the transition to UPPER-STAGE communism. But both lower-stage (socialism) and upper-stage communism are… communism!

There you're talking to another user.

It can be. Is there a problem with that?

According to lenin socialism is the "lower phase of communism", which implies it comes after the transition. In other words it's the point at which communism has been achieved but hasn't yet matured to the point at which everyone can have free access to all consumer goods.

No I don't have an issue with it, but the Vietnamese user did. So I pointed out co-ops function without direct democracy. And Lenin did not create Marxism or socialism. He didn't even start by studying marx. Socialism is a lower stage of "communism" and the transition to full communism. Marx considered it another stage in historical materialism. Similarly to how feudalism is the "transition" to Capitalism, socialism is that to communism. Socialism while it would not have classes, would have the state and money. No one has any idea what full communism would look like, and it certainly wouldn't look like state capitalism.

Why the fuck were you arguing with him if capitalist corps are more conpetitive? They should be outlawed because they are immoral and exploitative.

Tbh arguing whether socialism is a "stage" of communism is just arguing semantics.

Launching the Apollo rocket is the lower stage of landing on the moon. That doesn't mean a moon landing has been achieved when the rocket launches.

Are you implying Lenin hadn't read marx?

No he didn't, he used the term (scientific) socialism interchangeably with communism. At no point did marx ever posit a mode of production between capitalism and communism.

In a capitalist system, capitalists win. This isn't surprising. If a one capitalist corp. were surrounded by feudal institutions, the capitalist would lose and other capitalists would be discouraged.

Come again? At this rate, capitalism is the "transition" to communism, too. It's certainly true but it's a completely pointless statement.

No it won't. Marx made it very clear:
>Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products
(notice how there is no "transition")

Except it isn't.
"The first part of something" is part of said thing. That's what these fucking words mean.

If only… The problem is: it's actually arguing about if the proletariat should abolish trade or not.

They were surrunouded at first, and they actually… made the revolution. That's what we communists have to do too.

Apparently the crazy user is serious. Well, either that or the trolling will continue, until the quotes will be delivered.

Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme:
> What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
As usual, Marx does not make any proper distinction between Socialism and Communism, but it can be clearly seen that this "newborn Communist society" will be very similar to Capitalist society. And it is quite obvious, that this "certificate" is basically money.

> Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
I.e. we have a class of Proletariat and state that has to be a Dictatorship.

It's not reality because you're fucking wrong on every single point.

reports.uk.coop/economy2016/

Get fucked, corp cuck.

It's quite obvious that it's not money, since money is a commodity and:
Hence, no commodities!

Allow me to give you an exemple of what labour vouchers actually are.
Let's say we are on the verge of upper-stage communism. Only one product remains scarce: cloth. So we have to ration cloth. Since tall people obviously need more cloth, we decide this rationning will be based on height. Every person receives a certificate from society that he is this or that tall: it's a height voucher. Is this height voucher a form of money? Of course not.
Now, the labour vouchers will be exactly the same thing, except for the fact that, because the society will still be "stamped with the birthmarks of [capitalism]", we won't base our rationing on height, but on the amount of labour fournished by people.

I.e. we have a class of Proletariat and state that has to be a Dictatorship.
He is talking about the Revolution (and of course it will take the form of a dictatorship of the propletariat); he is not talking about socialism.

You can have to stages of a process that function totally differently. Socialism and communism are different systems, and many people want socialism without communism. Communism is theoretically stateless, as the contradictions of capitalism and property ownership no longer require coercion from a state to maintain

But that's my point! In the marxist sense, socialism do not "function totally differently" from communism: it is one of the two different "communismS" (lower-stage and upper-stage) that share the same core characteristics: beign classless, stateless and moneyless.

To put it simply, the main difference between socialism and upper-stage communism is that the later is supposed to be post-scarcity. But they function the same way.

Mises "critiques" centrally planned distribution of goods here and not socialism, which can have markets for distribution of goods…

Checkmate, atheist. That's Soviet money, basically.

There were two kinds: (cash) consumer money and (non-cash) industrial money. You couldn't use consumer money to buy capital goods without somehow converting them into non-cash money (which was not an option for private person).

He is talking about transition to this upper-stage Communism of yours, even if he doesn't call it a Socialism.

No. Soviet money was a commodity. Soviet economy was based on commodities.

No, he is talking about the transition to socialism.

No but he read other Russian socialist and revolutionaries before he studied Marx.

Yes but Markets are anti-leftist. The goal is to eliminate any competition between proles.

So have we never had socialism before then?

Lower stage communism (socialism) has different characteristics from upper stage communism (communism) and operates by a different principle, so it logically is something different. Just read some theory for god's sake marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/

random comment I found.I'm pretty sure Marx talked about it being sold.Not a Marxist, but the general criticism with capitalism is primarily that of removing the role of bosses and having workers sell the surplus labor themselves.

Bosses (managers) are not capitalists. Owners are (shareholders in comics).

I.e. bosses might be owners too (and, therefore, capitalists), but simply being a boss does not make one a capitalist/owner/shareholder.

Section C of the AFAQ had an extensive critique of mainstream marginalism, if you're interested

No we haven't.

Of course they do. And they have common characteristics too: being classless, stateless and moneyless.

Just read some theory for God's sake:
>Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products
>What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
In the communist society "just as it emerges from the capitalist society" (i.e. lower-stage communism, i.e. socialism), "the producers do not exchange their products".

I seriously hope that's a troll.

I seem to have gotten that mixed up. Thanks for clearing that up. Also, didn't Marx talk about supply and demand?

Marxhead, what do you think of

And the OP?

Good post

Everyone capable works a very short amount of time, feggit.

Of course he does. In Capital, he goes through the entire process of value and exchange. The second part doesn't even make sense? The surplus product the capitalist takes home goes into his pocket, i.e. hoarding.

Check his posts on the market socialism thread aswell

I kinda figured he did in his other works. Typical that most people that make those sorts of comments don't read much else other then the communist manifesto.