Two good critiques of market socialism and cooperative enterprise

Worst meme Ive heard

The article does seem to propose a kind of market socialist economy based on centrally-appointed publically owned firms that compete with one another, with key monetary functions like banks centrally owned (I've always wondered what the full coop proposition is for fiscal saving and lending – cooperative banks[?] perhaps, although I can't imagine how this would work as a competitive institution).

Am I overlooking something or do I have it wrong, perhaps?

I would ask: where, in the appointment of a wage (autocratically or democratically decided on) upon it, is labour not commodified? The ultimately point of the wage system is to undercut a consistent amount of surplus value from labour time which, when accumulated, turns out a profit. This directly commodifies the process and, when looking at the underlying motive (to compete with other firms) of market exchange. Following this chain, how is the nature of this process not going to end up in certain firms outcompeting others to usurp their labour power, capital and means of production using the money form in competition?

I think you here make a crucial flaw, where you blur the line between private ownership (which rests upon a strict hierarchical order, where the CEO does have the final say) and this cooperative form of ownership (where it is impossible to make any financial move without some type of democratic consensus). In the former, the CEO's interests are indeed capital accumulation, but by virtue of the fact that it is in his interest to do so (not just as a goal in itself, but for his well-being). He is here indeed ready to fuck over anyone in the firm, but not himself, to keep his operation afloat. In the latter, would we not see a collective effort in fucking everyone over to keep the process of compound growth of capital alive?

CEOs and shareholders are largely insulated from market forces; their compensation really has nothing to do with the performance of the firm (pic related for CEOs at least).

Workers, however, are selling their labor-power and are thus ingrained in market forces whether they like it or not. This would still be the case in a market populated only by co-operative without CEOs or shareholders. Self-exploitation is a rather silly term, however. There isn't any appropriation of surplus value, and you may as well argue that workers self-exploit now by agreeing to sell their labor-power. Instead, it's a matter of competition.

It's the pitting of one co-operative against another that forces down SNLT. Co-operatives must still produce a surplus of goods in order to acquire a profit for their own collective. One co-operatives' goods will inevitably go unsold, or be sold below their prices of production, as another profits. This is the redistribution of surplus value by the price mechanism. In order to prevent this phenomenon, the lagging firm must do one of the following: automate/mechanize further, or increase the intensity of the work in order to produce cheaper commodities. There is only so much surplus value in the market to go around, so increasing your own co-operatives' market share by advancing the productive forces is the only way to guarantee an advantage over your competitors.

I haven't read McNally's book, but I have high hopes for it. I'm still learning, so it's on the back-burner.

(Cont.)
But here you will enter a financial crisis in the firm, which will be vulnerable to purchase or bankruptcy at the mercy of the money form (which decides the value of all goods in a market economy).

But UBI is predicated on the value of the currency at hand (in a market economy: money). As such, without maintaining competitive, the value of this money will drop if compound growth does not remain healthy and profit is not turned, and inflation will occur.

I think the example of peasant production predicates itself on a type of subsistence farming, where production is in fact directly appointed according to need and not market distribution (which makes impossible a subjugation to money and its [the market's] forces).

(Forgot to reply to this)
But do people read those PDFs as much as they upload and download them? On 4/lit/, in my experience, yes: people had all the PDFs and reading lists, but no more than like 5 out 100 people would actually read any of it. (This is why I went to libcom, and now this place, hoping people here would be a little more disciplined and genuinely interested.)

Thanks, cunt. 8^) Good post too, even if I'm not entirely convinced.

Take your time fam. Got anything on market socialism/cooperative economy I could check out? I've only listened Richard D. Wolff's seminars on them and Seth Ackermann's proposals.

The assumption of the article was that the proposed system doesn't actually put the workers in control of the MoP. I just went with that, I didn't read the original Jacobin piece.

In not appointing a wage at all, and giving workers a direct share in the profits while letting them decide democratically where and when to work.

My point is that everyone would be in the position of the CEO - unwilling to fuck himself over for the benefit of the firm.

This would be the case if the only relation of the workers to the cooperative firm is that they sell their labour to it at market value. If the workers and the shareholders were one and the same, they are not selling their labour so much as straight up producing commodities for exchange.

What I am saying is that when you have cooperative firms, you will reach a point where workers will decide "you know what, working more than 4 hours a day and lowering my wages to $7.50 an hour just isn't worth outcompeting everyone else and cornering the market." When you have private ownership, you don't see CEOs and shareholders saying this because they themselves don't have to work, and for them the suffering of workers isn't a factor. In a cooperative, this is different, and it's especially so if you're competing with other cooperatives where the workers also have their own interests as workers in mind in addition to that of the firm. You could even make a law against it to keep people from working too hard. Of course, in this situation I am assuming there is a mechanism to prevent a John Henry type situation where you have artisans with hand tools competing directly against industrial assembly lines, and technological progress can be more or less equalized through state interference. Ultimately, though, I do think that one of the big things that makes exploitation possible is this separation between workers and owners.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have any particular attachment to the idea of markets and I don't think that they're the ultimate way to distribute goods and services, nor do I think that market socialism should be the end all and be all of leftism, but I do think that it is one good method to promote worker control of the MoP without traumatically severing your prospective socialist state from the world market economy (especially since real socialism will probably not develop simultaneously across the whole world if at all) and that actual socialist policy would be much easier to implement once your economy is populated almost entirely by co-ops. To this end, I think that increasing the number of co-ops today is something that is actually achievable and could serve a good purpose tomorrow. Like the state was used in the service of enclosure and disenfranchisement so as to help along primitive accumulation, by using the power of the state to seed co-ops and jigger the law so as to make them more competitive than private firms we could do much the same thing that the policy of enclosure served, except in reverse. Not to mention that by proliferating co-ops, you're putting more power in the hands of what are essentially proletarian organizations that can then lobby the state and support politicians in much the same way that private firms do today. Plus, if you reach a state of economic autarky where every firm is a co-op, you're pretty much set for socialism.

cont'd

cont'd

To be honest, I think the fact that a co-op's workers are also taking what the private owner's share would be makes them better able to compete if they need to. I think the evidence supports this as well.

It's impossible to say for certain, but I see people making reference to specific stuff from books fairly often, so I wouldn't be surprised. I don't really have anything else to compare to, though. The other boards I frequented were a little book-averse. The thing that pushed me here was that whenever I would get into an argument elsewhere I would have to deal with the fact that literally every other participant was an illiterate white supremacist with worldviews informed by nothing but artifact-riddled .jpegs.

I'm afraid not, most of this stuff I came up with on my own. I don't have any grounding in actual market socialist theory, and I don't know if I'd agree with it if I did. I'd much rather destroy capitalism by shooting people, but the circumstances have pushed me into this unfortunate situation of having to read books and talk about things instead.

How can we discuss market socialism when people have very different conceptions of what the term even means? For some it means that everything is co-ops, for some a planned economy that makes heavy use of faulty neoclassical economic models, for a few it is a scheme where everybody owns stock with some restriction that shares can't be inherited.

>My position is that having prices and commodities does not itself require the commodification of labour. The notion of self-exploitation requires that workers sit down and decide that they are going to sit down and work themselves to the fucking bone in order to drive down the socially necessary labour time required for commodities and undercut their competition. This is fundamentally absurd, and if this was indeed the sort of behaviour that market logic encourages, we would see the same thing happening today with CEOs and shareholders who choose to cut down their CEO and shareholder costs in order to maximize their companies' profits and undercut the competition. As a matter of fact, we see quite the opposite!
This. There is a type of Marxist intellectuals who are allergic to looking at the real world. They share that trait with many pro-capitalism shills. Co-ops do exist in the real world. When people decide on the tradeoff between more money and better work conditions for themselves, these factors are weighted differently than when there are other people making that decision for them. The real question is how much freedom they have when they make these decisions.

No, because co-ops are usually not run by Trotskyists. HURR. Actual answer: It depends on what society at large is like, what sort of social safety net there is. Strictly secondary to that, but not unimportant, are the sort of voting/decision procedures used in the work place. Can a majority vote in a way that the minority has to do the most arduous tasks for the least amount of remuneration? I think assignment of people to tasks and setting remuneration should be a unified process, meaning you can't claim a task is piss-easy and have an effective vote to lower its remuneration level if you aren't also up for doing it at the current level. One should also avoid any schemes where some people got a big amount of voting points as a bounty for having worked so hard according to the outcome of a voting procedure where these same folks already had more voting points.

ok, but wouldn't you need to come with an industry standardisation figure? you certainly would need to know if you are actually working harder and for more hours than the rest of the workers

let's pretend that you cover the average and still decide to work more hours, couldn't you stop these extra commodities from entering the marketing, to avoid overproduction?, like let's say I make bread, but I also like eating certain type of bread and I decide to eat it for myself, how exactly is this exploiting yourself if you are not exchanging these commodities on a market?

Well, some people read. But a vocal majority is mostly watching youtube (especially Wolff groupies, who can't differentiate between Anarchism and Marxism).

Frankly, I don't handle well the level of most discussions here. Not without some alcohol.

You can also camp at >>>/marx/
It's mostly dead, but owner doesn't mind and the thread will stay up for a long time.

Copy arguments and so on. I'd like to have some proper discussions, but my presence here is rather erratic (I'm afraid your thread will sink before I get a chance to look at it).

Sorry for the late reply guys. Had to go out for a bit.

I wouldn't doubt the viability of a cooperative-based economy or market socialist economy within its own perimeters, but would claim that this point of contentment (can it last?) is not one we should focus on, as it is also not the point we judge capitalism on (especially since it's 2016, and capitalism is only becoming better at resisting capitulation to its contradictions). Rather, I would propose we do not judge cooperative economy/market socialism (or any economic system, really) by its ability to compete within itself for longevity, but rather its implications as a whole.

I would, from lurking this place for about a week now, agree that the general mood on this board is far more intellectually challenging than Holla Forums (or even /lit/ nowadays, but that's thanks to Holla Forums). That alone makes this place worth lurking. However, I wonder if there's actually that much reading done, and if it's not instead just parroting basic leftist mantras under the pretense that people really know what they're talking about. This was a problem on /lit/, and after the guy's post above, I'd say I do recognize it a little here, although much less than elsewhere.

I think this is a really good point, and I do recognize this. Is there a general outline of the most popular propositions of a market socialist model as a fully encompassed economic system? Do you reckon we should make one ourself, like Marx did with capitalism? We're going to need a good point of reference for a concrete and thorough critique.

I do not for a minute doubt that a cooperative enterprise is much more in a worker's material interest than a private one would be, nor that it would not be viable. What I seek to critique is what a cooperative's material dynamics look like, what we'd get when we imagine a society hegemonically consisting of cooperatives and what these forces would breed.

Hah. Well, for the record, I only selected the flag to be recognizable in the thread, and while I am absolutely not a Trotskyist, I am a registed member of a local Trotskyist party (because it's the only communist party that operates in my vicinity). I've switched to namefagging OP now, so I won't be zinged now.

Precisely! As stated above, a critique or consideration of the viability and implications of market socialism must be imagined within its own concept. For most market socialists, we would imagine the plan is to hegemonize the system and legally recognize private property as illegal under a governmental paradigm while only allowing cooperatively-owned enterprises to be legal (outside of public services, of course).

I would actually argue that this is the primary concern: how does a process of participatory workplace democracy ensure its mainstay and its legitimacy, and what are the implications? Pic slightly related.

No, this is not the 'self-exploitation' McNcally refers to.

McNally refers to how SNLT is (re)created under any form of market distribution by virtue of the wage system in general which detracts from the value of labour its surplus to sustain commodification. This effect is amplified when we consider that it is inevitable one coop decides to democratically substract even more surplus from its wages to compete with the democratically increased substraction of surplus value in another [coop]. Furthermore, because the effect of decentralized competition of a market means that a basic threshold of compound growth must be met, we once again find ourselves interested in attempting to fetishize commodities on the market beyond their use value to stay ahead and sell more of them.

By reducing SNLT, democratically or not, you open yourself up to the forces of underproduction, which means you distribute less and make less. Within the natural interest of competing coops comes then the impulse to produce more and outcompete your coop by meeting existing demand with more supply.

I'm not sure how this is relevant, but I do imagine it being nice that I could take home a few of the commodities I've created without anyone really batting an eye at it.

(Cont.)

That's already not bad, and ought to eventually lead to actual reading and self-theory.

> >>>/marx/
I've checked it out and I'm sorry to say this but honestly, it just looks like a massive 20th century Stalinist LARPfest. There's barely any discussion of theory and it's just an attempt at glorifying the ultimately tragedic failures that were Soviet Russia, China, Vietnam, etc. and defending them from muh revisionists and bourgeois lies. I was actually afraid Holla Forums would be like that, but it looks like this /marx/ board is.

In my case, I prefer a long-term adjustment of the tax rate to make private firms uncompetitive long before private property would ever be made illegal, in addition to low-interest loans for the establishment of co-ops.

Likewise, for my purposes I don't see much sense in critiquing a theoretical market socialist society because I view market socialism as a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

also you likely just triggered mr. stalinstache and he's probably gonna start posting PDFs about how stalin was a good boy and basically you're a revisionist any moment now

This would appear to be an incrementalist approach; one premised on achieving power through parliamentary power within the contemporary liberal bourgeois state apparatus. Would this be the strategy?

I think it's important to do so regardless. Perhaps the 'means to' is actually much more important than end itself, as it is the viability of the 'means to' upon which rests the ultimate possibility of achieving the ends.

I hope I don't piss him off TBH; just stated my disinterest in his board. Although Stalinist butthurt is always enjoyable.

Yes, but again, it's sheer pragmatism. I doubt it's all that workable in the long run especially because this sort of business would take quite a bit more than the length of term allowed to your average bourgeois politician, not taking into account the difficulty of actually passing legislation and keeping it intact as it goes through. Nonetheless, I think that failure at this stage is an important part of the process that is very much required to establish the popular support necessary for more forceful action. The idea is to create demand for revolution in much the same way as demand for commodities is created, in addition to arming the population and all that.

Even assuming a revolutionary government, I don't think it would be prudent to immediately outlaw private property without first taking to account how this might impact the lives of ordinary working people who at the moment depend on private property and international commerce for their livelihoods. And a legalistic base too I think would be very important, since transparency and the rule of law are probably the best way of avoiding the horrors of the 20th century, especially in the context of a revolutionary state.

That's all well and good, but would there really be such a difference that an analysis of capitalism (which we can actually see and study) couldn't hack it?

also,

You could easily deal with this through state interference. Market socialism doesn't necessarily mean free market socialism. Hell, even under the American system subsidies for non-production are used all the time in to keep prices on agricultural products up, for example - there is no reason something like that couldn't be done under a socialist system. And that's not the only sort of that policy that's available - one could also stimulate production through bidding out contracts for so many T-shirts or phones or whatever else have you, nudge the price of currency in either direction, use taxes to control production or whatever else.

...

Meh.

McNally writes about Bernard Mandevilles's fable of the bees as if it only was about making a dubious claim that widespread egotistical behavior can lead to a well-off society. But that fable also has a second message: the paradox of saving. An individual can decide to only buy rice and move to a house made of paper and save money to later buy some fancy stuff. But if all people do that, there will be nothing more fancy than rice and paper houses.

Alec Nove claims that for an economy to have working price signals, it "follows" that everything, including labor power, must be linked with some universal equivalent. I have read Nove's Feasible Socialism, and he repeats that this follows a lot, but he doesn't describe any logical causality. You might as well argue that, since we live in capitalism, it "follows" that human kidneys should be priced and put on the market. In the real world, there are laws about product standards and you can get in big trouble if you put things on the market that don't meet these criteria. Shouldn't that put a dent in the belief of the sensible moderate socialist Noves, and the Austrian Voodoo economists and their ultra-leftist friends that there is an all-encompassing market process that is stronger than all human rationality?

It also seems hard to believe that workers would willingly work themselves to the bone in order to stay competitive. The entire point of staying competitive is for the co-operative to prosper and for the workers to prosper along with it. If the workers aren't prospering from the co-op then the purpose is defeated. Workers won't be working themselves to the bone to stay competitive because no other co-op would be doing that, so they would be able to remain competitive without exploiting themselves.

It would almost work on a principle similar to planned obsolescence. Conventional market logic would dictate that such a thing shouldn't even exist, and yet it does because basically every company does it in certain industries, so there is no real incentive for any one produce to not do it. Whatever they would gain in market share they would lose in per unit profit. Similarly, whatever the co-operative would gain in total profits or market share from self-exploitation wouldn't be worth it because as far as they're concerned, the entire point of keeping the co-operative competitive is to benefit them.

Keynesian social democracy doesn't work not because of the contradictions of markets but thanks to the accumulation of capital and the power of the capitalist class in the political economy. In market socialism, many Keynesian ideas would actually work.

Also, without elaborate feedback mechanisms any central planning is doomed to fail since demand and quality would become externalities to production.

digamo.free.fr/nove91.pdf
Here's a good book on the subject, although I think the author is ignorant of leftist psycho-analytical theory, and is wrong about exploitation. And it is a little bit out of date in respect to the role of computers in central planning considering it was written in the early 90's.

Nove was already mentioned, and yes he was ignorant. Thanks for your contribution. Nove repeatedly said that having market feedback for consumption goods only works if the means of production are privately owned. He did not make a single argument as to why that has to be the case.

That's the exact opposite of what he says in that book. If that was his belief at one point, it was not consistent.

Yes he was ignorant about certain things, but he was knowledgeable enough to back up his critique of marx as idealist and was right to focus on how to organize society as to internalize externalizes so that the economy does serve society.

He gives little thought to exploitation, so it becomes clear to us as people who've seen Wolff's arguments about exploitation that exploitation is important and that private property has no inherit value. But similarly, Marx gave little un-idealist thoughts about what socialism would look like and that was his big oversight.

and yet this happens in non-coop establishments every day.

to the guy who was wondering if anyone reads the .pdfs shared on this chan, yeah, i am . :p

Who does shit like that?!

Are you guys all fucking retarded? Capitalism is hell because of class antagonisms; i.e. the business owners want to work the workers as hard as possible to get the most profits he can squeeze out of them. Remove that conflict of interest and the problem disappears.

no shit, they still have to compete with capitalist businesses who drive their employees like slaves.

Anyway, here it is fixed.

used makandracards.com/makandra/1487-rotate-a-pdf-under-ubuntu-linux

You are missing the point completely. Coops compete with each others too in a market.

what do you guys think of the future of trade unions as the 21st century progresses? i just joined the ibew and i forsee some degree of stability as the industry needs qualified workers and then doesn't happen when there's limited access to training or they kill themselves on the job.

i feel this massive sense of responsibility now; that i actually have to bother to not suck at my suddenly not shitty job because it may reflect badly on my unionbros.

In non-coop establishments the workers don't have a choice. They are compelled to work harder because the purpose of a corporation isn't to enrich the workers, it's to enrich itself. Co-operatives are meant to enrich the workers themselves, which wouldn't happen if their quality of life, income, and working conditions drop.

weird thing, but countries with more labor protections, i.e. more power to the workers, tend to work less. i wonder why that is…

maybe it's because their enemies are not workers in other companies, but their own bosses.

You aren't addressing the points made and you are clearly buttblasted by this thread. So if you can't learn shit because your own mental handicap then maybe get the fuck out of this thread.

… they didn't work harder, like their competitors.

co-ops are likely marginally better but are still subject to market discipline, unlike, apparently, the 1%.
theoretically a coop should easily be able to outcompete its corporate competitors as they don't have to pay a ceo tax. if we're to believe daddy wolff and others these guys are mostly a liability.

haha in more traditional workplaces the enemy is anyone who doesn't buy the "bust your ass for poverty wages" dogma.

b-but guys, economics based on competition is human nature good for all

weird thing, but countries with more labor protections, i.e. more power to the workers, tend to… lose these labor protections. I wonder why that is…

people get comfortable and brainwashed, that's why.
the pendulum is turning in the other direction now; about fucking time.

Yes I am.

Why? How?

In a market they are competitors, do you understand that basic fact, dumbass?

...

some people are more special than others.
purportedly there's plenty of money to go around at the top, but it's reserved for ones own social circles.

...

fuck off Holla Forums

I wonder where that comes from…

Surely in an economy where profits were distributed, if I could get a job at another company that paid more for less, I would switch to that one, and so would everybody else until the profits reduced by being shared with more workers. Eventually the economy would stabilize to the point where everyone is working roughly equal hours for roughly equal wages. If competition intensifies past that point the government could institute economy-wide maximum working hours

Which is precisely why you couldn't get such a job.

Pure reformism.

Commodity production, market competition, government "regulation"… You are literally saying that we already have socialism right now.

this is happening now but people are barely making enough to cover rent.

the problem is excaberated by the thronging hoards of increasingly desperate unemployed.

maybe time for a better plan.

THE ONLY POSSIBLE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEMS OF THE MARKET IS A BETTERER FREEERER MATKET

Nice sophistry jackass
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlerAteSugar

no it isn't because the majority of the economy is owned by massive shareholders.

Why not giving one significant difference between market "socialism" and capitalism?

i believe i was referring to uniformization of wages

you mean besides worker ownership of the means of production?

last time I checked the property owners are extravagantly wealthy

Massive shareholders are submitted to the law of value just everyone else.

elaborate

i think we're talking past each other. you asked why workers couldn't just find a better job if they were unhappy with their wages.

Ask a question?

he is doing this on purpose

because "better job" already entails the presupposition that the employer will be exploiting them for all they can get

what?

buttmad

"Elaborate" is not a question. If you don't understand something, ask a question.

at least he has the good decency to sage his shitposting

Yes. I said "significant".

>>>/out/

Explain what point you were trying to make by reponding to my comment with "the law of value".

This meme needs to die.

Why do you think co-operators will be able to make different decisions from the CEOs'/shareholders'?

...

That is irrelevant to the fact that property owners can exploit the proletariat and coop workers cannot.

...

There are many more decisions to be made in a business than the quantity of production. And indeed, in many if not all industries, success in the market has a large random quality to it. Which means there is a wide array of decisions they can make and still be successful. Competition, while existing, is far from perfect.

Far from being identical, workers in a cooperative are far less likely to make decisions that would endanger their community or their lives.

Also, worker cooperatives are far more likely to be created and continue to operate in low profit environments where otherwise capitalists would shun and under-invest. This is because workers in a worker cooperative are more predisposed to job security over profits.

Planned economy was a huge failure and its just embarassing that you try to prove that the only realistical system is not viable.

Why am I even responding

Wow google-san is hot

Capital exploits the proletariat. Wether it is formally "owned" by a bunch of capitalists or by co-operatives doesn't make a damn difference.

*The bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat

You cannot exploit without extracting surplus value. But in market socialism and cooperatives the workers own the surplus.

Who are the protestors of capital*

Wat

But bro, self-exploitation is totally a thing and not some stupid bullshit we made up to justify our mindless dogmatism

Protector*
lol

Is this some kind of "guns don't kill people, people kill people" thing going on here

Socialism is the first stage of communism, a classless, stateless and moneyless society, you fucking illiterate.

Workers' control is merely a step in the revolution to get there. It means nothing if you try to make it a goal in and of itself.

Maybe we should offer a realistical solution to capitalism instead of this utopian garbage? Everybody knows capitalism is horrible but there are no alternatives after communism failed in Soviet Union.

As a society, Soviet Union was never communist.

No this is a "you haven't read leftist theory regarding capitalism" thing going on.

how in the hell do you think you'll achieve communism without worker control first? If anybody else has control, even commies as in the USSR, there is a chance their own self interest will become a barrier to achieving communism.

COMMUNISM is, SOCIALISM isn't.

We have the technology to accurately judge firm performance without a market now.

Bottom up socialism, but still a planned economy

I've read the theory, every time I've seen state control and central planning mentioned as a solution there's been very little analysis and a lot of idealism to back it up.

While there may be a high tech solution to the central planning problem, it is not immediately implementable.

Which is why you Lenin implemented the NEP.
The USSR experienced faster growth under Stalin than anytime in Yugoslavia.
Then you must realize that what you advocate for is not socialism, but capitalism with a human face?

Spookiest shit I've ever heard.

I wonder how long your posturing and calling everyone illiterate is going to keep up, seeing as I'm BTFOing all your arguments.

Literal capitalism and actually worse than market socialism.

not gonna work well, the benefits from planning in the first place were the ability for the center to take all things into consideration, groups of people not in the center making the plan will cause externalities to form.

But that death rate tho

The USSR ran into many problems from the pure ideology of their prices, they would have lasted a lot longer if they at the very least allowed cooperatives to compete with state enterprises.

The USSR was also not socialism. Capitalism can deliver great amounts of growth, but not forever.

It lacks the central feature of capitalism, that being private ownership of the means of production. And it is a transition to communism. So I'll say its socialism.

Prove it.

No you retard. The essence of capitalism is commodity production. Private property and exploitive relationships exist outside of capitalism. Marx talked about how communal private property can exist when referring to slaves owned by communes of people. Commodity production persist in market socialism, and capital is the means by which commodity production is accomplished.

You are empirically wrong. Huge companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people use central planning. The issue with not being able to judge firm performance, is solved by modern technology. How do you think corporations judge the performance of different departments?

Why don't you tell me what it was then?

They didn't run into those problems until Kruschev abandoned the idea of a command economy

It was a degenerated workers state, but State Capitalism is not an accurate way to describe the USSR.

The central feature of capitalism is not private property. It is commodity production.

Prove what? That the universe is not infinite?

Srsly?
The United States.
South Korea.
Japan.
Britain.
ect. ect.

Are stupid? I'm not talking about the judgment issue here. I'm talking about regular externalizes in society. When one section of society gets to decide what to produce and some people are left out, externalities will occur. Rural areas, for example won't get the development and infrastructure they need. Corporations cause as much pollution as they want because they don't have to live with the consequences, if a democratic majority don't have to deal with something, it's not going to get dealt with. Even if everyone is a minority on one issue or another.

Prove it.

Not proof. Try again.

They had plenty of shortages and other supply problems before that. Not to mention that the metrics for success encouraged departments to horde supplies and be inefficient, as well as other wacky results.

The workers had just about as much control as they do in the US. Which isn't much.

That critique is highly idealist. Even when you refer to technology making effective feedback mechanisms you're just mimicking a market. You need commodity production until you reach a state of general abundance.

Also

for

too

marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1975/PR1975-22b.htm

WEW

The cosmos is inflating faster than the speed of light, therefore there is a finite cosmic event horizon beyond which we cannot see or venture. Next question.

He's just being a pedantic butthurt little autist.

If you had read Capital, you would know that producing commodities for exchange value(M-C-M') is what is considered from a Marxist perspective, to be the defining trait of capitalism. This is why Marx supported labour vouchers(which the Soviet Ruble was similar to).

If you knew what that meant you'd realize eliminating anarchy of production is incompatible with a market economy. So as far as commodities have a use value, commodities will be produced. But commodities being produced for sale on a market of other commodity producers is something specific to capitalism.

The inefficiencies of a market are eliminated within a planned economy. Anarchy of production is eliminated. Just because we have to calculate supply and demand does not mean we are using a market. What sophistry. I guess you think a centrally planned corporation is secretly using market mechanisms to?

A growth of 638% over 10 years is no small feat. We are talking about a feudal society that had just gone through World War One followed by a civil war and had the entire capitalist world against them. To expect no shortages is true idealism.

The Soviet Worker councils were largely in charge of production.

Yes competition does create inefficiencies, where there is competition there must be a looser after all. But, as even Zizek points out, our freedom now is real. The freedom to choose what we consume and who we get it from is a real freedom, if not the only one. Competition is indeed necessary to make sure people actually like what they consume. And regardless, what harm could allowing a cooperative to make commodities and sell do if people do indeed want them?

And isn't it plainly obvious that corporations use market mechanisms? Even if they are centrally planned, they still use markets to determine supply, demand and to distribute their products.

Prove it.

All you're doing is repeating hypotheses from greater men than yourself, like a retarded parrot.

Do you even English?

Socialism is the first stage of communism you retard. It is just as communist as the second stage.

Literally how? How do they use trade to determine supply and demand?

When Zizek said our freedoms are "real", he meant that the ideology of "freedom" employed by the liberal economist is the same caliber as that employed for Lenin. The presuppose that: their ideology is the embodiment of true freedom, and then go on to accuse those who criticize their ideal as being against freedom. However, unlike liberal "freedom" Zizek agrees that Lenins animosity towards liberal freedom actually has rationality behind it. marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htm

Did you seriously think Zizek was praising the freedom of the market? No, it was a sarcastic quip, about how market economy "freedom" subordinates actual freedom to the forces of the market.

I meant the function of a corporation - allocating it's resources. The fact that it determines "the demand from X sector is Y so we need to supply X with Y"(i.e. determining supply and demand) does not mean that all corporations are essentially a microcosm example of a market. Corporations have actually tried splitting up the different sects and putting them in competition, a real microcosm of a market within a corporate entity. And the result was abysmal.

And I'd like to be clear I am not advocating for a return to a Soviet style bureaucracy, but I'm dismissing your notion that with modern technology, a planned economy would be inefficient or restrict """freedom""". Judging firm performance WAS an issue in the Soviet Union(though only a major issue after Kruschevite reforms). The main issues of Staninism was the actual restriction of freedom on the people - the absence of democracy in "real existing socialism". Not economic.

If he uses any data collected from people other than himself, will he still count as a parrot?

…they use how much of their product was bought previously, along with other indicators to determine demand, which they use to determine how much to produce.

my computer was dying so couldn't address these points until now

Yes and the US had a similar rate of growth in the same period of time. When you're literally at the bottom you have no where to go but up. That's not to say it isn't a great accomplishment, it is.

Many shortages were explicitly caused by incorrect pricing and soviet economists trying to come up with a socialist law of a value, an inherently misguided project.

Don't make me laugh.

Exactly. Not how much money. The reflexion about money only comes later in the process, when the company will worry about the profitability of its production. In other words: if you remove money, you can still determine supply and demand the exact same way as today; the only difference lies in the use-value replacing value (profitability) as the criterion for deciding which demand to meet.

No, they didn't.

There is no "socialist law of value" they tried to create. The socialist "law of value"(as I'm sure you are aware the LTV only operates within a market economy - it does not apply, to slave society or feudal society). The law of value as laid out per Marx in socialism would be the labourer producing as much as he consumes, consumption meeting production.

Wrong. The idea that Soviet planned economy( even in it's less efficient years prior to Perestroika and the subsequent dissolution) had arbitrarily set prices, is not supported empirically.

The problem in the Soviet Union was a lack of a capital market for firms. They operated without budget constraints. The solution to this would to have a capital market, or simulate one on a computer(which is almost possible to do now and likely will be doable in 15-25 years).

The ECP was never a problem for the Soviet, and other communist economies. Allocative efficiency was never an issue, it was a lack of a capital market.

Is this supposed to be a rebuttal?

That markets are super duper ebul is a meme that needs to die. They may be inefficient, but they are certainly better than the modes of distribution they replaced.

Even if you argue that market socialism is itself only good as a stepping stone (which is probably true), how is that an argument against it when making that first step away from neoliberal capitalism is getting incredibly difficult every day?

Ah that's what you were asking about. I would argue that prices and profits are still need so that money can be reinvested into capital until we reach a point where full automation is achieved.

1936 to 1946 US rate of growth was over 600%.

I know that it only applies to a market economy, but I'm not sure the soviet economists did. They obviously could not make it so that a laborer produced as much as he consumed because he was still producing for others.

…are you implying that they did not have centrally set prices that did not reflect cost or demand because that is empirically provable. As for the part you quote, that is mostly due to the fact that Equilibrium as an economic concept is bunk. There must always be a surplus in order for demand to be met.

This was a problem, I'll admit, but not the only one.

The bureaucratic hierarchy had more power than the soviet councils, as is necessary in a planned economy. It wouldn't work if one sub unit decided to diverge from the plan.

You must've missed this part:

No, it is not empirically provable. If it is please provide me with something similar.

By "capital" that should be invested into, I assume you mean that we must keep improving our means of production? If so, it's another way to express the same confusion again.

Yes, we must keep improving our means of production. But no, that doesn't require capital. Nor does it require money or profit.

Socialism is about producing for use-value. If we decide this is more useful to improve our means of production than to, say, build a five stars hotel, then we will allocate more resources to the improvement of our means of production than to hotels' construction. There is absolutely no need for the medium of money to take such a decision.

Because you don't have two set dates to compare and draw a conclusion from, rather you start with a conclusion and then cherry-pick combinations of time and place that fit your doom-and-gloom emo world view.

>Surely in an economy where profits were distributed, if I could get a job at another company that paid more for less, I would switch to that one, and so would everybody else until the profits reduced by being shared with more workers.
I agree, but make explicit what is needed for this effect: that the people working at a particular place do not have monopoly power over the decision who else can work there. I'm not sure that many co-op enthusiasts have that in mind.

Every passing day gets us closer to communism. It doesn't really sound "doom-and-gloom" to me.

No I didn't. The difference between the manufacturing and other sectors of the economy was most likely not due to levels of competition but the fact that the buyers of manufacturing have to place their orders ahead of time, thereby assuring that demand and consumption are much closer to one another.

digamo.free.fr/nove91.pdf
start at page 67

But then what mechanism do you propose to ensure that investment occurs? If you are thinking of democratic planning then you will tend towards under investment because people want to reap the rewards of labor and productivity now as opposed to later, if you are thinking of undemocratic central planning as in the USSR you will tend towards overinvestment and leave people feeling like their economy is not serving their needs.

This problem is naturally resolved with market co-op economy with a smaller state role in planing. Of course, this would not be identical to yugo's model. Rather we should allow people to exchange ownership of firms so they are encouraged to make their firms successful, but not to private individuals.

youtu.be/L2fF6j6d9D4?t=48m30s
this is what I was referring to. certainly Zizek is right to disparage those who proclaim this is the only kind of freedom we need, but he does subtly acknowledge that the freedom to choose within an existing societal framework is a freedom, as is the freedom to change that social framework.

I am not here to argue that a market is a fix for everything. Indeed, determining how big a unit of production should be is and will be an essential part of a socialist economy. You have to figure out what size would be the most efficient and be large enough to encompass externalities that would hurt society when the unit of production is smaller. Indeed it makes no sense for a bus route to exclude large parts of a city if going there is not necessarily marginally profitable. And I am absolutely for state owned/controlled industry for goods everyone needs, or where the profit motive would vastly distort the societal need.

But on a bigger level, why would you outlaw cooperatives or self-employed people producing commodities? Certainly if the state was providing for everything people wanted then they wouldn't even be able to make money. But if there is a demand for something that the state is lacking in, why not permit private citizens to fill the gap?

>Rather we should allow people to exchange ownership of firms so they are encouraged to make their firms successful
u wot
What is that supposed to mean? Groups of people own and sell firms to other groups? That is your "socialism"?

The roadmap from stalinism to undogmatic socialism:
1. Start with ebul stalinist system of centrally controlled production
2. Decriminalize private initiative alongside the ebul state sector.
3. Do nothing while people with that lovely entrepreneur spirit steal shit-tons of equipment and resources from the state sector.
4. Wonder aloud why state planning has more and more gaps.
5. Tell everybody that there is nuffin wrong with private citizens filling the gaps while being high on krokodil.

They should be able to sell it to the state, back to the firm (if the firm's charter allows it), or to things like pension funds. The point is that ownership should either be personal or societal.

if your state is unable to compete with self-employed individuals and cooperatives then it means that it was inefficient to begin with.

Also, we shouldn't forget that small is beautiful. Large centrally planned state industry is highly alienating because the individual worker has little control over what they're doing in. If there is not an economy of scale, the default should certainly be small enterprises.

...

How is that different from what we have today?
Disagree.
Economies of scale are everywhere, my liberal friend.

You tankies never change.

…do you not know what private property is?

t. ur bum

then there will be many state owned enterprises, although I would prefer an actual economist to prove this. Nonetheless we should be quick to identify where this not an economy of scale by allowing people to spontaneously enter a market to minimize alienation as much as possible.

We don't have shared ownership of the means of production today.

Here you are: human nature!

>What is a shareholder?

Given that mainstream economics is about as much a science as astrology is, I don't see why you would give much weight to the testimonial of such a person.

Economics of scale follow from physical reality. Picture two square pieces of land, one is four times the size of the other, the owner of the bigger square only needs a fence twice as long. Heating costs are lower in one big building than multiple small buildings that taken together have the same amount of living space as the big one.

Please take a look in the mirror to make sure you haven't become slime.

Oh c'mon you can't be this disingenuous.

The two points describe a logical development (a historical one as well). Incentive to steal stuff other than the stuff that can be directly consumed only becomes common when there is this growing thing that can make use of this stuff and gives the thief something in turn.

wut

I honestly think that a wolffian co-operative economy is the only way we can go from here

Richard Wolff is an economist.

As do dis-economies of scale. increasing amounts of administrative layers required to coordinate large enterprises can make them less efficient.

Nice argument faggot

are you even trying to make sense at this point? You have yet to explain exactly how or why people would just steal stuff.

You mean like money? Literally any common good can become money. Also, are defining producing things for other people as stealing? Kek Marx literally said that was what made us human.

You mean like anything produced through a division of labor? Come on how idealist can you get?

Apologies for not reading the whole thread, but are actually trying to say that "economies of scale" aren't dominating the market? Because that's a new low for MarkSoc.

Check stuff around you - how much of it was produced by small enterprises?

No I'm saying diseconomies of scale do exist and there should be no barrier for small firms to enter markets. Also that small enterprises are inherently less alienating than large firms, so they should be preferred all things being equal.

Also, capital accumulation can often distort the efficiency of large firms but that's another story.

ITT: Market """""socialists"""" BTFO

t. someone who hasn't read the thread

just look at who we're up against

What's the alternative to co-ops That is actually feasible? For this reason I am sympathetic. The workers coop movement is growing and I think we should at least support it

So, 18th century Britain?

Well, yes.

No. All things being equal - decision should belong to workers.

If there is no compelling evidence of necessity to divide large enterprise into smaller pieces, and workers are against division, then I'm against division - and so should be you.

In an economy where production is state-directed it can make sense for you to steal something when you can directly consume that thing yourself. If a thing isn't a consumer item, why steal it? Once that economy gets reformed so that more and more private production exists side by side with the state sector, it makes sense to steal other stuff than consumer items because you might use it yourself for production in the private sector or exchange it for consumption items. This happened with reforms in the Eastern Block.

I see you went to straight-up bullshitting and there is no point talking to you. I wrote the answer anyway for the benefit of others reading this thread.

Well how do you know what the workers want? Most people I think would prefer to work in small businesses, places where they feel more in control. And anyway it's not a matter of splitting up large enterprises but of creating and supporting small ones.

First of all you can steal things for exchange regardless of whether the private sphere exists or not. Secondly money also existed in the Eastern bloc and this money was also used in the black market so you could always grantee that things could be exchanged.

Anyway, corruption was always a problem in the eastern bloc states, attacking that would be much more effective than attacking the people making businesses, which as I've said before, would not even succeed if the state was doing a good enough job to keep people satisfied.

Your answer was extremely unclear and you provided near zero context. For all I know you could have been using steal in a metaphorical/metaphyscial sense.

I'm sorry, is this a serious question?

Which is okay in Stalinist economy.

That's not what happened. I.e. it obviously did happen, but you are blowing it out of proportion.

It's not Stalinist, you moron.

Private initiative was not criminalized. It happened during destalinization. By 1950s there was over 5% of non-state industrial economy (light industry mostly, of course). And then there was over half of population that was working agriculture - in kolkhozs - non-state co-op farms. I.e. over half of Soviet population was employed in non-state economy when destalinization begun.

Private initiative (non-state co-ops) existed in the 20s and in the 30s and in the 40s. Only in late 50s/early 60s it got mostly forbidden - and that's when central planning started having "gaps" (which had nothing to do with co-ops; both were consequences of bureaucratic coup).

I have worked in small and big companies, and prefer working in big companies. My experience is not a coincidence. Violations of safety standards and other worker rights are far less likely in big companies. In a small company where everybody knows everyone, conflicts between bosses and workers appear as conflicts between particular characters. In a big company, people are more likely to see structures behind the repeating conflict patterns and it's more likely you have colleagues that can help you out because some of them know the regulations, some of them know your native language and can help you when you have trouble with legalese in a language you are just learning. In a big company, it is possible to allow people a lot of freedom in how to plan when to work, exactly because there are always several people capable of doing a particular task.

When it comes to co-ops, workers are more in control in small ones in the sense that an individual is more likely to be pivotal when it comes to the outcome of a majority vote of all members. But a bigger co-op can do more. When you do things alone you are always pivotal in the "vote" of what you individually want to do. But what an impoverished view of freedom is that? Alienation is not simply the opposite of being pivotal. I'd rather be pivotal 1 % of the time and get a result I agree with 80 % of the time, than being pivotal 10 % of the time and get a result I agree with 60 % of the time.

Besides, a big co-op doesn't need to run on majority decisions for everything. Rather, you commit yourself to various smaller groups within it, and are more likely to be pivotal about these things you care about than what a primitive calculation based on the co-op's total membership would suggest.

Well obviously what they want isn't predetermined.

Stalinist economy has its own problem. Tell me again how well forcibly collectivizing the peasant farms went?

Well enough.

Collectivization is not a problem. It a solution, however imperfect you believe it to be. If you have a better way - a way to wage Civil War in a pretty way - please, share it with me.

So far I'm not impressed with neither Allende, nor Chavez, nor Rousseff being "humane", "civil", and "democratic". They all let Reaction set in and strike at the opportune moment, while Bolsheviks launched the offensive themselves.

Is relocating less than 1% of population that bad when you compare it to the alternative of decades of Fascism?

...

Literally ever other eastern bloc country abandoned stalin style collectivization of agriculture and got much better results. Stalin and the central government treated the peasants flippantly since they mostly had urban origins, and they incentivized peasants to prioritize their private plot of land over the collective efforts. Not to mention, they had no idea how to do the logistics of agricultural production.

Agricultural collectivization can only be done voluntarily in order to be effective. You can start up start farms and ask people to work for it, but just forcing peasants onto communes was just asking for trouble and inefficiency.

Literally all of the rest of the eastern bloc did agriculture better than the USSR retard. All they had to do was change the legal structure around agriculture and eventual material changes would follow, but instead they tried to force material changes without backing it up with the proper logistics and then just restricted the movement of peasants when they began to starve so it remained a local problem.

You can post actual data any time now.

You are overstating urban influence. Kalinin was practically on top of Soviet hierarchy.

It was voluntary. Majority supported it.

They did. 1927/28 almost became a famine year.

If this:
isn't a "human nature" type argument, I wonder what is.

Shareholders literally have shared ownership of their company.

If you think a centrally planned economy is not feasible, I will recommend to read stuff by Paul Cockshott.

digamo.free.fr/nove91.pdf
start at page 84

Prove it.

You mean when there was a grain shortage so the state just blamed fucking kulaks and took what grain there was, discouraging the peasants from producing more anyway.

If that was the case then why would I say that a central plan tends towards over-investment? The central planners are still human, no? The difference is that the central planners, by nature of their job, are most concerned with long term growth, and the mass of people are more concerned with living their everyday lives, and the rest of society, or at least most of it, is an externality to them. Sure, this will be influenced by education and such, but it'd still be an externality.

that's not remotely what he was referring to and you know it.

>>You can post actual data any time now.
> digamo.free.fr/nove91.pdf
After the whole page of very bold statements, the first source is a fucking newspaper from the time of Perestroika that was used to justify Gorbachev's reforms that does not even say anything about peasants.

Moreover, author literally can't quote the source of Party nominating kolkhoz managers, but claims it was so, and proceeds to use it as a proof.

Is MarkSoc the cause of your brain damage, or an effect?

One clarification: what should convincing evidence look like? Because I already expect "unless it was a poll made by HUAC on a territory occupied by Western army, it doesn't count".

And anything that would support kulak's involvement is Communist propaganda, unless proven otherwise by Mises and Ayn Rand. Got it.

Wikipedia agrees
Cited these two sources:
V.I. Semchik , Cooperation and the Law, Naukova Dumka, Kiev (1991) (Russian).
Jump up ^ E.V. Serova, Agricultural Cooperation in the USSR, Agropromizdat, Moscow (1991) (Russian).
The author of that book I originally cited was an expert on the history of the soviet economy. I would link you to his more detailed work on the subject, but there is no place to get it for free unfortunately.

Hit me with whatever you got.

The amount of grain that was being horded was not nearly enough to make up for the shortage. I'm inclined to believe that soviet prices and a lack of subsidy was behind the problem.

forgot link
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkhoz#cite_note-2

This is going to be fun.

oh come on man not everything is capitalist propaganda, what are your sources for saying that there was no part nomination of candidates for the Kolkhoz system? There wasn't even much info on these things available to the public until the soviet union fell.

soviethistory.msu.edu/1936-2/second-kolkhoz-charter/second-kolkhoz-charter-texts/kolkhoz-statute/
Second Kolkhoz Charter:
> 19. The business of the artel is to be managed by the general meeting of the members and, in the intervals between the meetings, by the directors elected by the general meeting.
> (a) Elects the chairman and the directors of the artel and also the auditing commission of the artel; the auditing commission is approved by the district executive committee of the soviets;
Only auditing commission needs to get approval from local authorities.

tl;dr: Party did not nominate managers.
Local executive committee (democratically elected by local population) gets to approve - not nominate, nor elect - audition commission, whose duty is book-keeping. Recording shit. Not decision-making.

That's it.

Are you genuinely retarded?

LOL I bet you think that the Soviet Union was a democracy just because the constitution said so.

> there were secret laws

AHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

You don't understand: in socialism the mass of people is the central planner.

This is exactly what he was referring to and he didn't know it.

Well obviously you'd need someone to administrate the will of the mass of people and all, but like I was saying, if that is your strategy, you've got to be aware of the tendency for people to under-invest with that method of planning, and for goods that the minority need to be under-developed/produced.

I'm pretty sure his initial use of the word shared either refereed to shared between all of society or the workers of the business, either of which is vastly different from the absentee ownership of a publicly trading corporation.

Yes I'll need someone: the mass of people.

Yeah yeah, the human nature is to under-invest unless a "mechanism ensure that investment occurs", I get it.

But thank you for making me look again into your posts on the subject; indeed, I missed something the first time. So you say that:
And:
Now tell me something: you work in a shoe factory. What does "reaping the rewards of labor and productivity" actually mean, concretely? Consuming only shoes? Surely you can't eat shoes, drink shoes or wipe your ass with shoes (unless you are Gargantua), so the rest of society is not an externality to you. What exactly, "structurally" keeps you from telling to other branches of industry to invest in each other? Even in your own branch: you are already investing way more labour in shoes than you actually need to go and walk.

I'm pretty sure he referred to the latter, which is no different from the "absentee ownership" of a corporation.

The fact that you acknowledge no logistical hurdles to this is very revealing.

Not at all. The USSR over-invested after all and those in the planning committee were also human. Not to mention, many workers in cooperatives and small business owners accept much lower wages than necessary in capitalism to invest in their business, hoping to make the enterprise bigger.

Polluters still have to deal with the effects of pollution, perhaps less than others, but they still do. They have to deal with the consequences of their actions, but they still do them because the rewards for their actions are direct while the consequences are indirect. Similarly, in yugoslavia, the way the cooperative system was structured made it so that workers could control the businesses while not having to be responsible for the long term growth as while they had control, they did not have ownership and couldn't sell their share of the business once they left, and indeed turnover was high so they knew they wouldn't be staying with a particular business very long. This lead to enterprises putting all profits towards wages and using loans to make all investments, eventually leading to economic crisis.

In democratic central planning externalities occur from some consequences of the structure of the democratic system. For example, think of the bystander effect. Everyone wants higher wages and lower prices, right? But of course, we also know that if prices are too low and wages are too high, we'll eventually run into shortages. Or even if you're rationing goods, everyone wants more goods and benefits. The problem is that most people will probably vote to lower prices and increase good production at the cost of investment because they'll assume that someone else will vote for the investment, or they'll just vote for the investment later. Not to mention, as I said earlier, there are many things that only the minority of people consume, and yet for those people they are absolutely needed for their happiness and well being. If every one just votes for what they know they need, the minority will be left out. And indeed it may be impossible for the majority to know everything the minority needs given flows of information in a society.

MAXIMUM OVERWEW

The term for what you mean is probably the freerider problem, not the bystander effect. You are projecting capitalist relations into the future. Public spending and taxation will be decided on simultaneously, that is, your "ballot" (online and likely public information) is only valid if the taxation and spending side correspond to each other (I am not a conservative and don't think these sides need to be equal in the current society with mass unemployment, but when everything and everybody is put to use that's a different matter). I reject your claim that minorities will be completely ignored under a voting system, it depends on the voting system in question. That said, I don't have a problem with the majority of people controlling the majority (!=all) of the resources and human energy to invest.

Drop that passive-aggressive nonsense. You or another yugo-flag poster got asked a million posts ago what that sentence meant:

That statement is clear as mud. I can't read minds and didn't know that was supposed to imply you have to work there. If it was meant that way the wording invites misunderstanding.

Making the well-being of individuals strongly dependent on how their co-op performs in the free market is a bad idea. In the same sector, there are different competing companies with different quality of equipment. I don't want to reward or punish people based on the equipment they work with. That's why I prefer central planning.

They are conceptually very similar. They're both about inaction thanks to assuming someone else will solve the problem.

I fail to see how that's relevant? We're talking about production, distribution and investment.

in that case you have an even stronger incentive to not invest, as you cannot even defer the payment over time with credit.

But then you'll still need a mediator to make their two plans and demands compatible.

But regardless, if your online ballot informed through public information is the basis for your planning, and I'm assuming that this will also provide for a feedback mechanism to determine quality, you run into another problem with alienation. Are workers, in their capacity as workers, not to have any relevant say in their workplaces? Or will it be, like the in the USSR, that they get all their directives from regional and departmental authorities, even if these directives are determined by democracy? How is a democratic workplace reconcilable with a central plan that must be met? Or is the worker still to be alienated from his labor even in this democratic socialism? And on the flip side, if the workers do have power, how do you mediate a consumer's demand for quality with the worker's who are already concerned with meeting the quota's of the plan.

Everyone else got it.

Obviously we need to incentivize people to invest more and more, so that we'll reach full automation and thus reach communism through a state of abundance. I would say this is also possible if there was a single group charged with central planning, but that the under-production/consumption this would cause would lead to a large amount of suffering on the way there. Democratic planning would probably be the slowest option to reach that goal, however, out of these three.

What is very revealing is your incapacity to conceive a society passing hurdles without a state.

You aren't addressing my point: apart from shoes, there is no "direct reward" for a shoemaker's actions; how is the perspective of this "reward" gonna make him want to under-invest?

-____- Do you talk like that offline as well? Just say:
Is that so hard? Never mind, I can talk just as douchey and cryptic as you if you want that:

The reason you classify that as a separate topic is that your thinking doesn't go from macro to micro, but the other way around. As such, you are unable to grasp what any second-rate Marxist or even a Keynesian grasps about how the real world works.

Humanity as a whole doesn't have any debt. An individual may decide to work overtime now to buy a thing now, or buy that thing now on credit and work overtime at a later opportunity. But humanity as a whole cannot bring stuff from the future into the present and work for it later. You suffer from an illusion that comes from thinking at the micro scale and the macro scale as just a blown-up version of that.

That's like saying, "When you have an election with ranked ballots then you also need a mediator to make the two different rankings compatible."

1. Without the class antagonism and everybody being sure of having at least a basic standard of living for themselves and their kids, there will be less disagreement about stuff than in our stratified society. 2. When a plan specifies what material output mix is to be produced, this doesn't imply only one possible way people are assigned to doing tasks.

You need to seriously fuck off with your view that people should be patriots for the firms they work at. Cheers.

...

I admit it is possible, but not so long as the advocates of such a system fail to discuss the logistics and systemic problems they might face in introducing such a system. Nonetheless, market socialism is feasible in my life time, nearly all other farms of socialism are not.

What? Does he not get labor vouchers or whatever?

Private ownership of the means of production through a system of wage labor.

Imagine a revolution happens and the factories get taken from the bosses. We are looking at two firms in the same sector, one with top-notch equipment and one with outdated equipment. The workers in both places are very similar in their intelligence and willingness to work, but because of the different equipment, the output of workers in these two places is very different.

Scenario 1: The demarcation lines between the firms continue to exist. The scope of the revolution was only to get rid of the unelected bosses and give workers some rights in how to run the firms they work in. Remuneration is dependent on the market, so the firm with the better equipment gives workers better remuneration. Now the workers of the firm with the bad equipment are free to buy better equipment, as that stuff is also produced for markets and not handled by bureaucrats. But the workers at the firm with the bad equipment don't have much money and don't earn much money, precisely since they have bad equipment. They can get out this problem, maybe, by applying for credit. What if the interest rate is high? What if it is so high that they can't get the debt do shrink? Even with a low-interest loan they have to incur a penalty for the actions of their former boss.

Scenario 2: The revolution was of a Leninist-Autist type. The data for allocation of equipment for production is centrally processed, and we take into account the different equipment when setting remuneration levels, instead of directly going by output. So the workers in both places get the same.

I believe I would be more happy living in scenario 2.

Almost. It's actually private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Ethical/horizontal/democratic private enterprise (>muh coops) is still private enterprise.

Nobody talks the same way they write.

I thought we were talking about your money-less centrally planned socialism. How do you intend to collect taxes without money?

So suddenly we are talking all humanity? I assume you are referring to a global situation of socialism? So much for feasibility and transition I guess.

That's not the same and you know it. There are lots of logistics associated with any economic decisions, not all of which readily apparent, it's quite easy for two different ranked ballots for goods to contradict each other in a way that requires someone to figure out a compromise

This may be true in politics overall, but I'm sure you'll find wages and office politics are an entirely different matter. Think of it as the difference between political emancipation and human emancipation as marx talked about it in "On the Jewish Question", the characteristics of human emancipation as he defines them are clearly only possible in a situation of general abundance, which clearly we have not achieved in any transition to communism by definition of us transitioning.

Then we once again run into the problem of incentives and criteria for success that the soviet union had.

If a worker has no investment in the firm's long term welfare that can only be bad for production and quality, not to mention alienating from their other workers and the product of their labor.

Co-ops tend to put job security over profit.

Not to mention I think we need to keep the natural contradiction of profit where it increases automation at the expense at the rate of profit, as when it naturally destroys itself we will then arrive at communism.

Sounds very familiar to Walmart's, or any other ethical business's, 'people before profit!' mantra for the proles that totally ignores the machinic workings of capital accumulation and the contradictions between use and exchange value which naturally force ultra-competitive decisions upon firms and reveal contradiction. With le ebin ethical capitalist firms you'll simply reify it but it will feel just, because it happened >democratically.

Today is a good day.

Except it's backed up with a material basis. When you own a company, you're not going to let it fire you even if you are not making a profit. So long as you are breaking even, you get money at the end of the day.

People in a co-op may sacrifice pay and work harder/longer in response to competition, but they are less likely to fire people because. Also, we should keep in mind that perfect competition does not exist and thus will not be capable of dictating every single action a firm takes.

Also
WEW

First of all I was referring to co-ops operating in a framework of market socialism. But I think it's difficult to deny that having co-ops make up a major percent of our economy to the point they would actually be competitive with capitalist firms for market share would be a major political win from where we are now. Certainly the virus metaphor is not apt, they wouldn't be able to just out-compete capitalist firms and establish socialism, that would be silly, but it would create a political base of support for organizing workers and ending capitalism.

What does 'material basis' mean in this context? Are you just mumbling complicated-sounding Marxist terms you don't understand to make it seem like you have any idea of what you're talking about? Beyond the confines of your puerile understanding of what capitalism is and the 'alternative' to it you're proposing, there's no substance to your argument here and you're really not helping your case.

Most likely not. What'll happen though is that you'll either see your enterprise fail because you refuse to cut into your own costs, or because the endless process of 'democratic' decision making in your horizontally-run enterprise didn't birth any effective plan for you to decide to extract even more surplus through additionally performed SNALT and save the firm as it competes on the market with other firms. Because of the value form present which represents exchange value and not use value, your collective enterprise's failure will lead to poverty and you'll be dependent on selling your labor at another collective firm, which infatuate the effect of monopoly and give advantage to other firms.

Which is completely subject to the law of value and capital accumulation. Games by which you choose to play because you are still in capitalism.

Finally, an ad verbatim admittance: muh coops are just a nicer, more tolerant and ethical capitalism.

This is classical liberal invisible hand-tier rhetoric coming from a self-described socialist.

Yes, I take actual communists and their theory seriously and so should you. It'd be time much better spent than whatever it is you're spending it on now, which apparently leaves you in your current state of undisciplined intellectual poverty.

So not-socialism within the framework of a legally mandated ethical capitalism?

If all you care about is for your ethical capitalism to outcompete less ethical capitalism, you seem to fail to understand what the aim of being socialist is at all and you're for all intents and purposes just another disillusioned liberal that hasn't materially analyzed his pitiful proposition.

No, because your 'coops' still respond to the law of value, and you would at best simply normalize a new paradigm in which complacently accepting your ethical capitalism is seen as preferable to having actual socialism.

Let me tell you a little about myself, and my experiences working in a coop now for over four years, and how I learned it the hard way.

>t-totally not a market guise!!

leftcom and planningfags proving they have no idea what is actually happening

(Cont.)
So yeah, I work in a worker co-operative. We're reasonably successful with over 80 members yet internally there is a lot of conflict and ill feeling between workers. I was having a conversation with some of my coworokers one day about why this might be the case and it ultimate comes down to two very machnically defined things;

1. the inherently capitalistic structure of cooperative enterprise
2. material class interests

The nature and structure of worker co-operatives means that members assume the role of both worker and employer. While we must carry out or jobs as we would in any other business we also have the added responsibility of managing the company and insuring its financial success.

The objective class interests of workers and employers are opposed to one another, which creates conflict within the co-operative. It is in the interest of workers to increase their wages while reducing the amount of labour they have to perform while it is in the interest of employers to decrease the wages paid to employers while increasing the amount of labour they perform.

As a member of a worker co-operative your objective class interests lie with both the worker and the employer as you are fulfilling both roles. The two opposing interests will eventually conflict with one another and decisions will need to be made that are either in the interests of the members as workers or in the interests of the members as employers.

Where this causes an issue for class consciousness and any hope of actual socialism in general is that when these conflicts occur there is no clear enemy to attack but the inherent characteristics of capital, which is not evident without a solid understanding of the material forces this will always generate. Ultimately, you are the employer; you are the one who is responsible for this happening; there is no boss or absentee owner to rally against; there is only your fellow worker. This leads to conflicts around class interests descending into individual squabbles between workmates which harms the class as a whole.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoy working in a worker co-operative but after witnessing this sort of thing first hand I honestly believe that they are counter-intuitive towards class consciousness. The working class are being pacified by handing them control over the means of production under the materially mandated condition that they be forced to fight between themselves to make it work because of the existence of production for market exchange and the value form.

There is a belief among members of the co-operative movement that they are providing an alternative to capitalism by running their businesses in a democratic and horizontal manner. This focus on the form rather than the content should be considered a form of false consciousness and something communists should combat but instead I see a general degree of support for co-operatives among many so-called communists, often young people very charmed by New Left-type 'democratic socialists'.

(Don't even get me started on how worker co-operatives do nothing to address private property, wage labour, alienation, the law of value, generalised commodity production or any of the other features that make capitalism, capitalism.)

TL;DR: The co-ops have to maximize the value of their capital, and that usually means having people work through shifts. They have to reinvest some of their revenue in buying more means of production, and this reinvestment/wage ratio has to be comparable to that of other ('cooperative' or not) firms. The only advantage is that the portion of the surplus that would be consumed by the capitalist instead goes to the worker-owners, and yet there is a mandated, ever-increasing basis which must be reinvested to ever stay competitive and reply to the law of value.

Ownership and legal structure.

Tru but that has little to do with profit in the short term. I should also remind you that co-ops are generally run just as well as other sorts of businesses.

In market socialism I see no reason to expect there wouldn't be welfare to prevent destitution, and I've always advocated a state controlled fund that would buy up shares of the biggest industry and distribute the dividends and such in part to everyone, something that would be an effective UBI.

The law of value sure, but capital accumulation would be tempered by state regulations and progressive taxes.

According to you.

Only according to your idealist definition of capitalism. Do you expect us to reach full automation through luxury then?

lol wut?

Also, if anyone wants to know or cares: the cooperative I work at is an agrictulture plant that grows primarily grapes and also owns large caves where a large portion of them are pre-fermented for sale to third party wine distilleries and fruit juice manufacturers. My function is that of seasonal vintager in early spring and summer and one of the many administrators of logistics the rest of the year around.

Go sleep, Annie. It's past bedtime.

did you even read what I wrote?

What a beautiful word salad you got there.

That is not even an "advantage" worth noticing, for the capitalist does not consume most of his surplus anyway; he invests it.

I think you underestimate how much squabbling occurs in any given project.

Of course not, but property laws can't be addressed until we have a viable political movement that can change them, something cooperatives and associations of cooperatives can help accomplish.
Considering you also control the surplus value produced it's not just wage labor, and at the very least the issue is being addressed through co-ops.
I fail to see how centrally planned enterprises would reduce alienation.
we need a law of value until we have a condition of abundance.
comes with the law of value

Yes but even when it is reinvested that's a good thing as that brings us closer and closer to a state of abundance and full automation.

Where does this meme come from?

….go look at how much money is made on the stock market and through private ownership of companies and then get back to me about how that's not worth noticing.

It's the logic conclusion to the law of value and the logic of capital. Capital is meant to increase productivity, to use less and less labor to produce the same amount of goods in the same amount of time. Eventually you'll reach a point where the capital exists where no labor is required at all. At this point, the law of value breaks down.

… only to go straight back to stock market and investment in private companies. You can't consume all this value; you have to reinvest it to compete.

Are you really this illiterate?

No they can't consume all of it, but even if their reinvestment rate is some 75% the amount of money we're talking about is enormous. Those people don't get to ride around in private jets and buy billions of dollars of shit for nothing.

You know Donald Trump's tax returns where he lost a billion dollars. He still had an annual income of over three million.

you know what i meant faggot. The tools would be capable of working themselves, that's a contradiction of terms, but one needed to describe the situation.

A labour-based voucher is not a reward; it's a certificate of the work you've done, entitling you to a part of some of society's products. You cannot invest labour vouchers.

So yes, it is a reward, it doesn't matter whether you are entitled to it because of your actions or if its a muh privilege.

But they have exchange value, do they not?

...

doesn't paul krugman's dick need to be sucked or something, rebel?

No. If I certify you have posted on this board, it isn't a reward for posting on this board.

Of course not. That's the point. May I remind you we are discussing your claim that there would be either under- or over-investment in a tradeless society? Tradeless means no exchanges.

Tell that to reddit.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Ok, first of all, even a centrally planned economy has trade by nature of having a division of labor. Secondly, we were discussing whether compensation for labor created externalities for people in their capacity as workers.

Labor vouchers would be used to receive goods and services, correct? Are they not capable of being transferable? And if so, why?

And anyway, of course there can be under or over-investment without trade! If the plan doesn't allocate enough towards innovation and future production then you might have shortages in the future. If you have put too much towards the future you will have shortages today!

Do you have memory issues? This:

is what we are discussing. You claim that there has to be a "mechanism to ensure that investment occurs" (your mechanism being: the market).
So no, you didn't say that under-investment can occur in a tradeless society; you said that it will occur.

No.
What do you mean, why? Why they shouldn't or why the cannot?

That was the larger issue, but my point was dependent on externalities which you were conveniently avoiding.

I am quite sure that investment will occur regardless of what system we are talking about, but the system will determine if there is systemic under or over investment. Certainly in market socialism both the state planning and a market would be responsible for investing.

Once again, central or democratic planning doesn't mean no trade. Secondly, I stated that depending on the sort of planning there will be either over or under investment.

They're making the same commodity.

You know damn well that's not just what's happening.

So they are transferable?

Both.

Also, it never ceases to amaze me when leftcoms and like fall for the ancap meme that capitalism is just trade.

Yes it does. Once again, that's the whole point of communism.

Yeah I know I was too lazy to write both; the point being that, according to you, there can't be the right amount of investment without a market.

So? It's division of labour, without trade.
My wife clean the dishes, and then hand them to me so I can dry them. Still division of labour, still no trade.

That's not just what's happening in capitalism… or in "market-socialism". Because there I won't give away my commodity if you don't give another commodity of equal value in exchange.
In communism, on the other hand, that's exactly what's happening.

No. I have certified you have posted on this board. Is this transferable?

Because then it's a commodity, and we haven't moved a millimetre from capitalism.
Because no one will to give you anything in exchange for you labour voucher, while you won't need anything one could offer you.
And also because that will be illegal (this part is more important during the revolution itself).

Tell me something: have you ever actually read Capital?

Yes, but in all attempts of planned economies they've had to simulate trade in order for it to work.

There can be, but it would be quite unlikely.

It is a vertical division of labor, I was referring to a division of labor between the production of different commodities.

In communism, on the other hand, that's exactly what's happening.
Wrong, in any transitory state to communism you are giving up your labor for something, namely goods and services. Keep in mind that what we are talking about is a transitory state, and not communism itself as I am all for that once it is possible.

It depends on the nature of the certification. You could certify that /someone/ has posted on this board, and thus it would become transferable.

Already, but what's the specific problem from it becoming a commodity. If you have a banana and I have labor vouchers, and I want the banana and you want the labor vouchers to get something else, both people end up benefiting. No wage labor was involved, no one is being exploited, and certainly no ability for large amounts of capital accumulation. Indeed if the state can provide for all wants this wouldn't be a problem, but if they aren't then why would this be unethical?

So you intend to have a socialist police force to imprison anyone who trades? Certainly Marx didn't believe this was necessary.

Parts of it, as well as the Jewish Question and the manifesto. I have several disagreements with Marx, for in several places he criticizes without thinking through the alternative very well, and thus was being rather romantic and idealistic. But I think I've also made it clear where we agree.

Yugoslav poster what do you think of Bukharin?

I haven't read anything by him except small excerpts but from what I saw he appeared to be highly idealist. Should have stuck to cartoons.

Alright but where did you get those cartoons from?

How about Deng Xiaoping?

How are leftcoms so fucking dumb?

how exactly do central planning authorities come up with the number of people that have to be destined to farmwork compared to the people destined in medicine?

the use value of wheat is fixed, as long as all wheat is produced in sufficient quantities and in good quality, the use value of a certain medicine is also fixed because of the same reason,because they are useful

they however, have different exchange values which do not come from the fact that they are useful or not, but because they require to be manufactured in certain quanitties accoridng to the needs of the population

If you tards make the claim that the central planning authorities will have to decide how many tonnes of wheat are going to be made vs the amount of medicine pills, and how many workers will be assigned to each activity (along with development of new technologies, maintenance, investment and so on) then its cristal clear to understand how they are still engaging in some form of market exchange, since they are assigning a different value to each commodity which is individual from their use value, you are quantifiying it's use value

in case of a famine, the use value of wheat increases, and so does the use value of medicine in case of general illness, the central planning authority that decides to assign the amount of workforce to each area IS, again, engaging in some form of market exchange

you simply cannot think of achieving any form of general wellbeing without market exchange until every worker can easily and quickly produce every commodity they want, thats utopian, not impossible, but unable to be achieved in present times

by letting the central planning authorities do the market exchange for you, you are basically letting them take the role of the owners of the means of production, which is literally not socialism

dont know why I wrote individual

The quantity of a product is part of its use-value, you fucking ignorant.
10kg of wheat is use-value.
1000 pills is use-value.
Etc.

Jesus fucking CHRIST.

You should have stopped at
or even
because this thread might be one of the biggest displays of socioeconomic illiteracy ever, especially coming from a self-described socialist.

Well, thanks for being honest about it.

There literally has been none.

My wife do the cooking, I do the laundry. Different products (not commodities, they are not for sale), yet still no trade.

There is no "transitory state" to communism. You are confusing communism itself with its higher-stage.
As for socialism, aka: the lower-stage of communism, you do indeed give up workforce for goods and services… but this is simply a definition of work!
The difference with capitalism lies in the fact that a proletarian, or market-oriented producer, does not give up workforce for goods and services: he gives it up for any equivalent in terms of labour time, which in turn he will give up again to get goods and services.

(to be cont.)

Riddle me this: I have no interest in "my" firm's long-term welfare, and I even got stock options. There are other things in life.

What is a firm? A miserable pile of people around things.

You must break the firm, not reform it. By that I don't mean that we should burn down everything and go live among salmon, I mean: change how we relate to the means of production, and other human beings.

When a person is hired for a firm (whether that is a co-op or not), there are two issues happening rolled into one: The hired person gets to interact with 1) the equipment that belongs to the firm and 2) other people that belong to the firm. These two issues can be split up analytically. Hiring in the sense of who gets to work with what sort of equipment is not something we can leave to small inward-looking groups legally held responsible for what happens to them in the market (to avoid the issue mentioned in ). Hiring in the sense of going together with people you want to work with can be handled in a way that gives more power to individual opinion than what people under capitalism are familiar with. One and the same macro plan can be fulfilled in billions of different ways. Many decisions can be handled in a very local and ad-hoc way. For example, at a place where the equipment isn't currently in use 24/7, the same output might also be obtained by longer and less intensive work (or shorter and more intensive).

Producers will freely associate with producers, that is people choose the people they want to work with. The means of production will be held in common, not compartmentalized and held by many small groups in permanent conflict with each other.

(cont.)

I could certify such a thing, but it has nothing to do with you. It's not a transfer of your own certificate.

The problem is that a society producing a big quantity of commodities is capitalist.
You can't have massive commodity production without wage labour, exploitation and capital accumulation. This is where having actually read Capital would be useful.

Certainly Marx did believe this was necessary during the revolution. As for after the revolution, I doubt many people will have a reason to break these laws to begin with, and enforcing them won't require "a socialist police" anyway, just people like you and me.

Can someone explain what they want instead of the market? Central planning? Why would central planning not be the failure it was in the Soviet Union? Or, why would decentralized planning be better, if that is your alternative?

Again, what do you mean by "failure?"

Any planning that occurred in the soviet union (most production in the USSR wasn't planned) happened mostly in terms of monetary accounting, in other words things were still being valued in terms of abstract labour time. Leftcoms want calculation in kind (calculation in terms of magnitudes of physical things) and production for use, which is something completely different.

For starters, Soviet Union had markets, not central planning.
Moreover, when the ruling party was actually communist (in the 20's), Russia lacked the material conditions to imlement central planning; by the time it had the material conditions, there was not a single communist alive anymore.
Not to mention that having a stable central planning in one country is impossible.

To put it simply: exactly the same thing you know today (in the first world). Except that you don't get paid for your work and you don't pay in the supermarket. Also some scarce goods are rationed.

no, stop being stupid
marxists.org/glossary/terms/u/s.htm

Exchange value is related to it's quantity
marxists.org/glossary/terms/e/x.htm
Exchange-value is the quantitative aspect of value, as opposed to “use-value” which is the qualitative aspect of value, and constitutes the substratum of the price of a commodity.

leftcoms everyone

This quote literally contradicts the point you are trying to make:

In other words: 500 tons of iron is a use value, but 500 socially necessary abstract labour hours worth of iron is an exchange value.

This.

Could you please stop disgracing yourself?

And by the way, there are no "leftcoms" here; simply actual Marxists.

the point I am trying to make is that central planning still commodifies use values, considering their exchange value instead when rationing them among the workers

500 hundred tonnes of iron is describing the amount of iron you have, but iron by itself has a defined use value

you see when you are implying the amount of use values you have is what defines the usefulness of a commodity and while it certainly does, that is very much related to its exchange value

if you think you can imply 500 tonnes of iron have more use value than one tonne, it is because you are commodifying them, thinking about how you will exchange them on a market

which what is produced under central planning rule, thus commodities ave exchange value

If you tards make the claim that the central planning authorities will have to decide how many tonnes of wheat are going to be made vs the amount of medicine pills, and how many workers will be assigned to each activity (…) then its cristal clear to understand how they are still engaging in some form of market exchange
That's like saying the leader of an army ordering X amount of his men to do some task and Y amount of his men to do some other task is engaging in some form of market exchange.

But according to the definition you link to in the next post I quote from, the use value of a thing is intrinsic to it.

You don't understand the context of the snippets you quote. The term "qualitative" highlights how use values of different product categories are not something you can simply add up, in that use value is different from exchange value. Use value (unlike the marginalist concept of utility) is intrinsic to the physical qualities of a product. When talking about multiple units of the same product, you can add up. Post got it right. The distinction made in that post is not sophistry. Consider what happens when there is a quick innovation in the production of a product with a very long shelf-life. The socially necessary abstract labour hours for the stuff already on the shelves drops, but in terms of use-value what is there on the shelves doesn't change.

Your posts mix up classical use-value with neoclassical marginal utility. You also claim that making any sort of decision-making about producing more of a use value X means producing less of use value Y is a market. I can't make sense of your posts.

...

No, under planned production calculation is done in concrete terms, both physical magnitudes of material things and *concrete* labour time. Abstract labour time doesn't enter into the equation.

no, because the fruits and results of labour of the soldiers will not be later residstributed between them, soldiers do not produce goods that are later on delivered to them using an exchange value dictated by the central authority, workers do

thats true, I made a mistake, I should have written "exchange value" in the famine sentence

I understand what you are talking about use value, but let's think about this, if you manage to create a technology that manages to reduce the labour hours needed to produce certain amount of products, yet another product still takes longer to produce, how do the central planing authorities balance this?bI understand that you could simply take the men that were previously working on the farmland and take them to the iron ore, reducing the labour needed on the mine, this is irrelevant to how the decision of creating technology to reduce labour necessary on the farmlands or to increase the amount of workers in a iron mine

you see I am not arguing about production, but on how the central planning authority determines how to assign workers on their respective areas, and how later they decide to ration the products to the workers

I understand what you are implying, but lets think about this:

If you are considering that rice has a certain value, as a concept, (this being individual from the amount of rice) then it is pretty obvious that more rice will be better, however you are forgetting something, If you make the value judgement from the perspective of your wife, considering that your wife might not be able to eat 500g of rice, and thus end up as waste, then yes the extra rice has no use-value to your wife. it might have some extra value in the future on the next meal, but there will be a point where she simply won't be able to east rice anymore, when she dies of course so, thus making any extra amount of rice basically useless

use value, while needing a defined quantity in order to be considered useless, doesn't necessarily need an infinite supply of said use value in order to be considered useful, more isn't necessarily better

now the thing is my main point has nothing to do with this, my point is that, somehow had to decide that a worker had to farm that rice, and someone decided to serve certain amount of rice in both of ur plates, in this case let's pretend it was your wife

your wife had to make a value judgement, in order to decide how much rice to farm, cook and serve compared to literally any other commodity on earth. she assigned an exchange value to them, not rom the persepctive of the use value rice has by itself, but on its value compared to other commodities

and this is not even touching my second point, on how a central authority would ration the products of workers with again, another exchange value judgement

This isn't what value means in the marxist sense. You're actually invoking subjective value theory here. Are you sure you're not an ancap troll?

but there is nothing subjective about the idea that you need a defined quanity of food to survive, we know the amount of fat, carbs, protein and so on our bodies need.

now if you absolutely want to label it as subjective value theory, then the central planning authorities must engage in the same subjective judgement, because they absolutely need to come up with certain production number, with certain quotas, independent from what the workers might demand, and assign a diffeent amount of workers to each sector based on this "subjective" value theory you are implying my wife is engaging in (she isn't, and marx knew this)

if you are implying that central planning authorities do not engage in a subjective value judgement, but my wife is, then I nedd you to explain what kind of judgement they are engaging in

Okay, how about this: I do certain activities as hobbies (not selling anything when doing these). When deciding between these activities, I'm also taking into account how long it takes me to do them. The fruits of these activities are delivered to myself. Is that a market, according to you?

Use value is intrinsic to the product, you are talking about marginal utility. Again.

You are misunderstanding people because you use the basic terms we structure our discussions around in a way nobody else does. This is a common problem in Holla Forums, but you take it to another level.

no because this is purely individualistic, I agree there is no market exchange here

HOWEVER

you cannot come up with the conclusion that the same would be under a centrally planned economy, because it is not an individual but a collective, and unless each worker is able to satisfy all of his needs with his own dinividual work (and I am talking about every production aspect of each commodity, from the production of the instrument needed to find iron needed to create the farm, needed to create milk, and then creating hiw own delivery truck using his own road) some form of market exchange will occur

you can't have it both ways user

either the 200 gram plate has a different use value to the 500 gram one or it doesn't, otherwise there would be no reason for you for posting this

if the quantity of rice is irrelevant (it isn't, but its not what determines use value at all) then use-value is complety independent from quanityt

If the quantity of rice is relevant,(it is because it would satisfy different human needs) then it is because each indidivual plate has an exchange value, my plate has more value than my wife

ok, if such thing is true, then how do the central planning authorities come up with the idea that a 500 gram plate is better simply because it has 500 grams, hos is this not a purely subjective value judgement from their part?

...

I didn't make that post.

Once again, use value of an object is intrinsic to its physical properties. So, talking about different amounts of the same product as different amounts of use value is allowed. When making a statement such as, this one chair is worth X amount of orange juice, you either talk about what it exchanges for in the market or you make a statement about your subjective utility, which is different from the concept of use value in classical economics, as you have been already told.

Okay.

That was me, not the user you're responding to here.

You keep repeating this nonsense in different ways over and over again, despite having been provided with several examples proving it wrong, without ever giving a single beginning of a proof yourself.

please read again

you are the ones conflicting the terms value (exchange value) and use value. use value comes from the idea that a thing can satisfy human needs, marx never said this idea cannot hold any form subjectivity, quite the opposite actually

use value is only becomes a property of a commodity if said commodity is used or consumed, if my wife cannot east 500 grams of rice, if she can only eat 200 grams, then the other 300 grams hold no use value to herwe understand rice has certain use value, but how it satisfy each individual is purely subjective

I don't like moustard, moustard holds no use value for me, but you might enjoy it, so it does have use value for you
marx was never againts this idea

let's not forget human needs and consumptions are limited, so there is a limit of how much use values a human can consume in their lifetime. exchange value however come from the idea that a 500 gram plate of rice holds more value than the 200 gram one when exchanged on a market and I am pretty sure I have tried to make this distinction clear. moreover, you cannot claim you eliminate exchange value with simply giving the control of production to the central planning authority

now a central planning authority, must consider how each use value satisfies human needs and later on engage in a value judgement in order to determine how many workers will be destined to produce said use value ( because workers will later exchange their labour for them) If only one workers wants mustard, then it makes no sense to destine a lot of workers to the production of mustard

a central planned economy is still responding to market forces. you cannot said work is not commodified in a centrally planned economy, if workers have to respond to market forces, these market forces exist even when it is controlled by the central authority

we already discussed humans can only consume a limited amount of use values in their life, therefore a central planning authority has to come up with a number of use values in order to let workers satisfy their needs, while doing this it is again engaging in an exchange value judgement, because workers will engage in exchange the amount of use values they produced with other ones, the amount of which was decided by a central planned authority

its still a market, just because you go to the supermarket store and your mom tells you you can only buy 10 dollars worth of candy, doesn't mean an exchange isnot happening

I don't deny that that is a very practical project, but you cannot deny that the person who wrote this

is using highly idealist logic

Not an argument

...

You deny that the soviet union was an attempt at a planned economy?

Feminists would say the wife is doing unpaid labor, and add that slavery was based on this idea. Certainly housework is evident of people doing labor without a wage. I further do not deny that goods can be shared without trade, as in primitive communism. But it is clearly evident that all of society would not be a single productive unit, as in the case of the house, the tribe and the firm. There will be divisions and you must have theory to prepare for those.

Lenin distinguished socialism as a transition to communism, and as communism itself being the higher state. I am inclined to go with his definition.

…which is still the case if we replace a wage with receiving labor vouchers.

What you are talking about is called marginal utility.

You misunderstand the project of market socialism. Certainly the petit-bourgeoisie have pride in their work because they have a sense of having towards their firm, and certainly the manager in the soviet union took pride in the well-being of his departmental area. We mustn't forget alienation from one's own labor, something central planning does easily. What sense of ownership can I get from a massive state controlled firm? The goal of market socialism is not only to end exploitation, but to give everyone a sense of ownership in their work.

As to your complaint of unfair capital concentration, certainly one solution is that of Rojava where capital is provided by the state to different cooperatives, and another is for state support for disadvantaged firms to get one time support in buying new capital.

How are those two statements compatible if people cannot freely create productive units with those they like to associate with?

It could easily have something to do with me, if because I posted I received a non-unique token.

But we are not talking about massive commodity production. We're talking about self-employed individuals and small cooperatives.

Also
The issue of exploitation and wage labor are clearly resolved in a cooperative. Or else you would be implying the capitalist is exploiting himself as well as the workers by being forced to give up some of his surplus to maintain his status as a capitalist.

Whenever I read Marx I only agree with him a little more than half the time.

And yet we're not talking about the revolution, we're talking about what happens after. Or perhaps my definition of a transitory state is a revolution for the reformist. Who knows. But I would disagree with the idea that all those who attempt to fix the failures of the state need to be locked up! For what do you do when your centrally planned economy fails? Every economic system will have failures, what theory do you have about fixing communism's?

Ah so you're just going to have ideological vigilantes solve the problem, great idea!

All that you've said is true but I would like to add that none of it is necessarily a bad thing. After all, the more that gets invested into capital the more efficient production becomes and the closer we get to full automation and the end of the law of value. But thanks to the democratic nature of cooperative I tend to think that there will usually be a healthy balance between re-investment and current compensation, and if not the state can interfere to correct for such imbalances.

no, I really am not

You should read it again (?).

K. Marx, Capital vol. I, I, 1, ii:
>To all the different varieties of values in use there correspond as many different kinds of useful labour, classified according to the order, genus, species, and variety to which they belong in the social division of labour. This division of labour is a necessary condition for the production of commodities, but it does not follow, conversely, that the production of commodities is a necessary condition for the division of labour. In the primitive Indian community there is social division of labour, without production of commodities. Or, to take an example nearer home, in every factory the labour is divided according to a system, but this division is not brought about by the operatives mutually exchanging their individual products. Only such products can become commodities with regard to each other, as result from different kinds of labour, each kind being carried on independently and for the account of private individuals.

...

Kill yourself

Are you utterly uneducated on the dynamics of labor vouchers?

Unlike money, vouchers cannot circulate and are not transferable between people. They are also not exchangeable for any means of production hence they are not transmutable into Capital. Once a purchase is made the labour vouchers are either destroyed or must be re-earned through labour. Therefore, with such a system in place, monetary theft would become impossible.

Additionally, the only kind of market that could exist in an economy operating through the use of labour vouchers would be an artificial market (arket) for mostly non-productive goods and services; as with the dissolution of money, capital markets could no longer exist and labour markets would also likely cease to exist with the abolition of wage labor which would by necessity occur with the adoption of vouchers.

This oh so painfully reaffirms your own admittance of not reading Capital at all. The cringiest part in all this is that you use Marxist terminology throughout the whole thread without having any knowledge beyond their function as buzzwords to feign having an intellectually-motivated statement and, when confronted with this fact by anyone who knows how full of shit and nothing you are, the only thing people here get back from you is a shitpost and an anime jpeg.

If you had read the thread you'd know we already discussed this issue.

In the part you quoted we were specifically discussing one particular feature of labor vouchers. That user claimed that labor vouchers were not in fact an exercise in simply giving people a measure of their labor time/power as a way to get goods and services. Labor vouchers are clearly an equivalent that is exchanged for goods and services, you're not consuming the labor vouchers themselves now are you?!

…so exactly what the soviet union had.

It would be if done in the framework of market socialism.

It's painfully obvious that you haven't even read most of the thread.

this post,

is only worthy of a shitpost and anime jpeg.

How exactly do labor vouchers abolish wage labor?

But not burried it finally as you should realize you're fully of shit.

They are, in that they are rendered obsolete on consumption and are then virtually useless. Just a piece of paper with no value beyond maybe wiping your ass with before recycling them or have them decompose organically over time.

This is the direct consequence of labor vouchers being directly proportionate to use-value based on time labored, unlike the value form in money which is pertinent when recognized and a dollar bill does not cease to have economic value when you buy your plastic dildo with it from Alibaba.

Except the Soviet Union had the money form (Russian roubles) and market distribution following wage labor. The only difference being pertinent state mediation in currency valutas and exchange rates, which still could not keep it from entering the inevitable crisis of capital accumulation that comes with it.

I wonder if you're trolling at this point.

Top meme.

The answer is above, as it comes with
A labor voucher directly represents a one-time exchangeable piece of evidence that says you worked [X amount of time] and are thus entitled to a product equivalent to [X amount of time]'s value of the voucher.

This is the opposite of a wage, which represents (necessarily in money, which is the use-value form) the remnants of what is left after surplus extraction into capital accumulation.

Oh really, then summarize the previous arguments if you would.

If you consume them that would likely mean that you do not have them. I feel that allowing people to keep them after consumption would eventually lead to problems in accounting.

This is interesting. So you're saying that the use-value of the thing being produced determines how much labor vouchers you are getting? But how do you reconcile that with society wanting things with high use value to be valued at lower numbers of labor-vouchers?

Did they have wage labor? It sounds an awful lot like the system you just described for communism except with a transferable unit of exchange value. Certainly, they didn't have a market for the factors of production. The only market existed for final goods.

TOP KEK

I find it curious that you place the emphasis on money and not surplus extraction. If suddenly the capitalist state decided that everyone should be paid in labor vouchers instead of money, but kept all other relations the same, that would no longer be a wage?

huh

I'm not here to spoonfeed a summary of what is effectively over 100 posts calling out your ignorance on the subject, up to you admitting you haven't even read Marx, to saying you think Marx is an idealist(?), to invoking market socialism using Wolff's (a Marxist's) rhetoric, to you basically saying 'you're right, BUT…', to now asking why you should have left this thread days ago to actually read even the most basic introductions to the dynamics of capital and have a cogent reply to basically anything here.

The rest of your post is just too much of a word salad as well, dude.

Which is why, in Marx's, Lenin's, Bordiga's, Lukacs, etc.'s time (where there were no computers and inter-communicational digital systems), the simple solution was not to let them keep them on consumption but to save and destroy them. With computers and the internet, or even in the later part of actual communists and their lives where there was already radio technology capable of signaling complex data signals, this system would occur from a distance with digital footprints.

Yes. It appears you have neither read capital or even investigated the Soviet Union's economic system to conclude it was capitalistic.

A capitalist system resembles a communist system? That's a new one.

Wrong. marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1941/ussr-capitalist.htm

No, this is where the 'top kek' goes.

Utopian socialism is in the dustbin of history. This meme does not work anymore.

I do not. The reason money stands central as one of the beginnings to any serious materialist understanding of political economy is because it [money] and surplus extraction [money commodified from a wage, ergo deducted from the surplus of its total not value] are not separable.

This is where your crass understanding of capitalism is in full effect; that you think capitalism is merely enabled by the capitalist bogeyman ordering the workers what to do. It undermines the mechanistic function and properties of capital itself and why Marxist critique of capitalism is so unique: it sees the relations between capital (dead labor) and the market in its entirety. To think market exchange using value form except with horizontally-organized firms instead of vertically-organized ones changes anything about the internal dynamics of capital accumulation.

Now read Marx.

Actually, call Marxist economics idealist again, then return to watching and linking RDW (a Marxist's) videos from which you get your market socialism meme from and return here once more for extra keks.

total net* value

Okay, having read the other threads you post in, I think I get now what you mean. A market is whenever there is more than one person and numbers are involved. So teaching somebody math is a market, pirates on a ship voting for their leader is a market, a doctor measuring your pulse is a market.

Top kek leftcoms

Literally not.

literally yes

Why are you directing your butthurt over the labor voucher system towards left communists/anti-Bolsheviks when it is both the general pre-ML form of currency that was advocated as economic praxis for communists, but literally Marx's own proposal as well? Even mutualists (anarchist left tendency, even though it is very much deprecated and dead) advocated for labor vouchers as currency.

See:
worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/depth-articles/history/labour-vouchers#NOSHORT
but also
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm (which honestly any self-respected leftist worth his salt should read at least once).

Your posts get worse by the day.

A check is money. A commodity. A product that is destined to be exchanged. Which a labour is not.

* labour voucher

You exchange a labor voucher for goods and services. Your only qualification is that unlike money it is not transferable or able to circulate. That is also true for a check or a money order.

Because he has his own, opportunist, pre-conceived ideas but somehow finds it cool to claim he's a Marxist (despite having not read/understood a line of Marx). So when actual Marxists prove him wrong in regard to both his theory and his claim to be a Marxist, he needs to call them something else: "leftcoms". The term is convenient because the most prominent actual Marxists to have survived Stalin's counter-revolution had already been categorised as such by Lenin's time; so what was in fact a categorisation in a limited controversy persisted until now.

You don't. How many times does it need to be said?

really? so what do you exchange labour vouchers for?

Nothing.

so let me see if I get this correctly: I get my labour voucher then I go to the supply house and I don't exchange it for bread, medicine, water or anything?

K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha programme:

Could you finally be getting something?

You're still not getting it. The voucher isn't exchanged because upon being "spent" it is destroyed. Ripped up like a movie ticket stub. Canceled out. The store person or service provider doesn't keep the voucher and accumulate them, and as such nothing is really exchanged. They simply use it as a way to verify that you've actually done work.

Do you exchange your good school results for a diploma?

yes, if you don't get good grades, you cannot get a diploma

a score above 5 usually means you can get a diploma, a score under 5 means you need to take the course again

clearly scores under 5 have a different value than the scores over 5

Yes.

Btw, I find the fact we keep using the term "vouchers" pretty stupid tbh. The underlying idea is to keep a record of everyone's labour. Of course, by Marx's time, that meant using vouchers, because we would have needed to be able to access this record in any store at any time. But now we have better means to achieve this: internet, RFID, etc.
So I think we'd better use the terms "labour record", which are way less confusing.

Are the good results symbolic for your virtue as an apprentice, which then earns you a degree? Or does the teacher take your good school results to metastasize them into a re-exchangeable commodity?

You have to be trolling. One can't be this dumb.

You can use your good grades for the diploma of different schools of you like by transferring to other schools before graduation

there is still accumulation in the scenario you are describing, a person that works 8 hours clearly will be able to earn more "labour records" than a person that works 1

let's not forget a person that works 8 hours in construction is going to need a higher caloric intake than a person that works as a store clerk, meaning he will need more products in order to satisfy his needs

glad you finally understand why the diploma analogy is fucking stupid, a diploma is not re-exchangeable, but products are

a chicken breast, which I obtained with my labour record, can be exchange for another product after both me and the guy who I will exchange the chicken breast with have already exchanged my labour record/vouchers whatever

yes, products produced and delivered under a planned economy are indeed exchangeable

So?

Oh, and:
>labour records
Wtf?

Products are exchangeable in any society. Because it is not a characteristic of the products. The exchange is not a relation between products, it is a relation between people. One that will not happen in communism.

Market exchange is not a zero sum game because it is trade of exchange-values (represented in the money form), and not use-values.

I can't believe it is necessary to explain this to someone who claims to know what they are talking about.

Here: youtube.com/watch?v=5C6zg_wzFLE&list=PL3F695D99C91FC6F7&index=13. A video with nice distraction and fun animations might be more to your liking than paperback or freely available PDFs on the internet.

Stop posting for now, please. It just hurts,

well its not the people the ones who will decide how many hours they can work, but the central planning authorities, eventually meaning people will have different work hours due to the technology allowing certain sectors to engage in less energy requiring labour and other having to complete the full worktime

you cannot imply you will let people decide how much and where they will be working, and implyi you will have control over production as a central authority, it make no sense

how are you going to balance your numbers in this case?

but the use-value of the products is partially what determines its exchange value

of course not, it is a relation between their value

umm what mechanism are you going to create to stop this? I already described several situations where people:
a) will be able to hoarde products
b) will be able to exchange them

even if you have controlled production and delivery via labour vouchers and production quotas

use values are kind of subjective, even marx agrees with this

I can't belive I need to explain this to you considering you have a marx face along your post

marxists.org/glossary/terms/u/s.htm

a shoe size 3 has no use-value for me, this is not even some retarded meme like subjective thery of value, a shoe size 3 has literally no use value for me

even if you want to arguee you will have an economy based on use-values alone, you will ecounter the fact that, given that use-values hold certain amount of subjectivity, products will be subject to some for of value judgement, therefore acquiring exchange value in the process

Use values are not subjective. What is subjective is what which of the given use values are useful to any given consumer of them. The entire reason the law of value succeeds to analyze and give reliable results when applied to capitalism is precisely because use-value is so entirely reliant on what we know the use-value is.

You are here literally conflating the category of [market] value (price, dependent on money form) and value, the former of which is relatively subjective in that it depends on the fluctuating market forces. StV, which Marxist economics rejects, attempts to make the case that use-value is subjecting by conflating price with [use-]value. It's like I'm talking to an Austrian.

The rest of your post literally appears to suggest that you believe communism [post-value form society] is impossible. I want to make a kneejerk comment here and say you're a liberal (what with basically supporting ethically rebranded capitalism with a hue of red), but I'd much rather ask you: have you even read any Marx and do you truly understand the hypothetical dynamics of a post-capitalist society laid out by the communist movement? This thread suggest that the answer to both here is a big 'no'.

Balance what? What the fuck are you talking about?

You put an "s" where I put none. Which means you completely missed the point. Again.

How? Do tell me?

But they won't need to!

think about how a planned production system would have to work, in order to avoid accumulation of commodities, you would need to produce commodities according to the needs of the workers

but if you don't have a controlled population, forcing them to work in certain sectors you won't be able to meet the production number you originally planned to, which means workers won't be the owners of the MoP, neither of their labour, considering they will have to meet working quotas

I am not saying market socialism solves the economic calculation problem, I am not a retarded austrian, but neither can planned economies, however, market socialism doesn't aim at solving it.

but then how exactly do you think of meeting production numbers if working 8 hours doesn't produce the same amount of products as working 1 hour?

I did here a size 3 shoe has no use-value for me, on a capitalist economy this simply wouldn't matter to me, since I would exchange it on a market, however if I produce size 9 shoes and my neighbour produces long shirts and pants, we can exchange our products based on the fact that they have use value for both of us, not simply because of the exchange value they posses

then how are you thinking of meeting planned production quotas?

If you dont have planned production and you don't have market socialsim, how exactly are you planning on achieving production?

This guy doesn't seem to believe communism is the end of value in society.

and how do you plan to achieve production and delivery of said individual use-values of not with a market?

absolutely

however, something has use value only when it is used or consumed, and I am quoting marx here

I am not even talking about price because in no where in my posts did I mentioned any form of money, try again

also, I am linking this post here in case anyone can actually come up with a reply

Exactly. My. Fucking. Point

humans cannot satisfy all their needs by themsleves, and you certainly are not self sufficient on a planned production economy either, there is some form of exchange happening. you cannot have a democratically deiced controlled market and fall for the well-its-not-really-a-market meme. that is pure sophistry

it is the same under a planned economy consisting of demcoratic production quotas

I will have to produce something with use-value for someone else, something that would have no use-value for me. it is retarded to belive I could produce something that has no use-value for anyone and be able to satisfy the needs of other workers.

you don't need to involve money at all, you could engage in some form of bartering, let's think I need plastic, and paint for my sunglasses, I will order certain amount of plastic and paint, it would get delivered I would produce sunglasses, sunglassesthat have use-value for the people that produced the plastic and the paint

there you have a market exchange without money or prices, simply on the basis of the use-value they poses

of course you could involve money to make things a lot more efficient, but that could let to capital accumulation unless some form of authority prevents this

Kek let’s just ignore the fact that you’ve all basically admitted that you have no theory on the failure of a centrally/democratically planned system, that you have admitted you have no theory of externalities, that your proposed system of labor vouchers and restrictions on trade puts a straight jacket on anyone who wants to solve a problem outside of a central system, that your definition of wage labor has little to do with surplus value, that your fetish for large centrally planned productive units does nothing to help alienation, and that your dismissal of class is highly undialectical.

Yes he is. Much of his critiques of capitalism focused on what would be the alternative through socialism, and yet he did not have a full theory of what communism would look like and how it would operate! Instead, capitalism should be apprised in light of feasible alternatives and future results.

Wolff is a Marxian economist, he uses Marx’s analysis of capitalism to see the world, he also believes that its not socialism so long as workers do not own the fruit of their labors on a micro level. I am inclined to agree with him. Having read his larger works, I can say he has regularly avoided Marx’s idealism.

I am well aware that’s what the solution was, I was just pointing out that your example was stupid.

I assure you I have done both of those things. Indeed, my critique of the Soviet Union is one of class, that they were not socialist because the bureaucrats had merely replaced the capitalists and the workers did not actually have any control to begin with. I agree they had wage labor, but according to my definition, not yours, as your definition seems to indicate they did not. Regardless I disagree with Marx’s contention that the lower stages of communism can be despotic, as this will almost assuredly end in failure. It should then surprise no one that Marx did not have a full theory of government and the state, as if he had studied this matter in enough detail I think it would be obvious to him that this would be impossible, or at the very least, highly unlikely.

Certainly the author thinks that there is no difference between a monopoly under capitalism and the USSR’s state monopoly. But this is evidently not true. Once again, we have a marxist trying to purely use the theory of economics to describe where a theory of economics and the state is needed. He spends most of the paper saying why those Trotsky and that other fellow are wrong, which they mostly are, as opposed to saying why they still had capital. Certainly markets and private property still existed in the soviet union alongside state planning and state control of prices, but there remained large sectors that were centrally planned under complete state control. Whatever the workers produced belonged to the state. And since they didn’t control the state, they didn’t own the fruits of their labor.

Furthermore, I still fail to see the difference from what you’re proposing, and the markets of the soviet union, where all prices were determined centrally. You must use some measure to determine costs, and we’ve already seen that your “in-kind” calculations are nothing but an ideological fiction that still requires the existence of exchange value.

Lol i guess the bureaucratic inefficiency, the stupidity of their state pricing system and the inability for the state planners to invest efficiently into new technology were just the wind in their back huh? And I suppose Gorbachav’s liberal idealism played no part in their collapse either?

Sometimes I wonder if leftcoms can even into dialectics. You do realize capitalism came about through class struggle, as will the next stage of society. Certainly feudalism didn’t end in a single revolution or even completely through revolution. And certainly private property didn’t come about without class And feudalism didn’t come about without effectively eliminating the noble class and their power. How do you expect socialism and communism to come about without dealing with the issue of class first, which market socialism does. Be pedantic as you want about names, we don’t see market socialism as an end of itself, but it is different from capitalism, and it will almost certainly lead to and is a progression of economic development and human emancipation.

If you think any form of planned market is a market anyway then whats the fucking problem mate? And how would a non-market socialist system be any different? Its still society telling you what to produce.

Yea no shit thats what i said.

You fucking moron. YES YOU NEED SOME FORM OF MONEY. The people who make plastic and paint for you do not need that much sun glasses, and if you were to do it this way the only people you would produce for is the people who make plastic and paint. Which would mean you fuck about 99% of your day and waste a lot of potential labour time. Trying to barter beyond what they need would mean they would need to find people who have what they need and need sunglasses and so on and so on. It becomes fucking impractical and you end up spending more time trying to trade then actually, you know, IMPROVING SOCIETY AND MAKING STUFF.

NO SHIT. THATS WHAT THE WORKERS-[insert word that doesnt trigger you and is basically a state] DOES. YOU PREVENT CAPITAL ACCUMULATION BY NOT ALLOWING PRIVATE PROPERTY AND SHIT.

I mean for fucks sake you are saying you do not need money to trade while keeping a somewhat similar productivity as today. That is simply insane.

Here is a video that explains money for total idiots. youtube.com/watch?v=-nZkP2b-4vo

1. Statistically speaking, you most certainly work with at least one other person, which would mean that you must devy up the products in some way, which is possible, but impractical. If you follow your line of thought to the end however, if you screw in the pegs for the glasses, you should get paid in glasses with pegs, not finished ones, because thats the labour of others, and you should buy un-pegged ones to peg.

ok, let's say I fuck up the pegs, and therefore have to use the glasses that don't work correctly, I understand and gree with this. but then, how exactly would I get other products? am I going to get a badly raised chicken, pants that don't fit or are incorrectly sewed?

are you going to force other workers to create bad products because I did the same with the glasses?

thats retarded

2. Lots of people work in service industry, such as mechanics, cleaners etc etc. You cannot be paid in clean floors of office buildings, you cannot be paid in the action of fixing cars.

NO ONE WOULD WORK CLEANING FLOORS OR FIXING CARS

the co-op that owns the offices would be the onesthat clean it, they will change roles every now and then to avoid alienation, the co-ops that make cars would fix them

fuck, read a thing or two about market socialism before shitposting

and you don't get to keep this if you produce commodities with no use value to them

so then you agree the system you are proposing works just like a market

try reading about syndicalism and market socialism first, you have proved to be completly unaware of how they work

Yeah man let me just drive my broken car back to fucking sweden to let my engine get fixed :D

I don't have to engage with someone who is retarded to such a big extend that he thinks money is not required. Good day, consider working in a gun and ammo factory so you can kill yourself.

ou would need to produce things that don't have any use-value for you, because they ordered you to do it, whereas in market socialism you can create products that have use-value for everyone

instead of being ordered to make size 3 and size 7 shoes, you will create something with use value for you, let's say a shoe that canc hange it's size and then present it to the market

it isn't

the central planning authorities can't order you such thing, because only trial and error could find out if such idea works, central planning can't afford such things because every labour hour is necessary to meet production quotas

thats irrelevant, because you would not only produce sunglasses but a wide variety of plastic products and parts

fucking read a thing or two about industry

top kek, read Proudhon

also

top kek, you have proved time and time again to be completly unaware of how market socialism and syndicalism could work

kek

Leftcoms aren't trots

Obviously it can be, or would you like to give a reason why my example is bunk?

…do you expect to end capitalism without fighting the power of the capitalist?

Did you read this sentence before you posted?

Is what? You really need to work on your sentence structure. Anyway, it does change one important thing and that is power relations, workers will become the ruling class.

Also Marx was an idealist and RDW was smart enough to use the concept of overdetermination and micro-level worker ownership to escape such idealism.

What you are doing is a misinterpretation.

Says the one who claims to be a Marxist.

What did he mean by this? If production is socialized, what's to stop the workers from finding/building a better enterprise instead of letting market forces dictate? The market still exists in the scenario being discussed, but don't workers have much more power? If the market determines success and failure in this context, wouldn't it have to be because the workers are not asserting their own power by refusing to work for exploitative enterprises or to work elsewhere?

So let's see if I can sum up the position our pirate flag friend has been trying to express.

Am I get right?

* getting it right

More exploitative enterprises have a competitive advantage, as they produce things with less labour time, therefore are able to sell their products for a price below their value. So their competitors have to become just as exploitative as them, or to die.

Not in classical economics (and Marx). In classical economics, it is a necessary condition for a product to have a use value in order to have an exchange value, and this condition is thought of as a binary issue, the condition is either met or not. You are thinking in neoclassical terms.

So when people vote on an issue that's a market? Judges at a figure-skating competition are a market?

You pulled that out of your arse. Of course central planning can allocate some resources to trial-and-error processes.

Markets have an automatic drive towards increasing work time. Markets and market-like efficiency criteria basically always tell you that working more is better. You can vote with your money for goods, but how could you vote with money against itself?