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.