Discuss on economics for a socialist transition

It most certainly can. That is precisely how it is currently run.

I don't know, but I would recommend to be especially careful with the most important sector of society (the one who produces food). And to not be too optimistic and confident with the introduction of high-tech technology, the main issue with socialist agriculture is not technological but organizational. Most cultures in the world still rely on individualized labor, shoving up this way of working and bet all the success of collectivization on the abrupt introduction of "rational" industrial methods and techniques could still be a bad thing.

OP there, mostly agree.

Only way to remove unemployment

No, because read the lines on the right side

Good thought. But it implies immediate and massive land seizings, I'm not very at ease with that for these reasons>>983394

Plus, most unemployed today are urbans, you want them to start in farming. Little chance they success in anything

Waiting for people to migrate from job to job is going to be a generational process. In the meantime, the system will be dangerously unstable. It is a huge inefficiency at a stage where we cannot afford one.

Farming in the economic center has already been industrialized. Small farms hardly exist at all. There are no more kulaks. Farms are almost all structured with a land owner(s) hiring waged laborers to utilize his machines to work his land.

No, anyone can learn different tasks and psoitions in little factories pretty quickly. You enter in a factory, you ask to work there starting the next week/months for at least 2-3 months. Your new colleagues tell you if there is much work to do or if there is already plenty of people in this workplace, if you decide to stay, they have to teach you at least one position in the production process that you will occupy for the whole week, for months or even just for some hours in the week.

I don't see where it's that complicated.

True for wide parts of the industrialized world, but what about the rest of the planet ?

I'm still skeptical about the possibility to collectivize agriculture just like the industry.

That is not the issue. The issue is scale. As individuals migrate from positions with no work at their own pace to positions with work it will not be with the universal goal of finding sufficient work for everyone. They will go from one desirable position to another desirable position in hopes of sticking there while others move on. For that process to play out so that people fill the least desirable positions with take years, decades even. The desirability of certain positions will see them always with an overabundance of workers. That is inefficient.

Even in pre-industrial societies global capitalism has all but eliminated the peasant class. Farmers work on land owned by other people. They may not be industrisl farms, but they are staffed by workers.

Why?

Since factories are workers managed, we could expect that the less desirable position will be the most remunerated or that different person will occupy those from a day to an other.
And I primarly want to work and get an income, I need to work first of all, so moving and moving without working enough is pretty prejudiciablel. Even if so, Geographic constraints (I mean mobility) would ensure that people won't go everywhere and anywhere to find the perfect position.

1) Strong and hard-to-fight political opposition, as said above
2) Although I do not consider post-revolutionnary Soviet Union as a leftist thing, I recognize that they tried to run a socialized agriculture. There, state farms were the less efficient, coop farms were slighty less inefficient, and private plots produced most of the food. And that situation was the same in all eastern bloc countries (except for Poland, which kept 85% of its land privately owned if I good remember).Even the big cereal-specialized and overmechanized sovkhozes in south and central Russia were incredibly less productive, not only compared to their porkistic counterparts in the american Midwest, but also compared to any other type of soviet farms ! You would believe a huge, heavy equiped, uniform farm whose the sole duty is the produce the same kind of cereal on a wide plot must be as efficient while being run by a capitalist than while being run for the sake of collectivity. But apparently no …

Maybe there is an other alternative to private ownership of land than state-ownership of land ? But I have difficulty to see what it could be

that's a great capitalist system you have there. Sucks it'll need to be dug out with ever more fervor than our current one.

You are still thinking on the wrong scale. This is not about differences between jobs within the structures themselves. It is about differences between industries. There will be more people trying to get into a video game design company than there will be people trying to get into a bauxite mine. The thing is, society needs more bauxite miners than they do game designers. If simply paying bauxite miners more is the solution, then that is going to drive the exchange value of aluminum–a critical resource–through the roof.

That is what I expected. Stalin attempted to collectivize agriculture in the Soviet Union in five years when Lenin had recognized that it would take at least twenty. The reason that collectivization was so difficult in the Soviet Union was that agriculture was still lords and peasants when the Reds took over. Peasants objected to collectivization, because it was not in their class interest, but in order for the working class to control the means of production agriculture had to be collectivized.

There are no more peasants. Capitalism has already eliminated them and replaced them with waged laborers on factory-style farms. That is why we no longer need to worry about agriculture. Collectivizing it now would be as simple as giving it to the people who already work it.

Speaking of classes, be aware that the way that you have the system structured the state takes the form of a bourgeois class. It extracts surplus value by way of the exchange of goods. That was the same mistake that Stalin made. Any institution that extracts surplus value in a transitionary system needs to be under the direct material control of the proletariat. Nothing can be more important than this. That is what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" means.

My personal idea for accomplishing this while using a system similar to that you present is to disarm the state. Allow it to maintain an air force, a navy, a network of military installations, and a supply line of resources that are critical to the functioning of a military. However, all small man-portable arms must remain exclusively under the direct authority and control of the workers' councils themselves. No state employee is allowed to carry a rifle. They can fly the aircraft, man the radar stations, and sail the ships, but they can not field anything resembling an infantry (to include units like air cav and special forces).

And? What's your problem?

It causes a shortage, and shortages of critical resources cause production stoppages.

I don't get it.

Your position seems to be this:
1. There is this very important stuff that certain people produce.
2. We pay these people shit, and the working conditions there make me shudder.
3. If people have the expectation that they can always get some job somewhere, the people in that very-important-stuff sector will demand better remuneration / working conditions or leave for another job.

So this stuff will get more expensive, creating pressure to use less of it and to make the production process more automatic where working conditions are the worst.

And this is bad, and these workers should know their place or something. What are you doing here?

Is more like an "immaterial service", not a industry. This job requires pretty high skills

aluminium is a natural ressource, managed by the state. Bauxite miners are gonna be state employees and therefore recruitment in mines is made by the state. This job may also need some qualification

I understand your point. But that's my fault, I didn't be enough precise about what "light" industries meant : All the industrial workplace where most of tasks do not need any qualification or skill that is not learnable in a short time. Free entrance in those factories is only a viable policy if any job there may be learnt by anybody quickly.

That is good thought to complete with any kind of world council democracy.

The primary effect of a price rising up is not a positive incentive at automatization, it just reduces the opportunities of productions and consumptions. In this case, workers managed factories who are using mostly aluminium to make items like tin cans or CDs will be constraint either to manufacture less goods (spend the same sum in costs of production), which means a relative shortage for consumers, either to sell at an higher price (make the rising costs pass on the consumers), which means that consumers will then have less money to buy other goods (therefore it penalizes workers in other factories)

If anyone can join the most profitable company anytime, what is the point of making profit?

How would you know - in real time - which company is the most profitable in the area ?

So the companies' results wouldn't be public?

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Profits made by workers managed companies go to the workers

No. State managed industry do not operate through a market. Industries who operate on the market are those workers managed

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fuck read first post

This thread is about elaborating a TRANSITIONNAL economy that will work

t. leftcoms

If all resource extraction is controlled by the state, then the state is going to be absolutely gigantic. Now, I am not concerned with small gubberment or any idiocy like that. What worries me is that we will have a huge bureaucracy that functions as a bourgeois class. We need a real, not simply legal, mechanism by which this class will be subservient to the proletariat. Without that, the bureaucrats will prepetuate the system needlessly and consolidate power. Is placing the infantry under the control of workers councils enough to keep the bureaucracy from undermining the revolution, or do we need further constraints upon it?

lmao your prophet will always be irrelevant

That concerns the form of governement, not the efficiency and sustainability of the transitionnal economy.

I guess. Between bureaucrats who do not have the right to possess guns and citizens concils (who have the right), who is more likely to get the last word ?

Capitalism and democracy are still superior.
Both only need relatively minor tweaks to make them function satisfactorily.
But that will probably never happen.
What will happen is we'll continue to lurch from catastrophe to catastrophe and more and more of our rights will be removed as a response.
In a 1000 years humanity will look back on this period with utter scorn. If we make it.

dude your visuals are shit u cant convince anyone to read that, i lasted three seconds.

Ok with democracy. But capitalism ? Please justify

I don't know what you mean or believe about "capitalism just need a few minor tweaks". How can a so utterrepressive, avilishing, inefficient, ressources wasting society be considering as a good one ?

I have that feel to.

I think mankind will not make it

Advices maybe ?

What worries me is that in the model there is a significant bourgeois class, in the form of the state, in control of significant portions of the production process. It would be in the bureaucracy's class interest to sieze the means of production by whatever means it has at its disposal. Controlling the extraction of critical resources gives the bureaucracy tremendous power.

We want the transitional system to collapse, but it must collapse into socialism. If the bourgeoisie is in control of the production process when it falls apart it will only collapse back into capitalism. That is what happened with the USSR. The key then is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in the state itself.

Just to spitball some ideas, those state employees who do the resource extraction (the bauxite miners, power plant workers, etc.) could be collectively in charge of military command appointments and a resource budget. Of course, then we would have to fix wages for government employees. We could trust the non-governmental workers'councils to do that.

I don't know. Does anyone have a better idea?

Nyet, all industry worker controlled or bust.
I don't give a fuck, do it right or don't do it at all.

nice idealism

That wasn't even remotely my question.

There would be transparency of course

Oh there is a transition. It is called a revolution.

Then I am back to square one: what is the point of profit if anyone can join the most profitable companies anytime?

capitalism is pretty much just private enterprise.
been going on for millenia.
there's dozens of flavours of it though.
what are you gonna do, make being a shop keeper illegal, like they are the problem with the world?
the problem is greed, international rivalries and geopolitics, sectarianism and the existence of externalities like the damage to the environment and societal fabric.
imo keynes came closest to figuring out how to make an international capitalist system that was inherently stable and failsafe, but his reccomendations weren't enacted.
that doesn't include things like figuring out basic worker and human rights so nations don't try to attain a competitive advantage through immoral means.

with democracy it's the way the media hijacks it, and the fact that the type of person who wants to be a politician and is successful at it is often just the type of person who should be nowhere near a position of power. in other words a cunt.
not meant to be an extensive critique by any means, btw.

What is the point of diverging profit rates if investors can easily switch to branches of the economy with higher profit rates than the ones they currently support?

So what you propose is actually… capitalism?

this isn't socialism and definitely not a transitional system towards a society that abolished value production.
The abolition of wage labor is our first priority.

In practice, there are many limits to excessive workplace turnover :

1) geography (search are limited to local areas for time and money reasons)
2) someone who seeks to join the most profitable company in the area will have to gather a big amount of economic informations in order to guess which factory (s)he should join. If a company did big profits on a month, this doesn't mean that the next month is gonna be the same.
3) If a factory is overpopulated, profits are too divided and therefore, some workers are gong too leave for somewhere else.

Capitalism formed at the early 17th century, he is born in violence, he is made of violence he maintains by violence, he will be suppressed in violence.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm

If you have to read only one part of the Capital, read this and the seven next chapters (PART VIII of the first book : Primitive accumulation of caital). Count 3-4 hours of lecture

Capitalism is not natural, nor consensual, nor ancient. The merchants in the middle age who peacefully accumulated their wealth through trade is a lie.

all of which is ultimately generated by property …

Medias are financed by the upper classes. Politicans have little power anyway, because all they can do is acting on law, and law (part of superstructure) would never has the priority over economic efficiency and issues (infrastructure). Economics - not wealthies, nor politicans, nor international organzations, nor any group of people - blind economic necessities in thelselves are determining the legal tendency. And you can't make the "politics over the economy" liberal illiterate thing : it means making laws that go against efficiency by a way or an other, thus leading the nation to be penalized in the global competition and more unemployment

If workers manage factory to sell products and then share profits made, that is not a wage labor system.

Our priority is to abolish unemployment, root of many social ills and conflicts

Way to make the term used to describe your economic system meaningless, jackass.

No, it's wage labor. If the workers own the factory then they're collectively acting as an "ideal capitalist" ie. they assume the position of a "conventional" capitalist (as if every enterprise is owned by one capitalist lol, ownership over capital is in many cases distributed among many share holders etc.)
As the ideal capitalist they buy their own labor power with the value they exploited from themselves. M-C-M' still applies, the laborers are still selling their labor power and they are still getting exploited by their capital.
And if it stinks and tastes like shit, it's probably shit.

then you aren't a communist.

Enjoy getting killed by capitalists after three years.

Fuck off with that ideological purity shit.

they do not own the factory, they only manage it.
They are not exploited by the capital, the capital is provided by the state and free of use (this is the very concept of free entrance in some factories). There is no unemeployment to force them to work beyond their individual needs, there is no despot to tell them how to run the workplace

yeah

of course they are exploited by capital as in they only get a fraction of the hours they worked.
no, instead the workers would do all the telling and replace the despot collectively

So in practice, some will still be able to accumulate capital.

Based leftcombro crushing the coops meme.

What does it have to do with the existence of a distinct mode of production between capitalism and socialism?

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But it's also true in a labour-voucher system that working 1000 hours doesn't give you vouchers to obtain stuff that has 1000 hours in it. There are deductions since some people are too young or old too work, or ill or with a disability. And some products and services get allocated purely on a needs-basis even though the producers get labor vouchers, so you have a discrepancy. And some work goes into R & D and towards a buffer stock.

A revolution is a long process.

This is state capitalism op
Better than regular capitalism

not on my watch you sons of bitches

change profiut for "surplus production"

pls no bully leftcoms nerds

literally nothing wrong with the community controlling the surplus
nothing wrong with developing productive forces
scarcity gotta be allocated, literally nothing wrong with labor vouchers

The bureaucrats aren't physically present and doing the extraction themselves, they just make plans. If ordinary folks have access to internet and arms, how bad can things get?

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I like how you're so assmad about incredibly basic materialist critique of the idea you support that you single out anyone against your market 'socialism' as being innately left communist.

It's not just funny because left communists here are generally touting the basic line of materialist thinking. It's funny because the general debate in the 19th and 20th centuries on the left (about markets vs. planning) was had so extensively and conclusively that in both the 1st, 2nd and 3rd international, it was one of the things almost all sides ended up agreeing on unanymously: that markets innately recuperate the logic of capital and thus will never provide a true alternative to a post-capitalist society, thus falling in the category of reformist, utopian politics. Yes, that's right: the anarchists (anarcho-communist and syndicalist), Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Kautskyists and the left communist (council communist and Bordigist Leninist) dissenters all ended up agreeing that any genuine socialism must involve economic planning, and they were essentially only fighting over what the organizational side of the revolution would end up looking like (democratic centralist, parlementarian representative, organic centralist, councilist, syndicates, etc.).

Want to know which side of the left (in and outside the 1st and 2nd international) didn't end up rejecting markets? Social democrats and Austromarxists. I want to insert a snide quip here, but this really should speak for itself.

Also loving the Slavoj jpeg to accompany your market 'socialist' position. Your proposed humanist capitalism being the broadest your horizon can go to as possible (remember: post-value form society is not possible, here's the quasi-Austrian arguments to prove it!) perfectly exemplifies his concept of interpassivity (we must do something, even if it's not ideal[tm], man!), and also why you are so angered and lose any semblance of patience when you are criticized. Because deep down, you bank on the possibility that, as full of holes your proposal is, 'it's better than nothing, therefore we must do it!'.

This is also what enables the ideological process of seeing anything beyond this as impossible – you already are incapable of dreaming of actual radical change, so anything beyond your narrow scope can only be the result of 'armchair criticism', nitpicking, 'ultra-leftism', etc. It's 'current year!' rhetoric without actually saying it's the current year.

How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on earth, an asteroid hitting the planet, than a tangible change in our economic system?
(t. Zizek, Parallax View)

Well, the general idea behind a transitionary system is that it will be destroyed. It is only supposed to last as long as capitalism survives. As soon as that is gone, the transitionary system should be obliterated.

It seems fitting that the Academia would chose a position that further benefits it's interests, at it has been shown time and time again than a vanguard party controlled economy will end with them in a position of power

a post-value society is absolutely possible, simply relocating the planning pat of production to central authorities (which will become the ruling class given the fact that they will be able to engage in force againts the workers) and labour to the workers is not a post-value society

the idea that labour is going to be controlled and commodified is not a post-value society as I have shown in the past

weather you like it or not, you will have to produce commodities in order to exchange them for others, you cannot ever form a coherent argument of how you won't exchange the commodities you produced in order to get other ones which you did not produce

while you engage in arguments appealing to authority and popularity between academics, you still fail to adress the main topic, economics

central planning production does not get rid of the class struggle

nice subjectivity

there is one system that gives workers, not only ownership but control of the productive forces and that is market socialism

its better than planned production

worker's co-ops are a tangible reality, that have shown to give workers control over the productive forces, while vanguardism, ML and other far left propositions haven't

It is not supposed to. It is supposed to last as long as capitalism does. When capitalism dies, it is supposed to collapse upon itself leaving only comminism. That is the intention anyway.

we can aid this with market socialism

Then it is not a "system" of its own; it is still capitalism and this is how it should be called.

This has been explained to you several times. But every time you just leave the thread only to go and repeat your nonsense on another one like nothing happened.

I dunno, t all seems pretty spooky to me

Yes, that is the case. I doubt that even the OP denies that.

Why did they all agree on this? What were the arguments?

The thing is you have not

You will produce commodities solely for their exchange value, your labour voucher will have exchange value

It ismliterally impossible to belive otherwise

I want to read this as well.

No.

And no.

>It is literally impossible for me to belive otherwise
Yeah you're pretty dense, I give you that.

bumpo.

Labour vouchers/credit are a measure of directly social concrete labour time, and therefore has nothing to do with value in the marxist sense of the term, which is socially necessary abstract labour time.
Given that the only thing exchanged in the lower phase of communism is one kind of concrete labour time for an equivalent amount of another kind of concrete labour, neither value nor commodities can be said to exist, since both of these things require abstract labour time in order to exist.

How can a capitalist class recreates itself in a society where most of MoP are collectivized ?

In the framework market socialist society, let's say someone wins a huge amount of money (by its sole labour and selling goods on market, or by the lottery if it still exists). Since factories, building, ores, woods, water, energy and transports infrastructures, and many other things are state, council or communal properties, all this money will never have the possibilty to become a capital. In a socialist society, all you can do with your money is buying commodities, not acquiring property and therefore becoming a parasite of the labor of others. You can only spend your money for your direct needs and desires, it just allows you to stop working until you die. You can't place it or loan it to obtain interests : there is no demand for private investment given that pretty all kind of MoP are took in charge by the collectivity.

The emergence of capitalist class rely on private ownership, not market economy.

Reversely, we could imagine a kind of capitalist society (predominant private ownership) where there is no market and big owners tend to manage a command economy which do not even use money.

About the exploitation of a proletariat and wage labour system, this feature has more to see with the existence of unemployment and an absence of free-access MoP. Proletariat : a mass of people who are separated of any kind of MoP and only have their workforce to sell. This is partly why I want to remedy unemployment by instituting free entrance in certain workplaces, therefore creating an enough wide economic sector whose all MoP are accessible to everyone and anybody. It would effectively suppress the root of wage labour and exploitation, by abolishing the radical separation of MoP who defines a proletariat

You're getting too hung up on capitalists here. Capital does not need to be embodied in individual capitalists (or groups of capitalists) in order for capitalism and most of its associated problems to exist.
In your example, only problems directly resulting from exchangeable means of production have been abolished, issues resulting from market competition would still exist, and these make up the vast majority.
The falling rate of profit and other periodic crises, for example, would still plague such a society, as competition would force down the average rate of profit (and increase the intensity of work) as some firms implement more advanced productive processes in an attempt to increase their own income.

And as for open access means of production in the context of a market economy: this would result in these particular firms becoming incredibly unproductive, it would basically be equivalent to work for the dole in our society. It depending on the wage offered it could also have the effect of causing people to want to preferentially work there rather than in actual productive firms (who wants to go down a mine when you can just fuck around all day for the same income), resulting either a labour shortage or wages rising to unsustainable levels in productive industries as firms compete for workers, resulting in an even lower rate of profit (and resulting in lower investment).

But these would not so painful and long with the safety net of universal guaranteed-employment. Economy never really enters into a recession cycle, as people working for the market do not lose their jobs but only a part of their income. Also, firms cannot implement more advanced productive like more automatization processes since things like machine-tools are manufactured and allocated by the state (I know this requires a Gossnab)

Open acces MoP only includes a part of these. Difficult and essential manual tasks such as mining or metallurgy depend on state-managed industry (limited employment and attractive remuneration). Only a small number of workers (the most qualified ones) will occupy these positions : this do not creates labour shortage for the rest of economy, could it still creates a pressure at rising wages elsewhere ?

The falling rate of profit isn't merely a cyclical crisis but also a secular one (pic related).

Machine tools and the things required to produce them make up the vast majority of capital goods. If you're willing to eliminate this much of the producer goods market in an attempt to do do away with the FRoP, why not just eliminate the capital goods market entirely and simply have an artificial market for consumer goods and services.

The size of the open industry/firms doesn't really matter if they are open to anyone and everyone to join, since if it's truly open there's no limit to the numbers that can join.

forgot pic