How do anarchists intend to deliver value

[sc4r]

Value is not defined by the cost of producing something but by how much someone wants it.

Now its a tenet of Marxism that value should be delivered at cost (as far as possible the more realistic would say, but lets not quibble).*

***

1. I say (being a fervent admirer of the power of markets) that the most efficient way to determine a close approximation to the above is to allow people to express their valuation of particular goods by allocating a proportion of their budget (which could be exactly the same for each of them) and giving the available goods to the highest bidder.

This will produce a surplus of value over cost for those goods which are in shorter supply relative to their value. And what you then do is expend more effort in producing these goods so that the value-cost expession is brought down.

eventually you end up with a very close approximation to satisfying as much demand for value as you can, at a close approximation to real cost.

This is a market, and it does this sort of dynamic balancing very very efficiently and accurately.

2. The advocates of a command economy state that some body of people will judge how to best balance the equation. So that I dont caraicature them I'll say that most dont rule out using something equivalent to a market to help them do this in some circumstances.

This will produce some sort of an approximation to a solution. Not as accurate (in my view) as a market, but it will allow an economy to be run with some sort of goal and some expectation that there wont be endless amounts of wasted production and endless amount of satisfiable but unsatisfied desires.

3. But as far as I can see the Anarchists simple say that individual 'communes' will produce what they indivudually think will be wanted and hope that the judgements of these communes is so fine that they dont end up either duplicating the efforts of others or totally failing to produce what is actually wanted. It seems to assume that the communes are initially set up so that at least the potential to create everything that is wanted is there.

It seems to have no mechanism at all to correct an oversupply of goods which are wanted, but not as badly as others. because after all, their output will still be taken up, because it is wanted.

An anarchist economy does not seem to have any regulatory mechanism to balance need and production across the whole economy. It sems to rely upon hoping and wishing that everything just happens to go right.

I've seen anarchist proposals whch are effectively markets. These , obviously are fine. But what I would like to know is just how those anarchists who spit at me when I so much as mention 'market' actually propose to balance their economy OVERALL.


* Strangely that is also a slightly more subtle implication in Capitalism BTW. Capitalist theory I hasten to add, it is not done in paractise because Capitalism does not work as its theory says it should. Thats whats actually wrong with it.

P.S. I expect shit to be thrown at me, and I expect slogans; but what I'm hoping for is something a little more substantive in the way of an answer in English not in anarchese.

I'll happily field questions on what a market is, and what it does, but I'm hoping not hear dogmatic assertions that it is 'bourgeois' or whatever. (dream on scar, hope all you like, it wont happen mate... ed)

[Som]

Not really a response to your thread, but i'm curious as to whether or not you missed this:
http://www.che-lives.com/forum/index.php?a...=ST&f=6&t=17582 (http://www.che-lives.com/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=6&t=17582)

[Pete]

Would value not become a thing of the past, when what is needed is provided and it does not matter past that?

[sc4r]

Thanks Som. No I had not looked at it, or more accurately I looked at the first link, saw that all it was doing was urging me to buy and read a ton of books and thought 'no way chum, I've better things to do than waste time and money on yet another tome of anarchist jargon'. You see what escapes many people is that like it or not you are competing for the very limited time and attention that people will give you, and if, like me, you have already invested a great deal of time looking at other ideas with similar titles, from similar people, had the sorts of non answers from anarchist's I've had in response to enquiries, had the sorts of abuse from them I get regularly, and heard nothing much beyond a lot of convoluted jargon then you wont get that time.

And unlike most people I actually do have a great deal of natural sympathy for the spirit of anarchism (but no real interest in it's history, or any desire to learn who it was that said what, when, which seems to greatly fascinate many anarchists), I do have a great deal of interest in the basic subject, I do (despite what my detractors say) actually posess rather more than a smattering of insight into organisational and economic issues, and have no objection to new ideas. If someone cant convince me to give them time then quite simply they are doing something very wrong.

I was, in this case though, guilty of poor judgememnt. Because just a quick scan through the second link showed an idea which is clearly thought out and jargon free, and clearly not afraid to address hard questions. I will be reading more.

BUT an a big but I'm afraid - albeit its based on a fairly cursory look- the idea does seem to explictly trivialise (not exactly ignore, which is something or a welcome rareity) not only the question I pose in this thread but also seems to have what appears to be a strange antipathy towards recognising that the exact same problem it solves in the individual workplace by having a
hierarchy of councils also appears in the context of the entire society. Why pretend that the problem of co-ordination only appears one level down the chain of society? Sorry but it really does just look like an a priori insistance that such a thing should not be needed. And it significantly weakens the sense of the whole thing.

It does talk of consumer councils expressing their desires and influencing production. But to who? theres no mention I could see of an overall council or any mechanism I could see for ensuring that the production of individual workplaces does reflect the expressions of these councils (maybe this is covered in parts I skipped, like I said I only skimmed very bfiefly).

And it does seem to trivialise that the mere expression of a desire without a very clear way of saying how important this desire is compared to the millions of other desires you could also have is fairly uninformative. AND it fails to recognise that if you want something which simply does cost twice as much to produce you automatically have to be prepared to sacrifice two things which cost 1/2 as much in order to get it.

Add to this that some things actually do cost far more if a few people want them than if many do and that some recognition of this has to be in place to accurately determine overall optimum production (optimum in the sense of satisfying peoples desires as nearly as possible given limited resources and limited diversity coupled with cost factors on all of them), and you have a distinctl;y sub optimum system.

Parecon seems on a quick glance to be a better thought out exposition than most and I'm sure it will at the least contain good provacative ideas. But it does still seem to solve practical problems only if you assume a pretty static and very homogenous society.

The joke (to me) is that by simply dropping their opposition to the idea of expressing preferences in the context of a budget, you resolve this problem more or less entirely.

Do this and build one more level of 'council' and you have pretty much exactly what I advocate anyway.

Thanks for the timely reminder. I will certainly be finding out more (who knows maybe the things I say are missing are merely disguised so as to avoid exactly the sorts of rabid attack I get, it would be sensible to do so).

thanks again.

[sc4r]

Originally posted by [email protected] 1 2003, 07:51 PM
Would value not become a thing of the past, when what is needed is provided and it does not matter past that?
Value never becomes a thing of the past until you can provide absolutely anything that a person might want at the same cost as anything else.

In effect this means having unlimited resources.

You'll never get this.

It becomes irrelevant as far as production planning difficulties are concerned if you assume a society content to have only what is available (not in my view either a likely, or even a healthy society, certainly a very boring one). This will mean potentially mountains of wasted production though.

If you assume any sort of a central planning mechanism then it becomes a relatively trivial concern in a totally homogenous society (again most unlikely and undesirable in my view).

If you assume both a very homogenous society and one that is content with the type of things they already have, and only concerned with varying the amounts then you could (just about) dispense with the production co-ordinating function as a specific entity, and again catering for perceptions of value is of trivial difficulty (though still important)

But I dont see any of these things as either realitic (cerytainly not in any society accustomed to anything like a first world life) or especially desirable.

Perhaps you do; I dont know that of course.

[truthaddict11]

I am against the market system because I believe it still creates wage slavery. I can give you a link on why anarchists are opposed to markets if you wish

[sc4r]

Originally posted by [email protected] 1 2003, 08:44 PM
I am against the market system because I believe it still creates wage slavery. I can give you a link on why anarchists are opposed to markets if you wish
Thanks but no thanks. I'm constantly amazed that young anarchists think it likely I have not explored such links before. I've lost count of the number of times I've been referred to the Anarchist FAQ as if the referrer was revealing some great secret he or she had discovered (and no I dont care if your link is not the Anarchist FAQ).

If you can explain to me why you think it creates 'wage slavery'; I bet I can show you that you are talking of a specifically capitalist market and dont appreciate how other sorts work.

I've read quite possibly 100's of Anarchist rants against 'the market'. With zero exceptions they get it wrong and mostly reiterate the same poorly informed prejudices I've read 100's of times previously.

I'm not, however, going to write another tome trying to explain what a market as opposed to a capitalsit market is to yet another person who has already made up their mind not to listen, and only really understands that he has been told it creates wage slavery.

Youexplain why you think it, and I'll explain where you are wrong. Thats the quid pro quo here.

this isnt intended as offensive to you. Its just a flat statement of the terms upon which I will expend my effort. I dont really like to waste my time, and if you care enough about exploring truth to expend some of your time, Ill reciprocate. If you do not then its your loss (and perhaps socialism's).

Or you could think of it like this. I've already invested time posing the question at the top of this thread. You have not even attempted to answer it. Its your turn.

And yet another way is that even if a market created inequity it matters not at all unless you have something better to suggest. (it does not, but as I said even if it did..)

Priest falls off cliff....Grabs onto a small and precipate ledge with one hand... and grimly clings on for dear life above the jagged boulder below.... 'GOD , if you are there save me now' ... GOD : "LET GO OF THE LEDGE AND I WILL SAVE YOU"....Priest: 'No offnece God.. BUT IS THERE ANYONE ELSE THERE?'.

[sc4r]

Update :

Som, Sorry mate but Parecon is a centrally planned command economy by another name. It does suggest a way of making this much less dependant upon 'expert opinion' than would be the case in most command economies but thats all.

And it does this by supposing that what (to my eyes) would constitute a quite enormous amount of consideration and detailed working is done by every individual and every individual workplace. Then it seems to totally trivialise the quite enormous task that would be faced by the state 'councils' in analysing such massive amounts of data.

It does of course have exactly the extra layers of hierarchic organisation I thought was missing. But it has them.

It would work in principal, but at a huge cost, and much less efficiently than a market would do the same job.

I reckon that in practise it would be no different from any other comand economy because I strongly doubt that the vast data collection exercise would either be done or properly analysed. In a simple homogenous economy it would be OK, but in a complex one I dont think so.

Sorry mate. I'll admit ti was at least a genuine attempt at an answer that actually said what it meant, clearly.

Now look at why Parecon dislikes markets.

First It is honest enough to admit the benefits and straightforward enough not to engage in silly mud slinging about 'wage slavery' etc.

But it (rightly) says that a pure market based socio economy will fail to recognise social externalities.

It does (incorrectly) seem to assume that a market economy must be based on exchange of value for value between individuals. This is a false assumption and to evaluate like for like one must assume a market economy which does not have labour as one of its tradables. (in other words a communist rather than a socialist market). A communist market does not allow anyone to exchange value for value or value for labour. A communist market allows the exchange of a pre-allocated budget (equal for all, you dont even need to set it to equal any particular quantity, it self-regulates for that) for value. All that varies from individual to individual to individual is precisely what types of value they exchange their budget for.

Now parecon asks that its citizens read, digest and evaluate mountains of data on social externalities and reflect them in their (presumably written) detailed requisition requests.

But there is absolutely no reason not to provide the same information to the citizens of a market economy, and simply ask them to what extent they want market prices weighted to reflect their opinion of externalities. then apply those weightings..In fact you actualy have something which is parecon BUT with a vastly reduced data analysis cost. Because you have simply substituted a cheaper and slicker mechanism for simultaneously colecting and weighting the exact same information, on the exact same basis.

And at a stroke you have a market economy working with far far less bureacracy than parecon but which does not suffer from the externalities problem.

The only thing I can think to add is that just possibly neither you not the parecon people would actually consider what I am talking about a market. It is a rather peculiarly one sided one its true (more in keeping with what would be called an internal market in a corporation) and is not inytended to negotiate value for value but to determine how value can be maximised given a budget. If so simply think of it as something like 'budget based socialism'.

Like I said thanks for the link because (I hope self evidently) I did not regard it as a waste of time or nonsensical, just not quite as good as a market based version of itself might be.

[Pete]

I assume that production will fall, and not be wasted, thereby destroying the 'mountains of wasted production' before it comes into being. Why would people continue to produce excess for extra cash? Is that not capitalism? Is the market system not inherently capitalistic (or atleast mercantalistic or feudalistic)?

[sc4r]

Originally posted by [email protected] 2 2003, 01:18 AM
I assume that production will fall, and not be wasted, thereby destroying the 'mountains of wasted production' before it comes into being. Why would people continue to produce excess for extra cash? Is that not capitalism? Is the market system not inherently capitalistic (or atleast mercantalistic or feudalistic)?
1. You assume wrong.
2. You are accepting the society that simply accepts whatever it is given then? In which case why not simply stick with Capitalism.
3. NO a market system is not inherrenetly any of the things you mention.

[Vinny Rafarino]

Originally posted by [email protected] 1 2003, 07:51 PM
Would value not become a thing of the past, when what is needed is provided and it does not matter past that?

Value would only become a thing of the past once the monetary system is abolished under communism, until then, value plays a key role in production.


I assume that production will fall, and not be wasted, thereby destroying the 'mountains of wasted production' before it comes into being. Why would people continue to produce excess for extra cash? Is that not capitalism? Is the market system not inherently capitalistic (or atleast mercantalistic or feudalistic)?

Value and market are not really "capitalist" in nature. What makes an economic system capitalist is the fact that the means of production are privitised and that surplus value (the equivalent profit in bourgeoise economics) is given over to the individual owners of the means of production.

Social market economics (what Stalin used in the USSR) simply takes advantage of the fact that value has already been placed on goods and services. What the comrade Stalin found out rather quickly was that if you do not allow the market to dictate the value of you products, once you attempt to trade internationally (a necessary funtion if you want your GDP to remain stable and growing) you simply cannot place your own values to products.

If you set the value to high, now nation will bother to trade with you, essentially leaving you with no surplus value to balance your constant and variable capital expenditures. This leads to two things, oversupply of products and no a reverse in capital placed back into the economy. Once you have an over-supply, there is no need to produce additional products, leaving those workers without jobs. Without jobs, these workers will no longer be contributing to the GDP. Bring this to a national level and you have economic chaos.

If you set your value to low, goods obtained internationally for the purpose of production will force your constant capital ration to an extreme level. If your factory is not pruducing surplus value, there will be no way to coimpletely pay constant and variable capital on the following cycle, leading to again, the closing of these factories with the layoff of all the employees.

The surplus value created from these goods is what is used to provide all of the social needs of the proletariat.

Of course once socialism exists globally, there is no need to retain the concepts of "market" and "market value" as labour value is now what is used to guage a products value and trade unions are used to guage production.

All of this becomes completely irrelevant once the transition into communism is complete.

[sc4r]

Originally posted by COMRADE RAF+Oct 2 2003, 07:42 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (COMRADE RAF @ Oct 2 2003, 07:42 AM)
[email protected] 1 2003, 07:51 PM
Would value not become a thing of the past, when what is needed is provided and it does not matter past that?
Value would only become a thing of the past once the monetary system is abolished under communism, until then, value plays a key role in production. [/b]
Value in the sense I am using it (to mean worth, desirability, etc) does not become irrelevant even then unless you take the naive interpretation of &#39;from each .. to each according to his needs&#39; as meaning that &#39;needs&#39; really does mean only basic subsistence needs.

You still need a way of finding out how peoples interpretations of what they need differs and how many of them need how much of what. Unless you are going to ignore their perception of what they need and say that you know best, or are going to be happy to leave some people with unsatisfied &#39;needs&#39;, and others with oversatisfied &#39;needs&#39; when you could have got at least closer to satisfying all of them.

Unless of course you have infinite resources.

Monetary value is just a unit for expressing percieved value so that it can be easily compared from person to person objectively. We get it confused only becasuse in a capitalist system some people are in effect allowed to express their perception of value at a higher rate than others (which is another way of saying that they are given different budgets to work with, or that they are given more money).

If I have 3 units of value and so do you, and we both want both the apple and the orange the easiest way to best satisfy both of us as exactly as possible is to ask how much of our 3 units we will each pay for a specified part of the apple and allow the negotiation to continue until we both have as muich of each as we feel happy with (perhaps I&#39;ll bid 2 units for the whole orange, in which case if you bid 1 unit I get 2/3 of the orange and you get 2/3rds of the apple. If I decided that in fact I dint like apple at all I might suggest that perhaps if yo dont like orange that much we could each get all of the fruit we actually like if we both agree not to bid for the other one at all - thats a very simple market in operation, and not a sign of wage slavery or capitalism).

may the road rise with you mate.

[redstar2000]

How do anarchists intend to deliver value, a challenge.


Value is not defined by the cost of producing something but by how much someone wants it.

Pretty fuzzy.

What does it mean in this context to say that someone "wants" something, let alone "how much" they want it?

In a moneyless economy, the question "how much do you want it?" is semantically meaningless...there is no quantitative measure of individual desire.

Does there "need" to be one? Is not the simple statement "I want X" sufficient?


Now it&#39;s a tenet of Marxism that value should be delivered at cost (as far as possible the more realistic would say, but let&#39;s not quibble).

Cost is, of course, something that could be quantified and perhaps will be...specificially in terms of the human-hours of work it takes to produce X (including, of course, a proportionate share of the human-hours of work it took to produce the raw materials, transport them, build the necessary machinery, etc. to produce X).

The statistical complexities would be formidable, no doubt (especially the problem of infinite regress)...but that&#39;s what we have super-computers for. If 10 people put in 100 hours to make X, the true cost is not likely to be much above 150 hours. Accumulated experience will provide reasonably accurate algorithms for solving the equations in most cases. All that&#39;s required is that people keep track of their hours and that someone keeps track of what is actually produced.

Knowing the true cost of possible "mixes" of production, people can decide what is "affordable" and what "costs too much". They may do this individually, collectively, or as an entire society-wide decision. Allowances can be made for those who choose to "opt-out" of a big project.

When producing things for use, you&#39;d like to know if the stuff is actually useful. As I&#39;ve noted before, modern card-swipe technology can easily furnish real-time or very close to real-time data on what people are actually requesting and using and what is piling up in a warehouse somewhere.

In the latter case, the collective might be informed (by that central data base) that what they are making is of no use to anyone. The collectives that furnish the "bad collective" with raw materials may cease to do so...or demand improvements. Spare parts may become unavailable. And so on.

How "quick" or "efficient" this process will be is hard to predict; we know that under capitalism, producers of shoddy commodities can limp on for a decade or more before the banks finally cut off their credit and force them into bankruptcy.

In the scenario that I propose, the "bad collective" would find themselves in an empty workshop unable to produce anything. They&#39;d have no choice but to move on to other, more useful collectives...unless boredom was really appealing to them. One thing they might be able to do is invite a collective well-known for its competence to "take them in" as apprentices...to learn how to get it right.

And if their incompetence was truly legendary, they might be incorporated into the routines of stand-up comedians.


It seems to have no mechanism at all to correct an oversupply of goods which are wanted, but not as badly as others, because after all, their output will still be taken up, because it is wanted.

As always, the simplest solution is to ask people what they want. Capitalists do consumer surveys all the time; there&#39;s no reason that communist society couldn&#39;t do them...and do them better and more thoroughly. Is it unreasonable to assume that if a serious want was going unfulfilled, that some collectives wouldn&#39;t step up to "meet the demand"?

Again, efficiency is difficult to predict, but over time it "ought" to work...at least for "serious" wants.

And, of course, there&#39;s vocal public opinion...always a key factor in communist society. People who have a want that is chronically in short supply will organize to demand it...and may even start a collective to start producing it themselves.


An anarchist economy does not seem to have any regulatory mechanism to balance need and production across the whole economy.

No, it doesn&#39;t, at least not explicitly. After the revolution, people will first be concerned with getting their own cities back in some kind of functioning order, then they will look at regional possibilities, then at the economy as a whole.

It&#39;s certainly not "out of the question" that "federations of federations" could eventually engage in some "loose" form of economic planning that would take in the whole economy. As I noted in an earlier post, they would be making some very well-informed suggestions...not giving orders or commands.

Finally, I hope it&#39;s understood that the baroque extravagance of "consumer wants" that we know under capitalism will almost certainly be a thing of the past under communism. In the last decade or so prior to proletarian revolution, with the capitalist system collapsing, people will be struggling to survive as well as against their fading masters...the idea that "you are what you buy" is one that will come to be regarded with disgust and contempt.

In some ways, communism will be simpler than capitalism.

:redstar2000:

PS: I&#39;ve deliberately chosen not to use this thread for a critique of "market socialism". My views on that subject are here...

"Market Socialism"--Are We For Sale? (http://www.anarchist-action.org/marxists/redstar2000/theory.php?subaction=showfull&id=1060612688&archive=1062413506&cnshow=headlines&start_from=&ucat=&)

The RedStar2000 Papers (http://www.anarchist-action.org/marxists/redstar2000/)
A site about communist ideas

[sc4r]

Your whole exposition is unfortunately undone by a central error. You assume that &#39;I want x&#39; is sufficient information to judge whether x should be produced given that you will also have said &#39;I want a, I want b....I want z, I want a1....I want z1..., and god know how many other things&#39;.

If it were possible to make them all (infinite resources) this would be sufficient, but, of course it is not.

If I were a farmer I might want a combine harvester, I&#39;d tell you so. I&#39;d maybe want it more than I wanted a small tractor, quite genuinely, it would save me work. But any society that took this an indication to stop making small tractors and supplying farmers with the combine harvesters they requested would be up shit creek when it turned out that the benefit to the farmer was about an hour a year. That, my boy, is in a dramatised nutshell why simply asking people what they want is not adequate no matter how simple it might be. The same sort of problem in much more subtle and less obvious to see ways occurs quite literally millions of times over in a modern economy. Your society would inevtaibaly find itself massively underproducing low spec goods and massively over producing high spec ones. The end result being an overall and increasingly serious inability to produce eough of anything.

You clearly dont know either how most market research is carried out, or analysed, or what it is used for. I do. It is not, as you seem to think, mainly used to find out what people want. It is used to find out what advertising they noticed and also to establish probable pricing policies for new product yet to hit the market. When this is done the respondent gets subjected to a battery of questions designed to actually simulate a market anyway.

Theres nothing especially esoteric about calculating a cost Redstar. It mystifies me that you went into such detail about it. And quite why you think infinite regression is required to calculate a cost I have no idea. Calculating costs may not be exact, but its done pretty accurately without even 1/100th of the difficulty you seem to assume. It is very much the easy part of the problem.

The difficult part is determining what mix of products will produce the greatest satisfaction given that only a total cost expenditure is possible, that some of that is fixed to various degrees, and that some parts of that expenditure are themselves influenced by the mix.

If you just ask people &#39;what cost would you pay&#39; without telling them that they have a limit on their total then you&#39;ll find out nothing, because they have nothing whatsoever to scale it against.

If you do give them a limit, then you will find out what the optimum production mix to satisfy them at any particular time would be under ideal conditions, but unless you are lucky enough to actually have that amount of production capacity in the very proportions they suggest, you wont be able to satisfy it. Are you going to start another round of asking them what they want all over again, but this time altering the available total by the amount required to change the production capacity? what if they dont want it under those circumstances? or for that matter what if such a mix is actually impossible? start again, try again? how many times ?

Or you could allow them to bid for what is available up to their budget. Then, whether you realise it or not you have just described a simple market (and in fact I expressly did describe a market in this way so as to make the point obvious).

The point of a market is that it provides a way to get an increasingly accurate approximation to what people want without having to completely redo the whole costly exercise an indeterminate number of times until an abitrarily acceptable accuracy is reached, and that it self adjusts to avoid contradictory or wildly swinging results.

A market in effect spreads the difficulty of a single calculation over multiple people and time to get increasingly accurate and timely results with less and less effort. Your method does the opposite; it asks every person to do the entire calculation over and over again until an acceptable result is achieved, and then, unless needs remain static (impossible if you have any durables in the mix), asks them to redo it from scratch over and over and over.

Whereas asking people to guess what others want, is I would hope, self evidently a bad idea even as an outline concept.

Asking &#39;individuals to decide on a society wide basis&#39; is such a strange notion I cant think what to say. Either it means a command economy where you dont actually ask everyone; or it means that you are still left with the problem that absoultely no decision has been made. All you have is a lot of different opinions just as before, none of which (if people have played by your rules) tells you anything about what people want themselves, and all of which require that every individual understand all the cost implications of all the possible mixes. As an example of a totally impossible demand to put on anyone, let alone everyone, this would be hard to beat. Do you have any idea at all how difficult it is for trained experts to calculate optimum mixes of even a small number ( less than a dozen) of products which may make use of some common but limited resources? I guess not.

To repeat - the problem is not to know what people are requesting / what they want, but to know what they would do without under various cost constraints, and to ensure that as far as possible everyone recieves a fair share of value as it is assessed by them....To dramatise this point : if your society produces T bone steaks for all it may very well think it has provided great value, and if it gives me one I&#39;ve recieved an equal share of output alright. But as I dont happen to like T bone steaks, it will have given me no value at all. I&#39;d much rather it had given me a double helping of ice cream and let the guy who really like T bones but hates ice cream have mine. We would both have benefited (Purrrrlease dont tell me we could have swapped, this is illustrative it does not remotely reflect the scale of the problem).

The rest of what you say does not answer anything unless you first address this, the hard question. Describing the technology sounds impressive only because it is actually very easy to do so in such broad terms. It&#39;s solving the central problem that is difficult from a conceptual basis. The technology is only really difficult from a detailed practical one. Which means of course that you ignored all the hard parts which might have relatively concise answers, and instead focused on the easy bits which you answered in insufficient detail to reveal anything interesting.

Loose answers about how &#39;the collectives would step up demand&#39; etc. likewise actually fail to address a real question. We already know that the idea is for the appropriate ones to do so, that is self evident. Saying that &#39;they will&#39; actually answers nothing. THE QUESTION IS HOW DO THEY KNOW TO ? HOW DO THEY KNOW THEY ARE NOT PREVENTING SOMETHNG MORE DESIRED FROM BEING PRODUCED ?

I dont expect either you or most of your followers to understand why what you have said is such a cop out. You probably think it isn&#39;t; thats because you have zero experience or interest in resolving the type of problem we are discussing here; but I do, and I&#39;d sooner hope that God sent down detailed instructions from heavan than rely upon your &#39;solution&#39;.

BTW what you described was a far far worse thought out version of PARECON anyway.

And finally you open with a line you probably think attacks my case, but ironically actually supports it. When you say that &#39;value&#39; is pretty fuzzy you are dead right. But that is exactly why your very unfuzzy approach to it wont work.

The notion of value exists, people care about it, and they want it. But getting them to describe what they mean by it, and how they will feel they have got it, in terms which you can actually do anything with is pretty hard. A market solves this &#39;fuzzy&#39; problem. Thats the whole point. A market is in fact a superb example of &#39;Fuzzy maths&#39; in action.

[redstar2000]

Well, no one can say you&#39;re not predictable when it comes to your market fetishism. Any proposed ideas that don&#39;t involve the market are as automatically rejected by you as by the Wall Street Journal.

In fact, you started this thread under false premises. You were and are not really interested in non-market economies at all; you just wanted another platform to beat your drums for the almighty market.

Why not face reality, squire? Your vision of "market socialism" can only appeal, in the long run, to those who share that particular infatuation--namely, capitalists or pro-capitalists who have other problems with the present set-up.

For example, I can see an intelligent and far-sighted minor-league capitalist saying something like "we need a plan like sc4r&#39;s--at least temporarily--because the present market system is producing such growing outrage that we risk revolution if we don&#39;t make some serious changes". Who knows, maybe George Soros might even go for the idea.

But I think your idea is a "non-starter" in the left now and in the working class generally in the future. The real debate is between those who endorse a strong state apparatus, central economic planning, production of commodities for sale, retention of wage-slavery, etc. and those who seek to abolish all of that "old shit".

You think that if working people see how "practical" your plan is, they will perforce rush to endorse it and implement it. I don&#39;t see why they should...it would just be a variation on what they have now.

No, I think that when people are truly ready for drastic changes in class society, the traditional socialists and the communists will be the main contenders...and possibly the anarchists as well. Of course, I hope the "Redstar-ist" folks win out...but who knows what the future will bring?

I highly doubt, though, that it will bring "market socialism". Beat the drums as hard as you can, there will just be too few people who will want to dance around that particular idol.

Not that that will stop you.

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[apathy maybe]

People, other people have short attention spans and don&#39;t want to read a tome one why or why not whatever. Unless it is interesting in my case.

We don&#39;t need a market, if someone wants something they wander along to where it is and pick it up. Else they put an `order&#39; through on the Internet and some kind soul who is wandering in their direction picks it up and delivers it. No economy needed.

But not being an out and out anarchist I probably shouldn&#39;t be answering this.

[sc4r]

No chummy there is no false pretence going on. I asked anarchists to tell me how they planned to deliver value. None of them have succeeded in doing so. I hardly think it&#39;s a bad thing that I decided to also invest a little time explaining alternatives, its called contributing.

But just as a matter of record out of 19 paragraphs in my last critique only 5 were about markets anyway. The rest was devoted to what I hoped were critical questions about your effort that I vainly hoped you might try and answer.

PARECON actually has the good grace to admit to the superiority of markets in this respect. And I accepted PARECON as a very decent answer, even though its one I see as badly flawed.

Your response was different. It actually adressed almost nothing of interest and missed out entirely on suggesting a resolution to the central problem. It spent aeons of time on (badly) describing overview solutions to trivial problems and no time at all on the questions which need addressing to give your ideas any substantive practical potential . The same questions you have been ducking for six months or so.

My last post pointed out the specific defects in your answer. I did not do as you do and simply dismiss it without explanation beyond a few slogans, quite the reverse I went into quite considerable detail and gave illustrations to help explain what to many will be unfamiliar and difficult concepts. If you want to argue with my evaluation in substance go ahead. Not doing so rather looks to me as though you cannot. It rather looks as though the evaluations and explanations of where you fail were, in fact, correct

I contrasted the working of a market with it of course because its a good way of showing just how inadequate your answer was. You dont seem to realise that this is the only way to actually judge ideas, to contrast them against something else.

You are actually almost certainly right that any significant change will be headed by a basically leninist movement. You are wildly optimistic and deluded if you think anarchism is gonna play any part in anything though buddy. That might explain why I&#39;m quite happy to declare myself at peace politically with leninists, they dont talk unactionable claptrap. I will, of course, continue to press them to consider very carefully the advantages of using some form of market based economy in any post capitalist society. I reckon enough of them will see the benefits that they will (just in fact as they always have to some extent).

I do basically support the leninist approach politically, All I fail to share is the insistence some of the youger and more gung ho types for prefferring what they think of as a gloriously bloody revolution, and possibly the timeframe afterwards for instituting genuine democracy (which I bet not many leninists dont want absolutely minimised anyway) . Thats fine, thats just teen talk. Older types have a bit more savvy.

No genuine capitalist will ever support my ideas. You seem to think that what they are in love with is the word &#39;market&#39; they are not. They are in love with using the market to keep and grow their share of capital. My market dont allow them to do that. Your continued insistance on bracketing me with capitalists, imperialists etc. is, I will say again, grossly insulting.

But some non capitalists who are not socialists either will be attracted towards socialism simply because seeing ideas like my mine expressed convinces them they are not signing up to a lah de dah idea which if implemented will cost them all the material comforts they would desire. In other words they&#39;ll see it as practical.

You denouncing it piper wont make it any less desirable. People like you wont have anything to do with anything that happens anyway (even your own predictions put that possibility 100&#39;s of years in the future). Nobody with any knowlege of economics or organisation would hire you to organise a XMAS club , let alone a national economy.

I&#39;m quite happy to discuss my ideas. why would I not be. I&#39;m quite happy to have anyone who wished to try and do so rip the logic to shreds. If they suceed I&#39;ve actually gained. I&#39;m not interested though in hearing you repeat how they are automatically bad because they include the word market. As substantive criticism yours ranks in value somewhere below what my Cat could manage.

[sc4r]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 3 2003, 12:40 AM
People, other people have short attention spans and don&#39;t want to read a tome one why or why not whatever. Unless it is interesting in my case.

We don&#39;t need a market, if someone wants something they wander along to where it is and pick it up. Else they put an `order&#39; through on the Internet and some kind soul who is wandering in their direction picks it up and delivers it. No economy needed.

But not being an out and out anarchist I probably shouldn&#39;t be answering this.
errrr if you dont want to read a tome then dont. I cant recall coming round to your gaff and threatening you with a chinese burn if you failed to do so.

Your interesting and detailed review of the Tome seem to consist of saying &#39;markets are bad&#39;. Fascinating stuff mate, So informative, so convincing.
{sarcasm moce off}

[redstar2000]

...I&#39;m quite happy to declare myself at peace politically with leninists, they dont talk unactionable claptrap. I will, of course, continue to press them to consider very carefully the advantages of using some form of market based economy in any post capitalist society. I reckon enough of them will see the benefits that they will (just in fact as they always have to some extent).

I do basically support the leninist approach politically.

:wub: Yes, I quite agree, you make a lovely couple. :wub:

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A site about communist ideas

[sc4r]

And thats your substantive reply is it?

The Leninists will crush you chum. The idea that you are going to be competition for them is about as plausible as you taking on Lennox Lewis in the Boxing ring and hoping he will surrender to your yacking.

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by [email protected] 2 2003, 08:48 PM
And thats your substantive reply is it?

The Leninists will crush you chum. The idea that you are going to be competition for them is about as plausible as you taking on Lennox Lewis in the Boxing ring and hoping he will surrender to your yacking.
:o I tremble before your wrath, oh mighty one&#33; :o

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A site about communist ideas

[class warrior]

sc4r,

If I uderstand you correctly, and I may not, you&#39;re arguing the notion of scarcity (economically speaking) in regard to a specific form of value. To use the Marxian term, use value, which takes into account consumer desire.

If this is right, then I have a question.

There are people who are willing to pay what I consider very high prices for things that I don&#39;t have any use for, and therefore find "valueless" by the definition you gave. These people bid for these products on an open market. I&#39;m talking, of course, about collectors. There are people willing to part with a princely sum in order to capture a first edition by some beloved author. Fair enough. However, in this instance, your fruit example doesn&#39;t work (though I doubt it would work regardless), for who would want two-thirds of a first edition?

Too, I&#39;m curious about the capital equality assumed in your argument. Is labor somehow not subjected to market forces? While labor is assuredly a very different kind of commodity, not given, for example, to the idea of commidity fetishism, does it still have a use value?

One more thing, in your apple and orange example, you say you have three units of "value," but that can not be what you meant unless you mean that money is not a commodity in and of itself, and it is. However, assuming you meant that a "unit of value" as simply a clever way of saying cash (the spending of which on any commodity would be an expression of one individuals value of that commodity, and be careful here, for it&#39;s starting to sound a little Austrian) then the orange and the apple would have to have some sort of "value" to begin with, for they didn&#39;t just magically appear at the market. Assuming that, for apples and oranges to keep appearing at the market, the majority of consumers find the use value higher than the cost of production of the apples and oranges, where would this surplus value then go? (I&#39;m also assuming here that you dismiss the Labor Theory of Value and work, instead, backwards from market value.)

Thanks for your time.

[sc4r]

Good questions, thanks.

E&OE

If I uderstand you correctly, and I may not, you&#39;re arguing the notion of scarcity (economically speaking) in regard to a specific form of value. To use the Marxian term, use value, which takes into account consumer desire.

Yes I’m talking of use value. But be careful you don’t start assuming, as many capitalists would, that it is somehow correct / justified to set the exchange price at use value modified by scarcity; and simply leave it there if it generates most profit / surplus value.

Scarcity does not genuinely affect use value; but what it does do is go some way towards revealing it. Or to put it another way Market price (or call it market value if you prefer) is a function of both Use Value and scarcity.

But do remember that the goal of a socialist society is not especially to reveal use value but to maximise how much of it is delivered. In conditions of any scarcity you do have to reveal it, so that you know how much of each commodity to make. Remember that it is no part of the goal of a socialist society to provide profit opportunities, the idea is to get rid of all discrepancies between total use value and total labour value because at that point you know you are producing the optimum mix of products. This idealised situation may never in practise be wholly achieved of course, but it is the goal.


There are people who are willing to pay what I consider very high prices for things that I don&#39;t have any use for, and therefore find "valueless" by the definition you gave.

So? All that means is you perceieve a different use value than they do. This isn’t odd, peculiar, or in any way not recognised by a market model. In fact it is precisely because it is a pretty much universal experience that a market is needed. If we did all put the exact same use values on things production planning across an economy would be a fairly simple matter. It’s because we don’t that something like a market is needed.

These people bid for these products on an open market. I&#39;m talking, of course, about collectors. There are people willing to part with a princely sum in order to capture a first edition by some beloved author. Fair enough. However, in this instance, your fruit example doesn&#39;t work (though I doubt it would work regardless), for who would want two-thirds of a first edition?

I’m confused by what you mean by ‘the fruit example wont work’ here. There is obviously nothing interesting to say about sharing a single indivisible product, beyond the fact that if more than one person wants it, it might be wise to look for ways to make it divisible (putting it in a library for example). Please tell me what your point in relation to either production planning or optimising total received value is?

I also have no idea what you are getting at when you say ‘you doubt the fruit example would work’. As an illustration it very clearly did work. Are you are trying to say that you don’t see that it illustrates any real problem and solution ? You are going to have to do a bit more work explaining what you mean if I’m to answer.

Too, I&#39;m curious about the capital equality assumed in your argument. Is labor somehow not subjected to market forces? While labor is assuredly a very different kind of commodity, not given, for example, to the idea of commidity fetishism, does it still have a use value?

Labour is not subject to market forces at all in the communist market, it’s not a tradable commodity. I don’t actually believe myself that its an especially good thing not to allow differences in the value of different types of labour by different types of people to be recognised, and if you allow this then labour does become a tradable commodity (not necessarily meaning that unrestricted trading is allowed BTW) . That sort of Market is what I have termed the socialist market (although, self evidently certain types of socialism would not use it, but use the communist market instead). Talking about the socialist market to anyone who cant see how the communist market works and is different from the Capitalist one would be like trying to explain calculus to someone who had yet to pass arithmetic. I wont even try to do it here yet.

One more thing, in your apple and orange example, you say you have three units of "value," but that can not be what you meant unless you mean that money is not a commodity in and of itself, and it is. However, assuming you meant that a "unit of value" as simply a clever way of saying cash (the spending of which on any commodity would be an expression of one individuals value of that commodity, and be careful here, for it&#39;s starting to sound a little Austrian) then the orange and the apple would have to have some sort of "value" to begin with, for they didn&#39;t just magically appear at the market.

I said ‘a unit of value’ rather than ‘money’ so as to avoid pulling in silly rabid comments from those in this community who think that irrespective of what money means they’ll scream that it is bad. It is an unfortunate fact here that one has to quite often use unnatural terminology in order to avoid mountains of objections which have nothing to do with substance. The same people who do this, unfortunately, often a habit of objecting to ‘verbosity’. So you cant actually win.

‘Money’ is definitely not a commodity though. Not in the socialist market, not in the Communist market, not in the capitalist market. Not anywhere. If you mean that money is the common exchange unit in which the value and prices of all other commodities is expressed and that therefore it’s total amount should reflect the total value of all the actual commodities then you are correct. RIGHTS to money can be a commodity, since all that really means ultimately is rights to an unspecified bundle of actual commodities to be determined at market prices.

Yes both the apple and the orange have an associated labour value, obviously. It’s better described as a cost since the constant confusion between the terms ‘value’ and ‘cost’ and ‘price’ and the, not infrequent, misuse that results, causes endless difficulties It makes sorting out what people really mean, or even whether their statements can actually mean anything hard.

I don’t care how Austrian the thing sounds. Do you seriously think that the Austrians never said anything valid or useful? Don’t be daft, their views and conclusions are highly coloured by their pre-conceptions (just as yours are, just as mine are probably) but this certainly does not mean that one should disregard everything they said as a consequence.

Not that there was anything particularly Austrian in anything I’ve said anyway. I did not say that the Apple and the Orange represented 3 units of value. The apple and the orange could have cost 100 or 1000 or 10,000 units of labour to produce, it would not affect the example one way or the other.

The point was that the two people had equal market exchange units (if you are confused by my calling them value units). And could use this fact to negotiate the best possible joint result. I’d have thought it obvious that if we were actually talking outside of the illustration about only two people one would not call the negotiation process a market normally. That’s what a market does, allow people to negotiate the best joint deal when a lot of people, products, and production variables are involved.

The ‘best joint deal’ in a capitalist market is, however, not defined in the same way it is in the communist market, because you are trading in different things.

I almost cant believe that an illustration as simple as that can be misunderstood or taken out of context; its actually very hard to see how I can make it still simpler I’m afraid.

Assuming that, for apples and oranges to keep appearing at the market, the majority of consumers find the use value higher than the cost of production of the apples and oranges, where would this surplus value then go? (I&#39;m also assuming here that you dismiss the Labor Theory of Value and work, instead, backwards from market value.)

You seem to miss the point that if the market is expressing a price (which reflects both use value and scarcity) higher than the production costs then it means that not enough apples and oranges are being produced. The excess of price over cost (what you are calling surplus value) is not a thing as such, it is information. It tells you to divert resources from producing something with a price below that of cost into fruit production.

I think you would have difficulty explaining how the labour theory of value is relevant here. It is relevant, but it is not a case of accepting either the labour theory of value or market value / price (which BTW is an example of the confusion I referred to earlier). Both are relevant.

The cost of a thing (express it in man hours by all means) is what it actually took to produce it.

The value of a thing is how desirable it is.

You cannot physically produce all the things people would ideally want.

So the trick is to produce the mix of those things that best balances their perception of use value for cost. AND try to ensure that it is not just the case that the correct balance of things is produced overall, but that things are distributed so as to best satisfy individual people.

Now remember that use value (in a consumer item) does not (unlike cost) actually have an objective referent of its own. Use value is really a subjective feeling. But you still want to deliver it.

So you have to give people a referent and a limit so as to get them to express their use values in a way that allows comparison with others and against cost (There’s no point in producing something with a use value of 1 hour if it costs 10 to make).

So you say to people &#39;Express your market valuation (use value *scarcity) for each thing you want relative to all the others. In order to keep you consistent, and to prevent you trying to tell us about the things which have such a tiny use value to you that it is irrelevant we will give you a fixed number of units (you can call these units money if you like) to express everything against. If you say you’ll allocate it all to having a car you’ll have zero left for food, so don’t&#39;. We also say &#39;And don’t forget that if a thing is in short supply you’ll want to bid high if you really want it, or others may get it in preference to you as it means their percieved use value for it is higher.&#39;

Now we know that the total labour value represented by how well all these use values can actually be satisfied is equal to the total cost of production of everything (by definition).

The market (in effect) says to people &#39;OK you can have all the things (in the volumes requested) for which your evaluation of market value was higher than someone else’s provided that there is enough of it to do this and allow anyone who bid even higher than you to get their share of these scarce things.&#39;

Then it says ‘oh and by the way you still have some unspent units because not all your ‘bids’ were of a high enough priority – care to rebid?’.

BTW it also, in effect, says to the people prepared to bid really high, &#39;theres no need to go that high&#39; have some back and bid for other stuff too&#39;. It might actually be even better if there was a way of recording both the final price and the initial &#39;bid&#39;; but because in reality a market does not go through the one time process of collecting information in this way and is actually more dynamic (which has other advantages of course) it cannot.

At the end of the day everything has been distributed. Everyone has got an approximation to the best mix of things they wanted which gives them as much use value as can be done given that there is not an infinite supply of everything and that other people have to be satisfied too.

Now what you do is say that we will convert the total of units bid into the equivalent in cost units (we divide total bid units by total cost units) and compare them to actual costs for each product. Where more was bid than the thing cost we know that it is both scarce and desired, so we make more. Where less was bid we know we have oversupply (or something that costs more to produce than it is worth to people), so we make less (or look for a way to reduce the cost). Or, if you want to express it a different way, the surplus value gets put into developing production of things which are wanted and in short supply.

The capitalist market does the same thing EXCEPT (and its a BIG EXCEPT) that the capitalist is not using the ‘bid units’ just as a means of information; To him it is actually transferred as a market entitlement unit (money). It entitles him if he likes to exchange it himself for commodities, and any difference between cost and use value becomes his profit. He personally keeps the surplus value (or exchanges it for rights to future surplus value in any production facility he may invest it in) . It still serves as information too of course.

And in the context of a liberal society and in reality our capitalist does not even have to play completely fairly by even these rules BTW.

*********

With all due respect to you, because you did try to ask sensible questions I would say, you have not separated functions and ideas which are specific to the capitalist market and economic ideology from those which are general to any market.

[sc4r]

My preffered usage of Price, value, and cost is more or less as follows ( I do not BTW claim always to follow these rules, I&#39;m not as pedantic about is as that, one used terms to communicate, and one tries to use whichever of them communicates best in any given siruation).

Cost : is the amount already paid to produce a thing or the amount one expects to pay to produce a thing in the future. It could in a socialist context very well be expressed as man hours labour involved.

Price : Is what you will have to pay to get a thing. In other words it&#39;s effectively the amount of man hours of your own you will give to obtain the product of someone else&#39;s production. Its the result of a negotiation of some sort.

Value : Is a much more subjective term. In the case of consumer goods it represents how satisfied having a thing will make you. You can probably not express it objectively except as a PRICE you would be willing to pay; not neccessarily the price you actually think you will have to pay.

In the case of production goods it represents the amount by which you feel you can reduce your costs if you have a thing, or alternatively the amount by which you can increase your prooduction for the same cost. Again its really only expressable accurately as a PRICE you would be willing to pay.

****

There is obviously a close relationship between the three things, and its often very moot as to whether a concept should be described as a value, or a price; or (less often) a cost.

Usually I would say : A price AT some point; A value TO someone; A cost OF something; is a pretty good rule of thumb about usage.

****

The problem, BTW, with using &#39;Money&#39; as a term in these sorts of arguments it that it does carry the connutaion that exchanging it will confer a right to the reciever to re-exchange it either for other goods or for rights.

Socialist &#39;Money&#39;, in an ideal socialist society, is not transferrable. You can spend it in the socialist market (in which case it becomes information) or you lose it completely. You would not ideally even be allowed to save it up (because this means you can distort market messages or accumulate capital (rights to production- exactly the thing socialism seeks to prevent). I can of course see society allowing you to exchange it for rights to something specific (but not ongoing) from society in the future. In effect allowing you to save up, provided you save it in societies &#39;bank&#39; and on Societies terms and conditions).

I wonder how many people here realise that their savings are Capital? or that taking credit gives someone else Capital? How many Capitalists are there on this board? How many Capitalists have been created or encouraged by people on this board?