robbo203
11th October 2011, 08:57
From an online debate. Comments?
I do not propose to to answer every single point of yours otherwise what is
already a longwinded exchange would be in danger of becoming even more so. I
will stick to the salient ones
1)"SCARCITY":
You agree that there is more than one way in which one can talk about "scarcity"
but insist that "Opportunity cost is just a more exact way of putting over the
economic meme of scarcity" (actually its not - even if the definition is
"exact", opportunity costs themselves are extremely difficult to pin down, let
alone quantify). Once again I have to remind you that this is an aunt sally
argument. It is an aunt sally argument because NOBODY is contesting the fact
that the kind of scarcity implicit in the notion of opportunity cost , exists
(such as, for example, if I spend my time typing out this email I cannot, at the
same time, play tennis - its one thing or the other). Yet you seem intent upon
projecting the idea that, for socialists and - although I am not a member - the
SPGB in particular, this is a notion, the implications of which, we somehow seek
to avoid. That is false and that is why I assert your argument is a complete
aunt sally. No one is denying, or has ever denied to my knowlege , that
"economic decision making" in a socialist society would entail opportunity costs
which need to be addressed and taken into account in choosing between production
alternatives. To the contrary, without money, we can arrive at a fuller and more
complete understanding of the opportunity costs of our decisions to the extent
that this is possible - a point Otto Neurath made, incidentally, in relation
to environmental impacts. You yourself have admitted that opportunity costs not
have to entail money. Your example of Concorde as an illustration of a
technocratic mindset that supposedly characterises how the SPGB and others view
"cost" as some kind of "artificial barrier to progress" is frankly ridiculous.
As usual youve got the wrong end of the stick altogether. Its not opportunity
cost that is seen as the "artifical barrier" which can therefore be eliminated
or disposed of in a socialist society but rather the profit criterion. THAT is
what is seen as the artificial barrier, not opportunity costs as such. Where
did you get this daft idea from that it was the latter?
2) "PROFIT":
You contend that "The SPGB ignorantly criticises profit and makes a bogus claim
that it can be contrasted to production for use when the confused master, Marx,
openly admits that it was for use". Actually the ignorance is entirely yours
because you misunderstand completely what is being said - namely the
subordination of production for use to production for profit. . This does not
mean that those who say this are thereby saying that production for profit does
not entail production for use. That is a non sequitur. What they are saying is
that production for use is curtailed or limited to what can only be profitably
produced. Thus, a starving person with no money does not effectively register
as a customer from capitalism's point of view - even though his/her need for
food is obvious - and therefore provides no incentive for producers to produce
food. In that sense money is indeed "stopping us having things that we might
otherwise have". That should be obvious enough when farmers are paid not to
produce and when food is dumped rather than sold because the price is deemed to
be too low from the point of view of making a profit. Such a practice is pretty
much regular near where I live - along the greenhouse belt between Adra and
Almeria in Spain. Ive often come across heaps of rotting cherry tomatoes and
the like in the barrancos dumped presumably becuase it could not be sold
3) NEEDS AND WANTS
You contend that "Our needs are infinite and not even known. It is our actual
wants that are finite". Really? We have a biological need for food. How much
chicken Tandoori can you consume at one sitting? I would suggest to you that it
is a very finite amount indeed. Exceed it and you will soon discover that your
body is trying to tell you something when you start throwing up. This is
precisely the point I made in relation to the law of diminishing returns and
why it is that Marginalist economics has ironically supplied us with a most
effective counter- argument to the claim that socialism is impossible because
demand is infinite and the means of satisfying it , finite. Its simply not
true. Demand tends to attenuate to vanishing point. True, as we satisfy our
need for one thing we may move onto another. In that sense you can talk about
demand being infinite. But it does not follow that this renders socialism
impossible. What kind of needs do we tend to move onto? Maslow who I referred
to in my earlier post distinguished between lower (or deficiency) needs and
higher needs. Lower needs such as one's need for food are easily gratified but
are recurring and socialism is predicated on the technological possiblity of
satisfying precisely these kinds of needs. Higher needs, on the other hand,
like the need for social esteem or for self actualisation are intrinsically
difficult if not impossible to fully gratify and tend to expand the more we seek
to gratfiy them. This, however, is not a problem for socialism as I explained;
on the contrary it is a boon. In a free access society, if the only way in
which you can can acquire social esteem and the respect of your fellows is
through your contribution to society and not what you consume, then this good
for socialism. If there is no limit to your desire for social esteem then this
neatly disposes (or helps to dispose) of the argument that people in a socialist
society would be reluctant to contribute .
Wants are not the same thing as needs. They tend to be the form - itself a
social construction - in which needs express themnselves. So you "want" chicken
Tandoori but you do not "need" chicken Tandoori. You need food. Wants tended
to be fleeting and ephemeral; ignore them and you soon forget about them. The
intensity of an unmet want diminishes with the passage of time. The opposite is
true of a need. Ignore the need for food and your hunger will intensify and
your very existence will be imperilled..
4) "SOCIAL CONTROL" .
You contend that free access deprives us of any form of social control over
production and for that reason, is "anti-social". The technocrats will run
amok, you claim, with their harebrained schemes or producing a plethora of
concordes and other such white elephants, leaving our baic needs unmet. This
only goes to show how little you really understand socialism - how are these
supposed "technocrats" to induce others to go along with their schemes? What
leverage could they exert over a population where labour is voluntarily
performed and good and services are free available to all? By a reductio ad
adsurdum argument it must follow that whatever is produced must have the broad
consent of society itself. THAT is the way in which social control will
express itself.
Perhaps I should rephrase my claim - it is not your understanding or cognitive
ability that is the problem. It is that the logic of the mind set to which you
have succumbed almost requires you to think of socialism on this way. Indeed I
have long argued that is precisely why people like von Mises and his acolytes
cannot conceive of socialism as anything other than a centrally planned economy.
The logic of their argument compels to think in this utterly blinkered fashion
. However, with a little lateral thinking you can overcome this problem and
thereby effectively address the question of precisely how society might exert
control over the production process in a socialist society.
Providing there is a some form of feedback process intact permitting a free
interplay of the many diffierent decisions needed to operate a socialist
economy, it will be entirely possible to see what stocks of material inputs are
available, how much of these are required for particular purposes and how much
would be left over for other purposes (the question of opportunity costs, rears
up again here). So if a socialist society really wanted to churn out 1000
concordes a year this would require enormous quantities of inputs and labour
power leaving little over for other purposes. Is that conceivable? Only if
society actually wanted it. But thats not likely is it? To the contrary, the
actual pattern of production would be shaped in the first instance by the very
priorities that society itself had decided upon, which prorities would serve as
a rough guide in the allocation of inputs throughout. Most likely, the most
important priorities will be those at the base of Maslow's hierarchy - the need
for food, shelter water and so on. Most likely Concorde production will end up
pretty low down on the list of priorities - if it figures at all - and
accordingly will receive very little in the way of material inputs to make it
possible
The so called economic calculation argument is an entirely bogus argument. A
complete irrelevance. It is as dead as a dodo and you really now need to get
used to this fact. Much more interesting in my view is the mechanisms by which
an ordinal scale of social priorities can be put into effect in a socialist
society. At an individual level, there is a certain degree of AUTOMACITY in the
way in which consumer preferences will be transmitted to producer units via a
self regulating system of stock control - much like in the capitalist market
today except that there won't be money. If consumers dont like item X, it will
remain on the shelf and there will be no stimulus to producers to produce more.
If they like item Y there will be a constant demand for Y and producers of Y
will be kept busy churning out Y. This is an indirect form of social control
but there is also the direct form of social control in the sense of conscious
deliberate decisions made by collectivities about the priorities of production
and it in respect of the latter that we need to develop a clearer idea of how it
might work and how it would interact with consumer choices made at the level of
individuals.
I do not propose to to answer every single point of yours otherwise what is
already a longwinded exchange would be in danger of becoming even more so. I
will stick to the salient ones
1)"SCARCITY":
You agree that there is more than one way in which one can talk about "scarcity"
but insist that "Opportunity cost is just a more exact way of putting over the
economic meme of scarcity" (actually its not - even if the definition is
"exact", opportunity costs themselves are extremely difficult to pin down, let
alone quantify). Once again I have to remind you that this is an aunt sally
argument. It is an aunt sally argument because NOBODY is contesting the fact
that the kind of scarcity implicit in the notion of opportunity cost , exists
(such as, for example, if I spend my time typing out this email I cannot, at the
same time, play tennis - its one thing or the other). Yet you seem intent upon
projecting the idea that, for socialists and - although I am not a member - the
SPGB in particular, this is a notion, the implications of which, we somehow seek
to avoid. That is false and that is why I assert your argument is a complete
aunt sally. No one is denying, or has ever denied to my knowlege , that
"economic decision making" in a socialist society would entail opportunity costs
which need to be addressed and taken into account in choosing between production
alternatives. To the contrary, without money, we can arrive at a fuller and more
complete understanding of the opportunity costs of our decisions to the extent
that this is possible - a point Otto Neurath made, incidentally, in relation
to environmental impacts. You yourself have admitted that opportunity costs not
have to entail money. Your example of Concorde as an illustration of a
technocratic mindset that supposedly characterises how the SPGB and others view
"cost" as some kind of "artificial barrier to progress" is frankly ridiculous.
As usual youve got the wrong end of the stick altogether. Its not opportunity
cost that is seen as the "artifical barrier" which can therefore be eliminated
or disposed of in a socialist society but rather the profit criterion. THAT is
what is seen as the artificial barrier, not opportunity costs as such. Where
did you get this daft idea from that it was the latter?
2) "PROFIT":
You contend that "The SPGB ignorantly criticises profit and makes a bogus claim
that it can be contrasted to production for use when the confused master, Marx,
openly admits that it was for use". Actually the ignorance is entirely yours
because you misunderstand completely what is being said - namely the
subordination of production for use to production for profit. . This does not
mean that those who say this are thereby saying that production for profit does
not entail production for use. That is a non sequitur. What they are saying is
that production for use is curtailed or limited to what can only be profitably
produced. Thus, a starving person with no money does not effectively register
as a customer from capitalism's point of view - even though his/her need for
food is obvious - and therefore provides no incentive for producers to produce
food. In that sense money is indeed "stopping us having things that we might
otherwise have". That should be obvious enough when farmers are paid not to
produce and when food is dumped rather than sold because the price is deemed to
be too low from the point of view of making a profit. Such a practice is pretty
much regular near where I live - along the greenhouse belt between Adra and
Almeria in Spain. Ive often come across heaps of rotting cherry tomatoes and
the like in the barrancos dumped presumably becuase it could not be sold
3) NEEDS AND WANTS
You contend that "Our needs are infinite and not even known. It is our actual
wants that are finite". Really? We have a biological need for food. How much
chicken Tandoori can you consume at one sitting? I would suggest to you that it
is a very finite amount indeed. Exceed it and you will soon discover that your
body is trying to tell you something when you start throwing up. This is
precisely the point I made in relation to the law of diminishing returns and
why it is that Marginalist economics has ironically supplied us with a most
effective counter- argument to the claim that socialism is impossible because
demand is infinite and the means of satisfying it , finite. Its simply not
true. Demand tends to attenuate to vanishing point. True, as we satisfy our
need for one thing we may move onto another. In that sense you can talk about
demand being infinite. But it does not follow that this renders socialism
impossible. What kind of needs do we tend to move onto? Maslow who I referred
to in my earlier post distinguished between lower (or deficiency) needs and
higher needs. Lower needs such as one's need for food are easily gratified but
are recurring and socialism is predicated on the technological possiblity of
satisfying precisely these kinds of needs. Higher needs, on the other hand,
like the need for social esteem or for self actualisation are intrinsically
difficult if not impossible to fully gratify and tend to expand the more we seek
to gratfiy them. This, however, is not a problem for socialism as I explained;
on the contrary it is a boon. In a free access society, if the only way in
which you can can acquire social esteem and the respect of your fellows is
through your contribution to society and not what you consume, then this good
for socialism. If there is no limit to your desire for social esteem then this
neatly disposes (or helps to dispose) of the argument that people in a socialist
society would be reluctant to contribute .
Wants are not the same thing as needs. They tend to be the form - itself a
social construction - in which needs express themnselves. So you "want" chicken
Tandoori but you do not "need" chicken Tandoori. You need food. Wants tended
to be fleeting and ephemeral; ignore them and you soon forget about them. The
intensity of an unmet want diminishes with the passage of time. The opposite is
true of a need. Ignore the need for food and your hunger will intensify and
your very existence will be imperilled..
4) "SOCIAL CONTROL" .
You contend that free access deprives us of any form of social control over
production and for that reason, is "anti-social". The technocrats will run
amok, you claim, with their harebrained schemes or producing a plethora of
concordes and other such white elephants, leaving our baic needs unmet. This
only goes to show how little you really understand socialism - how are these
supposed "technocrats" to induce others to go along with their schemes? What
leverage could they exert over a population where labour is voluntarily
performed and good and services are free available to all? By a reductio ad
adsurdum argument it must follow that whatever is produced must have the broad
consent of society itself. THAT is the way in which social control will
express itself.
Perhaps I should rephrase my claim - it is not your understanding or cognitive
ability that is the problem. It is that the logic of the mind set to which you
have succumbed almost requires you to think of socialism on this way. Indeed I
have long argued that is precisely why people like von Mises and his acolytes
cannot conceive of socialism as anything other than a centrally planned economy.
The logic of their argument compels to think in this utterly blinkered fashion
. However, with a little lateral thinking you can overcome this problem and
thereby effectively address the question of precisely how society might exert
control over the production process in a socialist society.
Providing there is a some form of feedback process intact permitting a free
interplay of the many diffierent decisions needed to operate a socialist
economy, it will be entirely possible to see what stocks of material inputs are
available, how much of these are required for particular purposes and how much
would be left over for other purposes (the question of opportunity costs, rears
up again here). So if a socialist society really wanted to churn out 1000
concordes a year this would require enormous quantities of inputs and labour
power leaving little over for other purposes. Is that conceivable? Only if
society actually wanted it. But thats not likely is it? To the contrary, the
actual pattern of production would be shaped in the first instance by the very
priorities that society itself had decided upon, which prorities would serve as
a rough guide in the allocation of inputs throughout. Most likely, the most
important priorities will be those at the base of Maslow's hierarchy - the need
for food, shelter water and so on. Most likely Concorde production will end up
pretty low down on the list of priorities - if it figures at all - and
accordingly will receive very little in the way of material inputs to make it
possible
The so called economic calculation argument is an entirely bogus argument. A
complete irrelevance. It is as dead as a dodo and you really now need to get
used to this fact. Much more interesting in my view is the mechanisms by which
an ordinal scale of social priorities can be put into effect in a socialist
society. At an individual level, there is a certain degree of AUTOMACITY in the
way in which consumer preferences will be transmitted to producer units via a
self regulating system of stock control - much like in the capitalist market
today except that there won't be money. If consumers dont like item X, it will
remain on the shelf and there will be no stimulus to producers to produce more.
If they like item Y there will be a constant demand for Y and producers of Y
will be kept busy churning out Y. This is an indirect form of social control
but there is also the direct form of social control in the sense of conscious
deliberate decisions made by collectivities about the priorities of production
and it in respect of the latter that we need to develop a clearer idea of how it
might work and how it would interact with consumer choices made at the level of
individuals.