Resource Allocation

[vagrantmoralist]

I'm a socialist. What that means to me, is a system where all people are provided a means of survival that does not depend on wages. To narrow it further, I am a Neo-Leninist socialist, though with a minor emphasis on Marxism (labor theory of property as opposed to value, NEP, etc). I've been reading over a few threads, and it seems to me that many people here describe socialism=communism which I wholeheartedly disagree with. I am a socialist because 1) I believe in freedom. Defined simply, freedom is the ability to do what one desires free of coercion, whether that be economic or political. The more freedom, the better. 2) Because I believe in progress, and societal progress is best achieved through a society where wage-slavery does not exist.

That being said, I cannot understand how communism (to take the Leninist definition) could possibly work. Workers controlling the means of production is what we should be striving for, yes, but what about luxuries? Communism provides a great system as long as long as society all agrees on what they want - but people do not and will not agree on what they, outside of the essentials (food, water, etc.) For example, I could put a high resource-priority on owning a digital music player. My friend could put a low resource-priority on owning a digital music player, but put a high one on owning a car, whereas I don't. In resource scarce world, such as our own, society must allocate resources somehow. To do it on the simple basis of majority democracy runs into the problem of tyranny of the majority, to do it politically in any sense runs the risk of disenfranchising one person of their rights to a certain product because society doesn't see the need in that product. So there we run into the problem with communism - how to decide how much resources to allocate to making music players, and how to allocate to making cars.

The solutions to that to me seem limited. There is, as I said, the tyrannical option of politically imposed allocation. There is the technocratic method of having experts declare that mp3 players are not viable in limited resources and thus simply none are made, there is the market solution of supply and demand, but what is the communist solution? What I see as socialism would still contain a market, to determine resource allocation for certain luxuries, but how would communists determine what is made, as a luxury, outside of survival necessities? In a communist system, how does one decide how much of a resource-priority to give to a specific luxury? To abolish luxury entirely would be tyrannical and unsustainable (and also not a world I would like to live in), which leaves...what? Does anyone have an idea of resource-allocation that isn't market driven, yet still allows people to choose their own luxuries? If one says, 'Okay, we will make both mp3 players and cars' then how do you determine how many cars/how many mp3 players to produce, outside of using market supply/demand?

[ckaihatsu]

Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

http://tinyurl.com/mtspczpcpe

[Blake's Baby]

I'm a socialist. What that means to me, is a system where all people are provided a means of survival that does not depend on wages. To narrow it further, I am a Neo-Leninist socialist, though with a minor emphasis on Marxism (labor theory of property as opposed to value, NEP, etc)...

I don't think that means you can possibly be a 'Marxist' (though I have no idea what you mean in this instance by 'Neo-Leninist'), because you are a propertarian.


... I've been reading over a few threads, and it seems to me that many people here describe socialism=communism which I wholeheartedly disagree with...

Then you define 'socialism' and 'communism' in a way that very many Marxists will disagree with. We're Marxists, and there is no distinction between 'socialism' and 'communism' for Marxists, because 'scientific socialism' (ie Marxism) superceeded the 'utopian socialism' of the liberal reformers of the early 19th century.

'Market socialism' is as oxymoronic as 'national socialism'. It is putting together two concepts that don't belong together. Socialism is a classless, communal society. The way to it is through the expropriation of property, the smashing of capitalism and the state, worldwide, by the working class, and the reorganisation of the whole of human society.

Any less is just reorganising capitalism.


... I am a socialist because 1) I believe in freedom. Defined simply, freedom is the ability to do what one desires free of coercion, whether that be economic or political. The more freedom, the better. 2) Because I believe in progress, and societal progress is best achieved through a society where wage-slavery does not exist...

I'm a socialist, because I believe that socialism (a classless stateless communal society) is a more rational way to organise society than capitalism. Marxists would say you're not a socialist, because you believe in private property - and therefore a class system and a state.

If there is private property, but no wage labour... do you think we can all go and live on the Frontier and have a little homesteader/croft-type existence? It seems like a ridiculous utopia to me. 'The world is increasingly divided into two opposing classes... the bourgeoisie and the proletarians'. Your solution is to make us all petites-bourgeoises.


...That being said, I cannot understand how communism (to take the Leninist definition) could possibly work. Workers controlling the means of production is what we should be striving for, yes, but what about luxuries? Communism provides a great system as long as long as society all agrees on what they want - but people do not and will not agree on what they, outside of the essentials (food, water, etc.) For example, I could put a high resource-priority on owning a digital music player. My friend could put a low resource-priority on owning a digital music player, but put a high one on owning a car, whereas I don't...

I can't see a problem with this. Do you think we'll all vote to give ourselves the same things that we don't want? Why would we do that?


... In resource scarce world, such as our own, society must allocate resources somehow....

What do you mean by 'resource-scace' here? I'm pretty sure that we could organise society so that we all have what we need, which would be a very good start, and then, we can start to talk about what we want.

There is no justification for some to have luxuries while others lack necessities. That's just a basic axiom of being human, not even being a socialist. So organising necessities is the first task of the working class, and what to do with the surplus comes a long way down the list.



... To do it on the simple basis of majority democracy runs into the problem of tyranny of the majority, to do it politically in any sense runs the risk of disenfranchising one person of their rights to a certain product because society doesn't see the need in that product...

What 'rights' are you talking about? Do you think you have the right to (say) a spaceship, just because you conceive of the idea of having one? Do you imagine that in a 'free' society we should have to build it for you or supply you with any materials so you can build it yourself?


... So there we run into the problem with communism - how to decide how much resources to allocate to making music players, and how to allocate to making cars...

Pretty simple. We find out how many people in our area want music players, and how many want cars, then go and talk to the people who want cars and explain that petrol is wasteful and diesel gives you cancer, and then persuade a bunch of them they don't really 'need' cars all the time, then decide we only need 30% of the cars that were originally thought to be needed because we'll have them in collective car-pools, and then we plan production from there. We find we need 2,000 cars and 8,000 music players. We put the requisitions in at the engineering works. Simple.

If there's a problem, if there aren't enough resources available for 8,000 music players and 2,000 cars, we work out what our social priorities are. Perhaps the Rosa Luxemburg Central Hospital gets first dibs on the cars when they come in (because trained medical staff need to get to the scenes of accidents and emergencies quickly), and they're rolled out to other groups later (the Amadeo Bordiga First Division Pot-Holing Society, which put in a requisition for 30 cars, won't get them quite as quickly as we've decided that medical staff should get priority).



... The solutions to that to me seem limited. There is, as I said, the tyrannical option of politically imposed allocation. There is the technocratic method of having experts declare that mp3 players are not viable in limited resources and thus simply none are made, there is the market solution of supply and demand, but what is the communist solution?

The one I outlined above.


...What I see as socialism would still contain a market, to determine resource allocation for certain luxuries, but how would communists determine what is made, as a luxury, outside of survival necessities? In a communist system, how does one decide how much of a resource-priority to give to a specific luxury? To abolish luxury entirely would be tyrannical and unsustainable (and also not a world I would like to live in), which leaves...what? Does anyone have an idea of resource-allocation that isn't market driven, yet still allows people to choose their own luxuries? If one says, 'Okay, we will make both mp3 players and cars' then how do you determine how many cars/how many mp3 players to produce, outside of using market supply/demand?

We decide for ourselves. It's not hard. We control production. It exists for the production of use-values. We don't make things that aren't needed, we make things that are needed. Before making things, we decide how many of them we need. Is that really so hard?

It certainly seems easier than not deciding how many of them we need, assuming that someone will take control of a production process to produce more than is necessary of something until they can't get rid of them any more, at which point they may stop having wasted loads of resources on unnecessary things, while something else that is wanted isn't made at all, because no-one in a position to demand it has any say in the production process, and anyway all the time and resources that could have produced something useful were producing something that wasn't.

Or everyone making their own cars/music players.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Blake's Baby had a good response, but I would just like to add that all these things are hypothetical. We can't really know what a future socialist society will look like until such material conditions exist.

[vagrantmoralist]

I don't think that means you can possibly be a 'Marxist' (though I have no idea what you mean in this instance by 'Neo-Leninist'), because you are a propertarian...

I'm not quite a Marxist, I do in fact lean towards the utopian (non-Marxist) socialism. Marx's ideas seem inherently unworkable, in that people simply do not like to participate overmuch, and when they do, they typically make short-sighted decisions. Ie, too much democracy is a bad thing (look at California's current budgetary woes, largely due to the fact that people voted themselves out of the majority of property taxes.)

Thus, while having necessities provided by the state is needed, assuming that people are willing to democratise production itself and still come out ahead is a fallacy. Now, whether Marx would say I am a socialist is irrelevant - Marx is not the end-all be-all decider of socialism. Marx is the decider of Marxism (which, as I stated, I'm not a Marxist.)

To define neo-Leninist, it means my views do align with Lenin's - the need for an armed vanguard revolutionary party, global revolution, NEP, etc - but I also realise that society has progressed by epochs since the days of Marx and Lenin, and many of the fixes Marx and Lenin proposed are simply unworkable in our world, which is what many Marxists fail to grasp in my experience. This is no longer an industrial world - by and large, it is a digital one.

You say if there is not wage labour, yet private property, you cannot have a modern society. That view is incorrect. Free association and democratised income-sharing easily corrects the issue of worker exploitation. One is no longer an employee - but a fully integrated member of the collective/co-op/company/firm (whatever you wish to call it.) Capitalism only exists because of the exploitation of the worker by a the bourgeoisie - something that does not exist in a socialist society, since everyone owns their labour. The class system exists because of worker exploitation, not as a mythical thing in an of itself. Remove exploitation, and there is suddenly no class division. Saying socialism without a market is oxymoronic is, to pardon the term, moronic, because Marx does not define socialism. He defines Marxism.

You use the example of me wanting a spaceship. Now, society is not required to grant me a spaceship, nor is it required to freely give me the materials needed to produce one. But if I want a spaceship, and am able to find a collective that also wants a spaceship, then society does not have the right to deny us the ability to build one for ourselves. The issue with abolition of private property is assuming that people a) can be persuaded and b) are willing to agree to the same priorities.

To clarify further, you posit in your refutation that
Pretty simple. We find out how many people in our area want music players, and how many want cars, then go and talk to the people who want cars and explain that petrol is wasteful and diesel gives you cancer, and then persuade a bunch of them they don't really 'need' cars all the time, then decide we only need 30% of the cars that were originally thought to be needed because we'll have them in collective car-pools, and then we plan production from there. We find we need 2,000 cars and 8,000 music players. We put the requisitions in at the engineering works. Simple.

The inherent issue in that assertion is that you think you can persuade a bunch of them into realising that they do not want cars. But what is society's recourse if they fail to be persuaded? Force? Law? Both are totalitarian over-reactions to the simple want of a product. Also, what determines the production priority at the engineering works? If the engineering works is currently backlogged with an earlier requisition to create (for example) televisions, then do the people just have to wait? It is impossible to allocate resources with one-hundred percent efficiency, just as it is impossible to do most things at 100 per cent efficiency. In addition, many of the tools needed to create certain products are as specialised as the products themselves, so you still haven't answered my core assertion - how do you determine what takes more priority over another? You may think that cars are wasteful and cause environmental harms and cancer - but I think your fears are overblown. As I said before, to determine it democratically would fall to the tyranny of the majority, since the individual's right takes precedence over a technocrats or an engineering committee's decisions. A market is the only fair, equitable way to ensure everyone gets what they want, since markets are allocated not democratically, but by supply and demand.

You say you don't need supply and demand because 'we decide what is needed, and how much of it.' But that assumes that people agree on those two points. They do not. I may decide that mp3 players are not needed, and thus we do not need to waste resources on any of them. You think mp3 players are needed and we should make enough for every individual citizen, because music is a necessity to a vibrant culture (or whatever.) And as I said, a democratic outcome would be tyrannical, because people as a rule, do not like being told what they can and cannot do by others. Which in turn, necessitates a state to ensure that people do abide to rules imposed on them by others, which in turn, necessitates the regulation of said state so it's interference of personal liberty is a minimum. Or one could simply have a bloody market and accept that some products will be wasteful, in exchange for not being subject to democratic tyranny.

[ckaihatsu]

I'll jump in here to make the observation that I think your thinking tends towards the linear, black-or-white side of things.

For example:





This is no longer an industrial world - by and large, it is a digital one.


History doesn't happen in neat chapters where one period is done, page turned, and then another one begins. While many advanced economies *used to* be more industrialized, and have since experienced deindustrialization, I'm pretty sure that *global* industrial production has greatly *increased* overall in the last half-century.

And, industrial production and digitization is not an either-or proposition -- in fact they're most often *complementary* these days, with a reciprocally reinforcing correlation between the two. (It would be like saying we're "past nature" -- yes and no.)





[A] democratic outcome would be tyrannical, because people as a rule, do not like being told what they can and cannot do by others. Which in turn, necessitates a state to ensure that people do abide to rules imposed on them by others, which in turn, necessitates the regulation of said state so it's interference of personal liberty is a minimum. Or one could simply have a bloody market and accept that some products will be wasteful, in exchange for not being subject to democratic tyranny.


I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here -- instead of conceptualizing a potential workers state as being a monolithic, one-policy regime, it may be better to see it as being more of an *administrative* *oversight* body that *facilitates* the productive goings-on, rather than "running" things in the managerial sense.

What this means in practice is that a level of generalization is always available, through politics, to smooth out and resolve any issues that arise around various productive entities.

Resorting to the market mechanism itself is a drastic measure with unpredictable consequences, as we know all too well from the events of the 20th century, and ongoing.





[W]hat determines the production priority at the engineering works?




[H]ow do you determine what takes more priority over another?








[S]carcity-vs.-abundance, on a per-item basis.

The argument comes up that sure, we all would most likely agree on a voluntarist collectivized mass production for everyone's basic humane needs, but *then* what should be produced after *that* -- ?


The short answer here is an economic democracy in which everyone has equally weighted, but equally limited, political power over what kinds of productive activity is prioritized. (See attachment at end of post.)

Here's a more systematic approach, from my blog entry:








To clarify and simplify, the labor credits system is like a cash-only economy that only works for *services* (labor), while the world of material implements, resources, and products is open-access and non-abstractable. (No financial valuations.) Given the world's current capacity for an abundance of productivity for the most essential items, there should be no doubt about producing a ready surplus of anything that's important, to satisfy every single person's basic humane needs.

[I]t would only be fair that those who put in the actual (liberated) labor to produce anything should also be able to get 'first dibs' of anything they produce.

In practice [...] everything would be pre-planned, so the workers would just factor in their own personal requirements as part of the project or production run. (Nothing would be done on a speculative or open-ended basis, the way it's done now, so all recipients and orders would be pre-determined -- it would make for minimal waste.)




I'll contend that I have developed a model that addresses all of these concerns in an even-handed way, and uses a system of *circulating* labor credits that are *not* exchangeable for material items of any kind. In accordance with communism being synonymous with 'free-access', all material implements, resources, and products would be freely available and *not* quantifiable according to any abstract valuations. The labor credits would represent past labor hours completed, multiplied by the difficulty or hazard of the work role performed. The difficulty/hazard multiplier would be determined by a mass survey of all work roles, compiled into an index.

In this way all concerns for labor, large and small, could be reduced to the ready transfer of labor-hour credits. The fulfillment of work roles would bring labor credits into the liberated-laborer's possession, and would empower them with a labor-organizing and labor-utilizing ability directly proportionate to the labor credits from past work completed.


[17] Prioritization Chart

http://postimage.org/image/35hop84dg/

[Eagle_Syr]

vagrantmoralist, what ultimately separates your political ideology from social democracy?

I understand and agree with you on many of your concerns, but there is absolutely no place for a market in Marxist socialism.

[Strannik]

It seems to me that market is a place or institution where commodities (or their property rights) are exchanged for one another. We can speak about socialism or communism only when property rights of everything belong to society/state or to community as a whole. Individuals exchange their labour for usership right of social product (cars, audioplayers, luxury resorts), not ownership. That's a very important difference.

[ckaihatsu]

It seems to me that market is a place or institution where commodities (or their property rights) are exchanged for one another. We can speak about socialism or communism only when property rights of everything belong to society/state or to community as a whole.


Yes.





Individuals exchange their labour for usership right of social product (cars, audioplayers, luxury resorts), not ownership. That's a very important difference.


I'm going to take a hard-line against any labor-material exchanges, even this non-ownership 'usership right of social product' formulation of yours.

I think it's inherently problematic to attempt conversions of value between the two because material items tend to stick around while people's labor is more-limited in timeframe and is transformative in function.

By ignoring this apples-and-oranges differential we wind up valuing inanimate material items in the same terms as portions of a person's life spent for the sake of providing work / effort.

I'll posit that, regardless of how such a system may *start out* in implementation, it will inexorably regress to a situation where a particularly privileged group will be in charge of issuing the standards of valuation for both, in an unaccountable, de facto way.








Labor vouchers imply a political economy that *consciously* determines valuations, but there's nothing to guarantee that such oversight -- regardless of its composition -- would properly take material realities into account. Such a system would be open to the systemic problems of groupthink and elitism.

[Blake's Baby]

...

The inherent issue in that assertion is that you think you can persuade a bunch of them into realising that they do not want cars. But what is society's recourse if they fail to be persuaded? Force? Law? Both are totalitarian over-reactions to the simple want of a product...

The point about cars was totally an aside. It was to set up the point that social prorities will change during the revolution. We are not going to have a revolution just to keep things the same. You don't seem to realise that.

You example doesn't change if we want 8,000 music players and 8,000 cars, 8,000 music players and 2,000 cars, 9,000 music players and 1,000 cars, 3,000 music players and 6,000 cars, 11,000 music players and 4,000 cars, 1,000 music players and 9,000 cars... or any other permutation of cars and music players one could name. It's all just 'how do we decide what goes on x and what goes on y?' and the answer remains the same. We have a discussion about what we want, then act on it.

What does 'what is society's recourse if they fail to be persuaded?' even mean?

So; a group of people decides that they want some cars. They request some cars. They get some cars when those cars are available. What's the problem?

'The people' are not different to 'society'. 'Society' is 'the people'. If the people decide they need cars, why would they then have to force themselves not to have them? Your question doesn't make sense.


...

You say you don't need supply and demand because 'we decide what is needed, and how much of it.' But that assumes that people agree on those two points. They do not. I may decide that mp3 players are not needed, and thus we do not need to waste resources on any of them. You think mp3 players are needed and we should make enough for every individual citizen, because music is a necessity to a vibrant culture (or whatever.) ...

Why would want to force anyone not have an MP3 player? Why would anyone force you to have one? If we do waht I suggested, instead of this insane barracks-communism where everyone has to be the same that you're talking about, we can find out that we need 8,000 music players not none and not 80,000. That's why we need to talk about it instead of some chump just deciding.



...

And as I said, a democratic outcome would be tyrannical, because people as a rule, do not like being told what they can and cannot do by others. Which in turn, necessitates a state to ensure that people do abide to rules imposed on them by others, which in turn, necessitates the regulation of said state so it's interference of personal liberty is a minimum. Or one could simply have a bloody market and accept that some products will be wasteful, in exchange for not being subject to democratic tyranny.

You'd rather have an economic tyranny than a 'tyranny' where everybody is allowed to express an opinion? Get away, don't you realise that 'people as a rule, do not like being told what they can and cannot do by others' - can't remember where I heard that but it's as true as anything needs to be in this discussion. So what makes you think that a situation where 'the market' (ie those who control the market, and the economic laws that the market operates under) is less tyrannical than people having a say in how production and distribution are organised?