Is Economic Planning Inefficient? [Archive]

Paul Cockshott

8th August 2012, 23:27

Comrades,

I'm not particularly well-read on economic planning, and would like to learn more, so I have some questions about it that I hope the more senior Left-wingers on here can help me with.

1) Is centralized planning or de-centralized planning better, and why is that?

Centralised planning is better in general, in the sense that overall material balances between production and consumption of raw materials and producer goods are best handled centrally.

2) How can we be sure that planning won't suffer a crises of under- or over-production, like the market? Such incidents could leave some without, or lead to wasted resources, time, energy, etc.
Over production in the capitalist sense is less likely for producer goods since the quantity of producer goods planned for is based on existing statistics of their rate of use, extrapolated forward to allow for the planned growth of the economy.
However over production of another sort is possible if the plan is not adjusted fast enough to take into account the possibilities opened up by new technologies. It is possible that certain industries that were historically critical may, due to the political influence they have, continue to recieve an undue share of social investment.

3) Is there any wiggle room for "wants" in a planned economy? Say, if the planners decide to make X number of blue shirts but I really wanted a Y quantity of red ones instead? How do we take varying opinion and differing desire for quality, quantity, and type into consideration?
Certainly there is. There is no reason why a planned economy can not use a market in consumer goods to guide the plan targets for output in terms of quantity and quality.

4) Would there be elements of competition present at all? How do we know quality and ambition would continue if there is not competition?

There is not competition between firms but there may be competition between design teams. For example in the Soviet economy there were in the 50s and 60s several different design groups coming up with different computer architectures, rocket launchers etc.

5) What about (God, I hate right-wing rhetoric, but I have to use it here) economic liberty? If, say, I wanted to open a local store or small enterprise in my town or region, would I be able to - or would that be forbidden by the planners?

That is typically prohibited because it leads to the formation of a class of small capitalists with interests antagonistic to the socialist economy.

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

8th August 2012, 23:28

The liberal Capitalist United States currently has over 20% of its production capacity standing still, gathering rust and dust, over 10% real unemployment, while 2 Trillion Dollars sit on the bank accounts of corporations and are not being used to produce for human needs. Planning is the only thing "efficient". Btw. efficient is a ridiculous term, can you say whether building a hospital is "efficient" or not? No, human costs are immeasurable were it deemed "inefficient" i.e. unprofitable to build a hospital. So, no, planning is not inefficient.

Paul Cockshott

8th August 2012, 23:29

Competition splits efforts and prevents cooperation to merge the best of both designs into a new design.
The history of soviet computing after the adoption of the Unified Range indicates that this is not necessarily the best course.

Paul Cockshott

8th August 2012, 23:31

The words efficient and inefficient are so strange, what would efficiency mean in the context of a socialist society?

It means achieving a given standard of living with the least toil and effort. It means economising on human exertion.

Positivist

8th August 2012, 23:33

My take on planning in a socialist society would be, first and foremost, that the planning would be performed by the workers (even at the lower phase of socialism where the average workers role in planning may just be deciding what exactl they want to produce, and then some more advanced institution would be responsible for determining how to produce it.)

On how planning would be performed (I am referring to how it will be determined what specifically is produced here) then it will depend on the type of product. "Needs" ( foods, beverages, medical supplies) would be determined through monitoring of previous consumption habits, and perhaps through some sort of individuall based prioritized voting program.

As for "wants" (luxury items, technological devices) the production of these could be determined through a system of preordering. What quantity and quality of luxury items that each person was permitted to preorder would be determined based on the amout of labor credits (or vouchers, money etc.) that the workers had in their possession. The amount of labor credits one would be given would depend on how much they work as well as how difficult the work they performed was.

JPSartre12

9th August 2012, 00:01

Certainly there is. There is no reason why a planned economy can not use a market in consumer goods to guide the plan targets for output in terms of quantity and quality.

That's what I was thinking - that there has to be some sort of "market mechanism", for lack of a better term, to help guide distribution, allocation, quality, and quantity. Would that be considered "market socialism", then?

I feel as if the presence of such a market mechanism is inherent anti-socialist though, because a socialist society would have the abolition of all markets. Or is there room for some sort of market force in a planned society? I'm unsure. Could you clarify this for me, please?

That is typically prohibited because it leads to the formation of a class of small capitalists with interests antagonistic to the socialist economy.

Yes, that makes sense ... However, if we cannot be economically creative and open small enterprises, then what would be the creative, inventive motor behind the economy? If I'm sounding like a capitalist forgive me :scared:

Teacher

9th August 2012, 00:24

I feel like I still need to research more about the Soviet economy but I don't think the "socialist calculation" argument explains the inefficiencies or lack of innovation.

cynicles

9th August 2012, 00:30

Certainly there is. There is no reason why a planned economy can not use a market in consumer goods to guide the plan targets for output in terms of quantity and quality.

Yuck.

ckaihatsu

9th August 2012, 02:43

That's what I was thinking - that there has to be some sort of "market mechanism", for lack of a better term, to help guide distribution, allocation, quality, and quantity. Would that be considered "market socialism", then?

I feel as if the presence of such a market mechanism is inherent anti-socialist though, because a socialist society would have the abolition of all markets. Or is there room for some sort of market force in a planned society? I'm unsure. Could you clarify this for me, please?

This is an excellent point, and it points to an area that is woefully under-addressed -- and maybe *un*-addressed -- in socialist theory.

To rephrase: Who, exactly, should have their material desires heard by a post-capitalist societal order and its mode of production?

I don't think there'd be much controversy in simply attending to people's humane *needs*, as part of the overthrowing of the capitalist (dis-)order, but once that's done, what would be the basis for an *extended* mode of production that capably utilizes all human knowledge and abilities, and does it in a way that's both beneficial to humanity as a whole, and to popular and individual will -- ?

And -- here's the kicker -- what would / should be the *criteria* for a liberated individualist access to a portion or direction of society's productivity?

- If it's based on work (liberated labor) contributed, then the objective motivation would be to spend most of one's life-time working for society's interest -- it would conflict with the initial *individual* (personal) motivation to secure a return on those efforts for self-directed, individualistic directions, and to have the personal time to enjoy or realize them. The corollary is that this political economy would then be situated in a primitive-accumulation-like mode of operation, always looking to collectivize as much liberated labor effort as possible by conferring rewards according to that yardstick.

- If it's based on *administration*, then those who fill bureaucratic-type roles would be the most empowered, on the social basis that things are running smoothly and orderly. There would undoubtedly be fierce factionalism and institutional party politics, of an elitist nature, for the sake of "legitimacy" and material rewards.

- If it's based on *consumption*, then those who are most consumeristic and conspicuous would gain the most attention and consideration, since their own individualistic-type desires would be the driving force of society's production.

- Finally, if it's based on a democratic-type popular will then those who cater to such fancies -- good or ill -- will receive the most consideration and reward. There would be the hazard that less-popular, more-serious social concerns might easily be left by the wayside.

Yes, that makes sense ... However, if we cannot be economically creative and open small enterprises, then what would be the creative, inventive motor behind the economy? If I'm sounding like a capitalist forgive me :scared:

We can address this structure as well -- liberated labor would then be presented with the objective incentive to stick to apprenticeship and artisan-type arrangements, since, according to this, large-scale production would be taboo.

The problematic common to *all* of these possible social structures is that they all imply the main correlation as being that of social identity to *material* (rewards). I would bemoan a society that was able to surpass commodity production only to become stuck in what is essentially a different *version* of the same, from one of the scenarios above.

The way to avoid any potential pitfall here is to situate (liberated) labor in terms of *liberated labor* only, and to keep it detached from the realm of the material-items world. Instead of seeing arbitrary production as resulting from the sacrifice of labor, and thus correlated to it, liberated labor itself should be seen as a pointedly requested, pre-planned *service* that *just so happens* to give rise to a certain material production. This, then, releases worker, administrator, consumer, and artist / engineer from considerations of valuation for the material item itself, for the indefinite life of the object -- (!)

So, instead of a demand for *materials* the mindset should be a demand for a liberated-labor *service* that *leads* to the fulfillment of certain material requirements.

More at my blog entry.

blake 3:17

9th August 2012, 03:08

Yuck.

There's nothing inherently wrong about using certain market mechanisms as part of socialist planning as long as market relations and the commodification labour are suppressed. It doesn't make any sense to produce goods that no one wants.

JPSartre12

9th August 2012, 03:18

There's nothing inherently wrong about using certain market mechanisms as part of socialist planning as long as market relations and the commodification labour are suppressed. It doesn't make any sense to produce goods that no one wants.

Perhaps having a culture and educational system that promotes cooperation over greed could help? That way there would be a socialist "market", but the mentality of greed wouldn't be present. Although, this may sound idealistic :glare:

ckaihatsu

9th August 2012, 03:22

Rather than remove my 'thanks' from post #6, I'll just comment on the part that's more 'iffy'....

Certainly there is. There is no reason why a planned economy can not use a market in consumer goods to guide the plan targets for output in terms of quantity and quality.

My concern / question here is what the underlying basis of valuation could possibly be.

What, exactly, constitutes the 'market' in a *non-market* planned economy -- ?? This is simply circular reasoning without providing a standard for how consumption is to be determined.

blake 3:17

9th August 2012, 03:25

That's what I was thinking - that there has to be some sort of "market mechanism", for lack of a better term, to help guide distribution, allocation, quality, and quantity. Would that be considered "market socialism", then?

You can apply market mechanisms to identify consumer needs and the ability to meet those needs.

One of the problems in Yugoslavian socialism were elements which protected jobs but led to the production of goods which no one wanted. I can see many of the same problems coming from many proposals put forward by many syndicalists.

The central questions of production wouldn't be left in the hands of workers in a single factory or industry, or directed by market mechanisms, but democratically decided by society as a whole. I think that's the sanest answer to ending stupid, irrational and ecocidal production.

blake 3:17

9th August 2012, 03:43

Perhaps having a culture and educational system that promotes cooperation over greed could help? That way there would be a socialist "market", but the mentality of greed wouldn't be present. Although, this may sound idealistic :glare:

A huge cultural shift would be necessary but insufficient. A genuine economic democracy could accomplish some really magnificent things -- building useful, aesthetically pleasing, healthy goods which were designed to work well, rather than fall apart. Aside from industrial production, this would also encompass agricultural production, public services, education, research. Productive and reproductive forces could be relative degrees of autonomy and flexibility that could help spur useful innovations, development of skills and knowledge, and lead to shorter, healthier and more pleasant work days while responding to changes in consumers needs and wants.

I'm very much in favour of a planned economy, but skeptical of one that is overly centralized and driven by a managerial mindset. China's Great Leap Forward is an example of what not to emulate.

robbo203

9th August 2012, 06:40

In every conceivable type of economy there is "planning". Even the most extreme "free market" version of capitalism you can think of is full of plans. Capitalist enterprises each make their own plans on a daily basis. The problem is not that you have a numerous plans and a polycentric system of planning but rather that these different planning units are in competition with each other in capitalism.

There is, in fact, no alternative to a system of polycentric planning in which each unit adjusts its plans - its outputs - in the light of decisions made elsewhere and on a self-regulating spontaneous basis. Central planning in its classical sense as total society- wide planning which replaces numerous plans with just one single mega plan is a complete non starter. It is actually a pretty crackpot idea when you think about it seriously. It stands precisely zero chance of ever being realised. It is unable to accommodate the slightest change and because of the coordinated and integrated nature of modern production will never ever be able to even get off the ground. The central planners will have to redraw the plan again and again and again before they even have the opportunity to pass the production targets down to each of the countless production units and, by the time they do that, the plan will be wrong again and out of balance

No, the only feasible way ahead is to think in terms of a decentralised system of planning, perhaps organised on different levels - local, regional and global (although overwhelmingly local) - in which production units relate to each spontaneously - not on the basis of economic competition in the market but rather on the basis of cooperation to produce directly for use

Paul Cockshott

9th August 2012, 09:04

Paul Cockshott

9th August 2012, 09:27

Rather than remove my 'thanks' from post #6, I'll just comment on the part that's more 'iffy'....

My concern / question here is what the underlying basis of valuation could possibly be.

What, exactly, constitutes the 'market' in a *non-market* planned economy -- ?? This is simply circular reasoning without providing a standard for how consumption is to be determined.

Ok let us assume that every person fit enough to work and not currently on parental leave works say 30 hours a week. 10 of those hours are worked for the benefit of the community to contribute towards schools, health clinics, support of the elderly etc. If they have 20 hours work done for their own benefit then they have a social credit at the end of the week of 20 hours. With this they can go to cooperative stores and get consumer goods that took 20 hours in total to make.

The cooperative stores cancel out the credits and keep records of what is sold placing replacement orders for the goods distributed.

The total consumption figures for each type of good are then used to set the plan targets for the consumer goods sector.

It may be the case that certain goods are temporarily in shortage or have been oversupplied. This could happen for several reasons.

There may be a bad harvest meaning that certain types of food are in short supply. When this occurs the same amount of agricultural labour will have resulted in less corn or soy having been harvested, so the marked labour value of all foods containing these will have to rise. Similarly if unseasonable frosts harm the orange crop, the labour required to produce an orange will rise.
This means that the labour content, which is the true social standard of value, changes with climate and weather conditions and thus the number of oranges that a worker can obtain in the cooperatives for an hour of her labour goes down.

Another reason might be that there has been a new invention - say for the sake of argument 3D holographic TV. Now the technology to make these may have been solved, but it is unclear whether people will really want holographic TV. You could do consumer surveys and have people vote on it, but people dont want to have to waste time filling in such surveys so you will get a poor response.
Instead the plan is likely to allocate an initial trial production run, setting up a factory and supply chain to make them. But it would be risky to set divert a lot of people into their production if you dont know if people will really want them.

So the initial rate of production will not be enough for everyone to buy one. Two things can happen:
1. Once the new goods appear, people decide that they are not such a good idea after all and they remain unsold at their true labour content.

2. Lots of people want them and the cooperatives sell out as soon as new delivery comes in - this was a familiar occurence apparently for some goods in the USSR.

In the first case the cooperative retail organisation should discount the goods to ensure that they do at least sell and get used until the plan can be adjusted to produce less, or withdraw the line from production.

In the second case it may be a good idea to mark the price up, showing the true labour content and the temporary premium to prevent queues forming until new factories making holovision sets can come on stream.

The net effect of the two mechanisms should be for the cooperative stores to break even with the discounted goods and the innovation premium goods cancelling.

Vladimir Innit Lenin

9th August 2012, 09:49

Paul Cockshott's problem here (this is mainly for the OPs benefit) is that he is trying to provide a very exact blueprint for the production and distribution of resources/goods/services, based on his own personal ideas.

Rather than such an exacting blueprint (which discusses specific policy) what would be more useful is to discuss a framework within which specific policies can merely be ironed out in some future period; discussion over policy is irrelevant and purely speculative right now, since there is no revolution and we don't know the material conditions of this future period.

In terms of framework, Robbo203 has it spot on. Capitalism is full of plans, but rather than being co-ordinated, they are the business plans of individual firms, each looking after their own interest; each business plan is designed to maximise surplus for that specific firm, rather than to match production to the needs and wants of the population. It divorces production from need - the capitalist business plan would rather have a situation of supply shortage and greater surplus, than adequate supply and a lower surplus. This is the nub of the for-profit system.

You then have central planning, which is as rigid as the day is long. One plan, centralised, for an entire given geographical region (a national entity) cannot hope to work; it cannot adjust for the slightest unforeseen change, for different tastes, and very much typifies the rigidity and inflexibility of the society it represents - one party, one state, one plan, and you're either inside it or you're outside.

Rather, the framework that would present the greatest scope for the realisation of the abolition of markets altogether, the abolition of currency and the central state in a realistic, concrete way (contrasted with this 'withering away' nonsense) and the greatest possible level of workers' democracy and participation, is to have de-centralised planning, where there are many plans, but based on need, rather than profit. This provides flexibility for different tastes, needs and wants, and allows for a certain level of transaction costs [needing intermediaries for transportation, for example], and will allow some flexibility - a change to a plan in region 1 of nation A will not affect the other 10 regions in nation A to a great extent, and could be easily self-managed by region 1 of nation A, for example. Realistically working towards the abolition of the state as an entity for managing economic and political affairs, it would be very realistic to thus devolve the responsibility for producing at the level of need/want to regional, city and even local workers' councils, which could then liaise with workplace councils to ensure a smooth running of the production process.

With regards to ideas for a market for consumer goods, those who propose this idea do so merely with a lack of imagination. Suggesting that a market mechanism is needed (aside from being a wilful step back towards Capitalism!!!) recognises the gross deficiencies in one's existing economic ideas. Let me pose this question:

if you believe your economic philosophy would allow production at the level of needs or wants, rather than for profit, why would you need any market mechanism at all?

Saying that a market mechanism for consumer goods is desirable is almost explicitly saying that an 'other' central planner, divorced from the needs/wants of the general population, will decide on the base level of production, above which the ordinary people will not have that much of a choice over consumer goods. This is USSR-fetishism at its worst, and should be avoided at all costs as a farcical replication of a failed economic history.

Paul Cockshott

9th August 2012, 10:16

if you believe your economic philosophy would allow production at the level of needs or wants, rather than for profit, why would you need any market mechanism at all?
Philosophy produces nothing of course, what we are talking about are institutional arrangements. The problem is for a socialist society to have an operational technique for measuring needs and wants taking into account the fact that the amount of human labour available to supply those needs and wants is limited.

I think that during the early stages of communist society the principle of distribution according to labour is likely to have to remain for those goods which require a significant amount of labour to make. If you have distribution according to labour, then the basic
principle is that people get back what they are willing to contribute to society. Given that
principle that form of 'bourgeois right' as Marx called it, you have to adjust production
to correspond to peoples wants and needs. You can to some extent rely on experts to work out what peoples needs are - that certainly applies in healthcare for example, and it arguably applies to types of food production, but for consumer goods people are their own best judge. If people are to have an effective choice over what they individually consume, then you need some sort of market mechanism to judge their wants and needs.

Saying that a market mechanism for consumer goods is desirable is almost explicitly saying that an 'other' central planner, divorced from the needs/wants of the general population, will decide on the base level of production, above which the ordinary people will not have that much of a choice over consumer goods. This is USSR-fetishism at its worst, and should be avoided at all costs as a farcical replication of a failed economic history.

No it does not assume that a single central planner divorced from the needs of the population will decide the base level of production. What it means is that there are some items of collective consumption that have to be decided by the political process. Preferably this should be a democratic political process with the population as a whole voting on how much labour is to go on education, social welfare, health etc. Such services, since they are provided free to the individual have to paid for collectively by deductions from people's consumption income.

Rowan Duffy

9th August 2012, 11:46

if you believe your economic philosophy would allow production at the level of needs or wants, rather than for profit, why would you need any market mechanism at all?

You've clearly missed the point.

We have a large number of people all with different interests in what they would like to consume. We need a feed back mechanism which is flexible and allows us to allocate productive resources in a way that allows them to signal what it is that they want.

Voting is a mechanism of allocating everyone a single token, and the majority tokens make the decision - winner takes all. This makes perfect sense if there are some number of mutually exclusive choices. However, if the choices are not mutually exclusive, but merely subject to limited resources to be allocated to some number of choices, instead of giving everyone one token, we should give everyone an equal pile of tokens and let them allocate as they see fit.

Markets with planning and a fair distribution of tokens - and some level of democracy regarding largely mutually exclusive possibilities (like should we build primarily car based or rail based transport) is about the most desirable state of affairs we can hope to reach.

The panicked opposition to markets is ill founded. The problem is not markets, it's capitalism - the system which attempts to maximise profits in independent competing bodies acting incoherently with an investment programme carried about by a tiny cabal with no connection to the public interests.

Socialists need to stop mystifying money and markets. The point is egalitarian economics which wont regenerate the capitalist system of accumulation. The question should be whether accumulation and a circuit of capital will be generated rather than whether or not some laundry list of epiphenomena (like money) exist.

As relates the question of planning I have a few points to make.

1. Overproduction is ok. We actually need to have a bit of overproduction as a lubricant. This is of course especially important with food. I hear a lot of socialists get panicky about the fact that we throw food away. That's a good thing. If there are unforeseen fluctuations in food supply, things go downhill pretty quickly. Soviet plans were generally overly taut, leading to cascading supply chain failures when there were fluctuations. Consistent overproduction does not lead to crisis - it's simply somewhat wasteful.

2. Price signalling is not very information rich. It can only be useful for deciding amongst a set of known possibilities. It's likely that there will have to be a fair bit of "market research".

3. Efficiency can only be understood with respect to an objective function. The bourgeois notions of efficiency are entirely circular. They are efficient because they have designed the objective function to be what capitalism does (and even this is subject to a model of capitalism which is probably not terribly accurate). Objective functions are very important - they are the declarative aspect of planning. They give us a relatively small description of what it is we are trying to optimise - leaving the question of optimality to be a interface + process + algorithms.

The USSR never actually developed an object function. If it can be said to have been efficient with respect to anything, I suspect that it was political expediency.

4. Capitalism provides a mechanism for excising institutions when they fail to meet capitalisms criterion for survival. Once you have political control of investment, rather than a profit making control, it can be difficult to liquidate institutions which are no longer needed. This can be a good thing and a bad thing. We can avoid the elimination of socially useful activities which can't be fit into the commodity form. However it also means that activities that are no longer socially useful can be protected from liquidation leading to a support for sectional interests. We need more thinking about how to deal with this problem I think.

Some background on the development of planning and its problems in the USSR are given here:

http://spiritofcontradiction.eu/rowan-duffy/2012/08/07/planning-and-its-complexities

Paul Cockshott

9th August 2012, 22:37

I think Rowan's web link is very helpful

robbo203

10th August 2012, 00:20

. If people are to have an effective choice over what they individually consume, then you need some sort of market mechanism to judge their wants and needs.

Mises.org has just won over another convert to the cause!

No it does not assume that a single central planner divorced from the needs of the population will decide the base level of production. What it means is that there are some items of collective consumption that have to be decided by the political process. Preferably this should be a democratic political process with the population as a whole voting on how much labour is to go on education, social welfare, health etc. Such services, since they are provided free to the individual have to paid for collectively by deductions from people's consumption income.

Ridiculous. Stop and think for a moment what you are saying here. How exactly does one go about voting on how much labour is to go on, say , something like health. You would need to disaggregate it in the first place. Dental care is not A&E., gynaecological services dont cover mental health issues as far as I am aware. So what then? You just gonna have on your ballot paper tick boxes for proposed (proposed by whom?) labour time investment in Health for the next 5 year plan?

A. 127,6 million hours
B. 68.3 million hours
c. 247.8 million hours

Absurd. Utterly absurd. And not only would you have to disaggregate between different branches of health care - its pretty meaningless to just plump for A (or 127.6 million hours) for something so vague as "health care" for the 2013-18 - but also presumably between different health authorities, hospitals and even doctors surgeries.

And even if people in significnat numbers did bother to vote for such a grandiose peice of burueacratic irrelevance, how would you make the decision stick, eh? Should you make it stick anyway (one hopes theres not some devastating epidemic just around the corner)? And if you didnt or couldnt make it stick what is the point of going through the motions of engaging in such a pointless ritualistic exercise wasting massive of amounts of resoruces and peoples time to arrive at a pretty useless decision anyway?

Your whole problem is that you still looking at the organisation of a socialist society from a fundamentally capitalist perspective in which things like markets matter and quid pro quo exchanges govern everything.

What you need is a paradigm shift in the way you look at the world, frankly.

Rowan Duffy

10th August 2012, 13:41

Your whole problem is that you still looking at the organisation of a socialist society from a fundamentally capitalist perspective in which things like markets matter and quid pro quo exchanges govern everything.

What you need is a paradigm shift in the way you look at the world, frankly.

Your whole problem is the belief that you can call every concrete proposal capitalist and substitute for the incredible complexity of actual economics with slogans and hand-waving. Really, your critique amounts to little more than association fallacy - and an association fallacy based in a total failure to understand Marx's critique of capitalism.

You've internalised the liberal fantasy that capitalism is transhistorical. You've identified markets and money with capitalism and made it a universal fact. The only way out of the dilemma you and your SPGB/FULL-COMMUNISM comrades have created for yourselves is transcendental rapture.

If you expect to be taken seriously you need to put forward a proposal or critique the actual problems of other proposals. Preferably the former, since critiquing things is always easier than suggesting alternatives.

We can not run an economy with billions of people and billions of commodities on a completely ad hoc basis. Any attempt to do so would very probably lead back to capitalism as people would fall back to the first thing they understood that actually functions.

It is true that quantities of labour have to be disaggregated in order to plan them. But who was suggesting otherwise? And why should we scream in horror at the fact?

ckaihatsu

10th August 2012, 16:36

(Busy -- will respond later.)

Paul Cockshott

10th August 2012, 19:20

How exactly does one go about voting on how much labour is to go on, say , something like health.
Here is one procedure by which it could be done http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/extendinghandivote.pdf
I am sure that there are others.

Obviously the population as a whole is not going to decide on the detailed organisation of the health service, that would have to be delegated to some form of democratic health board, but the population as a whole can certainly decide how many hours a week are to be deducted for health care.

RedMaterialist

10th August 2012, 19:59

I'm very much in favour of a planned economy, but skeptical of one that is overly centralized and driven by a managerial mindset.

We already live in an overly centralized economy driven by a managerial mindset. It is called global, monopoly capitalism. And it is getting more centralized, more managerial, more global and more monopolistic every day.

The idea is that people must take over this economy and run it for themselves. It is useless to imagine going back to the good old days of feudalistic, small workshops.

It is this economic system which can produce the Mars rover. We can change energy production to wind, geothermal, solar, etc. But we have to first take over the oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy companies.

robbo203

10th August 2012, 23:53

Your whole problem is the belief that you can call every concrete proposal capitalist and substitute for the incredible complexity of actual economics with slogans and hand-waving. Really, your critique amounts to little more than association fallacy - and an association fallacy based in a total failure to understand Marx's critique of capitalism.

You've internalised the liberal fantasy that capitalism is transhistorical. You've identified markets and money with capitalism and made it a universal fact. The only way out of the dilemma you and your SPGB/FULL-COMMUNISM comrades have created for yourselves is transcendental rapture.

If you expect to be taken seriously you need to put forward a proposal or critique the actual problems of other proposals. Preferably the former, since critiquing things is always easier than suggesting alternatives.

We can not run an economy with billions of people and billions of commodities on a completely ad hoc basis. Any attempt to do so would very probably lead back to capitalism as people would fall back to the first thing they understood that actually functions.

It is true that quantities of labour have to be disaggregated in order to plan them. But who was suggesting otherwise? And why should we scream in horror at the fact?

What on earth are you are wittering on about? What is this supposed to mean: "We can not run an economy with billions of people and billions of commodities on a completely ad hoc basis" How does this relate to anything Ive said at all?

I dont just critique - Ive also put forward concrete ideas myself on many occasons as well you know. So dont try and put that one on me.

Ive stated my opposition to the notion of central planning in its classic sense of society-wide planning by which is meant the co-ordination of all the inputs and outputs of society within a single all-encompassing plan. It is a totally impractical proposition for several reasons, any one of which would suffice to put the matter beyond question. And this is not because of any lack of "gee whizz" computer technology. Its everything to do with the relationship between the plan and the complex ever-changing economic reality it is supposed to "plan" for.

I suppose this is what you mean by your asinine comment that we cannot run an economy with billions of people etc on a completely ad hoc basis. I reject society wide-central planning and therefore, logically, I allow for a degree of spontaneity in the way in which the numerous plans interact and adjust to each other in what must thus inevitably be a polycentric system of production. If that is the accusation you level at me then I happily plead guilty. Realistically, There Is No Alternative as Mrs Thatcher was fond of saying.

The irony of it all is that you then come out with such liberal pro-market garbage as this - not realising, apparently, that the market also necessarily involves a degree of spontaneity or "ad hoc-ery":

"The panicked opposition to markets is ill founded. The problem is not markets, it's capitalism - the system which attempts to maximise profits in independent competing bodies acting incoherently with an investment programme carried about by a tiny cabal with no connection to the public interests"

I'm well aware that markets existed before capitalism and are thus not exactly the same thing as capitalism - so no need for the patronising comment, thank you very much. Capitalism however, is the most advanced form of market economy and there is no way of turning back the clock to some sort of precapitalist market-mutualist fantasy world of petty commodity production if that is what you are hankering after. In any event, in no sense do markets figure in kind of genuine socialist vision of the future. It is the ABC of socialism that commodity production goes out the window when socialism is established

As for your silly bluster about me having "internalised the liberal fantasy that capitalism is transhistorical" (why would I want to get rid of markets money wage labour etc if that were so?) it would seem, rather, that it is you that have internalised the liberal fantasy that the market is transhistorical. You want to keep the market system - presumably for ever

Anyone who thinks the revolutionary socialist opposition to markets is "panicked" or "ill founded" just hasnt got a clue and would probably have no idea at all what the Communist Manifesto was getting at in calling for "communistic abolition of buying and selling". Such a person - and you seem to be just such a person - would not seem to understand what a market signifies - namely , private or sectional ownership of the means of production - and how this fundamentally contradicts everything that socialism stands for. Markets may not be simplistically equatable with capitalism but they sure as hell are not equatable or compatible with socialism

Here's where I think the problem arises. Ive noticed this with some on the Left. They recognise that society-wide central planning as such is simply not on the cards but then infer quite illegitimately that that means you need a market mechanism to coordinate supply and demand in the absence of the mythical central plan. Its a black or white situation with them, They lack either the wit or the imagination to conceive of the the fact that you can coordinate supply and demand without this central plan AND without the faintest whiff of the market either.

In fact, the mechanism whereby this can be accomplished exists and functions under our very noses every single day of the year - a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind. Go to your local supermarket and you will see it in action Capitalism would grind to a halt tomorrow without it

In capitalism we have in effect two parallel systems of accounting in operation - monetary accounting and calculation in kind. Communism or socialism - same thing - gets rid of the former completely but retains calculation in kind Failing to recognise this simple gives rise to a fatal confusion. So we have the truly astounding statement by Paul Cockshott (who presumably calls himself a "socialist") that:

If people are to have an effective choice over what they individually consume, then you need some sort of market mechanism to judge their wants and needs

No one should doubt the utterly anti-socialist thrust of this statement, The poor obviously dont want or need more since, obviously again, they decline to exercise their wonderfully effective choice in the matter of consumption which actually boils down to a matter of hard cash. If you lack the cash the market is simply not interested in your "wants or needs". If you lack any cash at all you may well perish of hunger for all the market cares.

The market is just an impersonal mechanism. Its not designed, if one may talk in those terms, to helpfully transmit information to the producers regarding the "wants and needs" of consumers. Yes, commodities have use value but that is incidental to the purpose of production under market capitalism which is to make a profit,

In communism, the wants and needs of consumers are expressed amongst other things via precisely this self regulating system of stock control. Changes in the pattern of demand are reflected in changes in the rates of depletion of stock levels which then automatically trigger requests for fresh stock from the suppliers. The same thing happen in relation to suppliers and those further down the production chain that provide the inputs they need. This is why it is called a "self regulating" system . There is no one controlling mind that dictates all these complex movements of inputs and finished goods in advance in some kind of godlike fashion.

No doubt there will be more to it than just this. For example , a supplementary mechanism for monitoring consumer demands more directly is consumer surveys . There are also, of course , public or collective goods that need to be produced and for which decisionmaking structures and procedures will need to be put in place at local regional and even global levels.

However, at the heart of the communist system of productiuon is this self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind. No large scale economy, including capitalism, can do without calculation in kind but conmunism will be different from capitalism in relying solely upon this. Leastways, that is my view on the matter.

RedMaterialist

11th August 2012, 03:03

Lowtech

11th August 2012, 05:41

1) Is centralized planning or de-centralized planning better, and why is that?

"planning" is simply logistics; a corporation planning or "government" planning has little difference. moreover, any "de-centralized" planning we have currently is grossly insufficient as need/utility is not accounted for at all, capitalist "de-centralized planning" is profit and exchange-value oriented.

2) How can we be sure that planning won't suffer a crises of under- or over-production, like the market? Such incidents could leave some without, or lead to wasted resources, time, energy, etc.

price/supply/demand or aka "market dynamics" are limited to market based economies

3) Is there any wiggle room for "wants" in a planned economy? Say, if the planners decide to make X number of blue shirts but I really wanted a Y quantity of red ones instead? How do we take varying opinion and differing desire for quality, quantity, and type into consideration?

this question comes out of a very insufficient understanding of non-market based economics.

4) Would there be elements of competition present at all? How do we know quality and ambition would continue if there is not competition?

people don't require money to understand the merit or importance of their deeds, self-development, etc. in actuality, this question is self-defeating, as money, as a form of incentive, is extremely inadequate in the measurement of efficiency compared to the scientific method. then when you introduce artificial scarcity and retention of value, especially as the rich consume more than they produce, money becomes far more insufficient as a means to measure efficiency or in allowing real competition.

5) What about (God, I hate right-wing rhetoric, but I have to use it here) economic liberty? If, say, I wanted to open a local store or small enterprise in my town or region, would I be able to - or would that be forbidden by the planners?

retention of value would very much be forbidden (selling at a profit/under compensating workers), however opening up a shop and trading your craft for other people's crafts or even trading for some kind of monetary unit wouldn't threaten a market-less economy at all. as Doc Brown said of the future, people run for recreation, so too will people of our future "barter" and have shops for recreation, but no longer will they use these things to subjugate their fellow human beings.

robbo203

11th August 2012, 08:34

Hasn't this entire argument already been addressed by Marx in The Gotha Program?

You can't go from capitalism to communism without a carryover of some of the characteristics of capitalism. The distribution of goods as use-values will, for a time, be done as under capitalism: by use of a wage system based not just on the time of work, but also on the inequality of the work. Some workers, say heart surgeons and critical critics, will be paid more for an hour of labor than, say, a professor of philosophy. You might have wages of $50, $30 or $10 an hour. The goods placed on the market will be priced based on their value as labor time, as is done now under capitalism. This market will be managed, as is done now, with gigantic computer networks.

In order to make society more equitable a system of extremely progressive taxation will be in place; health care, education, old age pensions will be socially guaranteed.

Later, as society transitions to a fully communistic society, production of use-values based on labor time will be eliminated: then we get to the stage of from each, etc.

Yes, Marx did (rather half heartedly) recommend a system of labour vouchers in the lower phase of communism - as a transitional arrangement prior to the establishment of free access and volunteer labour as the governing principles
of the higher phase of communism.

I think he seriously erred in making this recommendation. Personally, I consider the labour voucher proposal to be far more trouble than its worth. It is beset by many intrinsic problems that will make it virtually unworkable and very likely to pave for the return of capitalism in some form

How exactly do you go about establishing pay differentials between different categories of work for example? There is no plausible objective standard that you can appeal to and you are kidding yourself if you think there is. Ultimately it boils down to peoples' subjective valuation. But that, in itself, presents us with a difficulty in that it is almost certain to prove very socially divisive and, as such, will provide a strong incentive for cheating and corruption.

Which leads to another problem - how are you going to effectively monitor labour contributions. With some forms of work e.g. factory work this may not be too difficult as we have the technology e.g the card system to do that but with other forms of work this is far more more problematic for obvious reasons, That aside there are the huge bureaucratic costs of monitoring labour contributions (who is going to monitor the monitors?) . Even if you could more or less automate the process you would still have to take steps to ensure against cheating and corruption and dealing with the consequences arising from that. The little machine might register when you clock in for work but not if you decide idle away the time rerading the newspaper in the bog and chatting to your mates instead of working. And do we really want to have a survellience society inflicted on us? I thought British capitalism was already bad enough as it is in that regard. All that effort of monitoring and supervision adds absolutely nothing to socially useful production but on the contrary draws resources and manpower away from the same.

As if that were not enough you would then have to calibrate the prices according to labour time inputs as well. How is this to be done? What do we mean by labour time inputs in this context? There are only two options available. Either we are referring to "socially necessary labour" or actually expended (past) labour?

The first we can rule out absolutely for precisely the reason Marx pointed out - that it is only through the market that the socially necessary labour time embodied in commodities - their value - can be revealed or made manifest via the ratios in which they exchange . Abstract labour time, although it is indeed the "immanent measure" of value in capitalism, is not something that you can directly measure. It exists only as an ideal, something that can only be inferred from one's analysis of the economy and made apparent through through the long term movement of prices. So it could not "serve as the matter of price comparsions" in a labour voucher economy. This, of course, was basis of Marx's critique of the ricardian socialist, John Gray who proposed the idea of labour moiney within the context of a commodity producing society. As Marx pointed out:

The difference between price and value, between the commodity measured by the labour time whose product it is, and the product of the labour time against which it is exchanged, this difference calls for a third commodity to act as a measure in which the real exchange value of commodities is expressed. (Grundrisse, penguin/NLR Harmondsworth 1973 p139-40).

In other words we are back to capitalism

Using actual or past labour as the yardstick gets round this particular problem but runs into serious problems of it own. Not the least of which is that any kind of effective pricing system should really be based on not what happened in the past but what ought to happen in the future. It is future-oriented in other words.

One of the problems it will have to address, for instance, is how to balance supply and demand. To prevent any serious mismatch between them (which could prove to be extremely wasteful and inefficient ) you would have to ensure that the combined face value of all labour vouchers issued somehow equalled or approximated the combined face value of the consumer goods available in the stores. Now, this in itself would be a monumentally difficult task to accomplish when you sit down and think about it. It would require an incredibly huge amount amount of data compilation and collation. Yes we have wonderful computer technology at our finger tip today but that is not enough. Not nearly enough in this case. This would be further complicated by the fact that the economy is not something that is static but constantly changing.

Moreover, and unlike in the case of a money-based economy, any miscalculation, any discrepancy between the overall labour values of products, on the one hand, and vouchers issued, on the other, could result, for instance, in a situation of systemic underconsumption since both sets of values are fixed and supposedly equivalent at the outset. One could, in other words, literally end up with consumers not having enough vouchers to buy back the products produced. So you could very well be forced to reintroduce a market and flexible pricing to get round this problen and, once again, we will find ourselves on the slippery slope back to capitalism. Note also the inducement to consume for the sake of consumption itself that this implies and the dehumanising market mentality that that entails. Prices are lowered or raise to stumulate or depress demand accordingly. Is this how a communist should be thinking? I think not.

There are many other problems with using actual labour time units . One is how do you measure the actual labour input that went into a good. You cannot just measure the labour inputs that went into the final stage of production but all the preceding stages as well and since production is a socially integrated process this makes this intrinsically well nigh impossible. Also, there are other costs not just labour costs - such as environmental costs - that ought to be reckoned for in your pricing schema - how do you do that?

And you still at the end of the day face the problem of how to evaluate different types of labour. Evaluating skilled labour in terms of multiples of simple labour is just a glib way of evading the issue. What is the productivity of a skilled dental surgeon compared to a skilled computer operator? I defy anyone to give an answer to this

I agree 100% with Peter Kropotkin:

“No hard and fast line can be drawn between the work of one and the work of another. To measure them by results leads to absurdity. To divide them into fractions and measured them by hours of labour leads to absurdity also. One course remains: not to measure them at all, but to recognise the right of all who take part in productive labour first of all to live – and then to enjoy the comforts of life” (The Wage System)

The labour voucher system will be a hugely costly bureaucratic nightmare, It will be inherently socially divisive. It will undermine the very cooperative values upon which a communist society depends by promoting individualist competitive attitides towards consumption and promote cheating and corruption. And it will compel the reintroduction of market to overcome imbalances between supply and demand. It has nothing to recommend itself whatsoever

If some form of rationing is required prior to the establishment of full free access communism, there are hugely more effective, bureaucratically more simple and straightforward, as well as fairer and more egalitarian, ways of doing this than the anachronistic and unworkable idea of labour vouchers.

The sooner we consign the whole idea to the dustbin of history for the transperent nonsense it clearly is, the better.

Strannik

11th August 2012, 11:28

It seems to me that the discussion of centralized vs. decentralized planning misses the point a bit. If I understand it correctly, a Turing machine of any size can run any logical program, so there is no difference whether the decisions are made by one central planner or many small planners. The actual question is on what information are the decisions based on and what are the decisions. So the question is about feedback information in the economic system.

I think that market or market mechanisms can be justified when they contain some kind of information that would otherwise be missing from social economy.

So the question would be: in a situation where any economic actor has real-time access to actual information about any inventory and order queue; and is also free to compile their personal order queue according to their personal requirements - what additional information would a market system or labour voucher system contain?

Paul Cockshott

11th August 2012, 14:12

it would contain info about social cost. If there is no such mechanism each person may choose to consume goods containingsay 60 hours labour a week, which is more than can be made.

Kotze

11th August 2012, 17:49

I dont just critique - Ive also put forward concrete ideas myself on many occasons as well you know.Where?

JPSartre12

11th August 2012, 18:10

The labour voucher system will be a hugely costly bureaucratic nightmare, It will be inherently socially divisive. It will undermine the very cooperative values upon which a communist society depends by promoting individualist competitive attitides towards consumption and promote cheating and corruption. And it will compel the reintroduction of market to overcome imbalances between supply and demand. It has nothing to recommend itself whatsoever

If some form of rationing is required prior to the establishment of full free access communism, there are hugely more effective, bureaucratically more simple and straightforward, as well as fairer and more egalitarian, ways of doing this than the anachronistic and unworkable idea of labour vouchers.

The sooner we consign the whole idea to the dustbin of history for the transperent nonsense it clearly is, the better.

I respectfully disagree, comrade. Establishing a labour voucher program would be a nice step away from bourgeois money, because at least it's not transferable and one can't make 'more money' off of it.

Oh, it's not a perfect idea, but it's a tad better than what we have now.

And on what grounds would you call it bureaucratic?

Lowtech

11th August 2012, 19:38

Fundimentally, artificial scarcity is a kind of rationing, however, it is rationing for the benefit of the rich

If you have a market-less economy without retention of value, you've already eliminated artificial scarcity, society would be realizing the real abubdance of resources propagated in the economy

In other words, you dont lose abundance when eliminating the market, it is increased perceptually

In all honesty, the only thing that would warrant labour vouchers is when someone has worked somewhere long enough to earn a transfer to another location, as in moving many miles away

I respectfully disagree, comrade. Establishing a labour voucher program would be a nice step away from bourgeois money, because at least it's not transferable and one can't make 'more money' off of it.

You can't make "more money" from money now either, that's like saying a lever does the work for you, however, economically, no one "does the work for you," if you didnt do the work, someone else did, and if you benefit from that labour, the producer of that value is not

JPSartre12

11th August 2012, 22:59

You can't make "more money" from money now either, that's like saying a lever does the work for you, however, economically, no one "does the work for you," if you didnt do the work, someone else did, and if you benefit from that labour, the producer of that value is not

Perhaps this is an overly crude example of making money from more money, but what about interest in my bank account?

Not doing work, just sitting around, and it slowly grows by itself.

RedMaterialist

12th August 2012, 04:05

And you still at the end of the day face the problem of how to evaluate different types of labour. Evaluating skilled labour in terms of multiples of simple labour is just a glib way of evading the issue. What is the productivity of a skilled dental surgeon compared to a skilled computer operator? I defy anyone to give an answer to this
...

If some form of rationing is required prior to the establishment of full free access communism, there are hugely more effective, bureaucratically more simple and straightforward, as well as fairer and more egalitarian, ways of doing this than the anachronistic and unworkable idea of labour vouchers.

The sooner we consign the whole idea to the dustbin of history for the transperent nonsense it clearly is, the better.

The answer to the evaluation of skilled labor in a transitional society is the same as it is now in a fully developed capitalist society: the value of any kind of labor is determined by the socially necessary amount of time needed to produce that type of labor. A skilled surgeon takes (on average) many more hours to produce than a skilled computer programmer.

The labor value of a surgeon is, therefore, reflected in higher wages, in a higher price of labor, than a computer programmer. The surgeon has, therefore, contributed a larger part of the social working day than has the programmer, therefore he or she receives more in wages, a larger portion of the social product. Marx said that the worker would receive a labor "certificate." We now, in the U.S., have such a certificate, the Federal Reserve Note, in Europe it is called the Euro, in Japan the yen, etc.

This unequal pay for unequal rights is a defect of capitalism, but, according to Marx, it is a defect which is necessary to continue into the first stage of communism:

"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society." The Gotha Program.

Why destroy a trillion dollar monetary system which, more or less, places a relatively stable price on the labor value of consumer goods? Why not follow Marx's advice and take over that monetary system and run it for the good of society? Then when a complete transition to communism is made then destroy it, or rather, just let it die. Or, as I like to say: "Occupy the Federal Reserve!"

RedMaterialist

12th August 2012, 04:20

Perhaps this is an overly crude example of making money from more money, but what about interest in my bank account?

Not doing work, just sitting around, and it slowly grows by itself.

That .01% annual interest does not just come from nowhere, as if by magic (it does not come from an invisible hand.) A good part of it comes from slave wages paid to workers in China, India, Bangladesh, etc.

Interest, just like rent, is a part of the labor of the worker which is not paid by the capitalist. They even have a formula for it in the Bureau of Economic Statistics, GDP, Section 1.15, I think: Non-Labor + Labor + Profit = Price. Which, in Marxist terms translates as: Labor + UnPaid Labor = Price.

You pay 5$ for a tshirt at WalMart. $3 is for the wages of the labor in producing the shirt, $2 is part of the value of the labor not paid by the capitalist. Your interest comes out of the $2.

Lowtech

12th August 2012, 06:14

Perhaps this is an overly crude example of making money from more money, but what about interest in my bank account?

Not doing work, just sitting around, and it slowly grows by itself.

I am happy to answer your question...

Interest is not making money from money, this is impossible, rather it is another social construct created to take value from others, as all value has a source; either produced by you or produced by other people, directly or indirectly.

If you don't work and somehow receive money, you are retaining value and consuming more than you produce

On very small scales this appears benign and is acceptable in cases of the disabled or elderly, however on large scales, when you have individuals retaining 100's of thousands of "dollars" or more, this is not only economically invalid, it is extremely detrimental

Kotze

12th August 2012, 09:02

A skilled surgeon takes (on average) many more hours to produce (...) therefore he or she receives more in wagesThis comes up all the time so I have a canned response:

"Also, the problem of elite emigration poses the need for transnational politics." The only elite that matters here is the one that actually has some important skills that most people don't have, like doctors. If education and training of these people is provided by the public, this reduces their scarcity. So if there was only one country in the world we could get away with not paying them much more than average. As long as only a part of the world is transformed, things are a bit more complicated, but we don't have to pay them a very high income either. The clumsy "solution" is to forbid anybody to leave the transformed region. Less clumsy would be a temporary ban on leaving that is only applied to those who undergo very expensive training paid for by the public. People should be informed about the extent of possible movement restrictions before they decide whether to undergo such training. I don't think such restrictions will be common though, because even if another country with a shitty job training system gives you lots of money, it's after all the whole quality of life that matters, and I think it's likely the more egalitarian society will have a lower crime rate, better public transport and some other nice things (and last but not least, most of the friends you grew up with).Above argument works with the assumption of people being pretty selfish, not assuming it makes the case against big income differentials even easier.

Let's get back to the topic degree of centralizing. I haven't seen anything compelling by the "decentralized planning" guys and to me it looks like a contradiction in terms :P

robbo203

12th August 2012, 11:29

Let's get back to the topic degree of centralizing. I haven't seen anything compelling by the "decentralized planning" guys and to me it looks like a contradiction in terms :P

Where's the contradiction? Decentralisation just means many plans that mutually adjust. It is counterposed to the dotty oidea of having just one single plan encompassing everything It does not mean "no planning". Decentralised planning is full of plans and it is not possible to avoid planning in that sense

Kotze

12th August 2012, 12:07

robbo203

12th August 2012, 13:38

Hey robbo,

I'm still waiting for links to your "concrete ideas" that aren't just waffling about how everybody will "spontaneously interact" with "decentralized plans" in "interactive processes" where everybody just takes what they feel like or whatevs.Then it doesn't make sense to counterpose this to markets.

Why do you think a decentralised system has to entail markets?

As for my concrete ideas Ive already explained how it is quite possible to operate a decentralised system without markets. Such a system already exists in embryo within the shell of capitalist production. Capitalist production units and distribution centres of necessity are engaged in a self regulating system of stock control which uses calculation in kind. Without this practical mechanism, capitalism would grind to a halt tomorrow. This is what your shelf filler is doing in your local supermarket - monitoring different kinds of stock . Shortages of specific stock translate into orders for fresh stock which are transmitted to the suppliers

Of course, it is quite true that the supermarkets is also involved in monetary calculation alongside calculation in kind. Monetary considerations mediate productive activities in capitalism. But in no way does that invalidate the point that what we see here in action and under our very noses in a capitalist society is a decentralised prpduction system in which numerous units adjust to each others plans in terms of physical stocks and calculation in kind. This is more readily apparent when you look inside what is going in a single capitalist corporation when stock is transferred internally without a money price being attached to it but essentially the physical process of transferring stock is also apparent between corprations although it is accompanied or shadowed by a process of monetary transactions - in short, a financial trail

The point is that it does not have to be like this. In fact, what a socialist society would do would be to take over such a system and adapt it for its own purposes, getting rid of every vestige of monetary calculation in the process

Its as simple as that!

You are aware, I assume, of what you are saying by dening that such a non market decentralised system of planning is possible? You would in effect be saying that the only alternative to a market form of decentralisation is a non market centrally planned economy - meaning everything, and I mean literally everything, is planned in advance fromjust one single planning centre.

Thus the global output of 2 inch screws along with millions upon millions of other items would have to specified apriori as a precise quantititive production target. Since a great many items serve also as the inputs of other items, the production targets of these other items depend crucially upon you meeting the production targets of the inputs in question . One little error , one little chance mishap - like a tsunami or a flood which wipes out some important peice of infrastructure (like the factory producing 2 inch screws) upsets everything and has inevitable ripple effects that will require you to reconfigure the total plan in toto - since everything is connected to eveything else.

Point is that that there are thousands and thousands of factors operating every single minute of the day, and everywhere, that could cause reality to deviate from what "the plan" specifies. And as if that is not bad enough, you would have to ensure that everyone works the exactly the hours they are required to in order to ensure the production targets are met and also that their consumption patterns should remain completely unchanged for the duration of the plan. Is this feasible? Of course not. Not even the most powerful totalitarian state imaginable could ensure its feasibility

Ergo, central planning in the literal sense of society-wide planning is a dead loss.

Howevr if you agree that it is an absolute non-starter but still think the only alternative to it is the deceneralised market then the logic of your position commits you to saying that the only feasible option there is in the modern world is the market economy

Are you seriously willing to embrace such a completely anti-socialist position?

robbo203

12th August 2012, 13:58

The answer to the evaluation of skilled labor in a transitional society is the same as it is now in a fully developed capitalist society: the value of any kind of labor is determined by the socially necessary amount of time needed to produce that type of labor. A skilled surgeon takes (on average) many more hours to produce than a skilled computer programmer.

No no no - you cant do this! Cant you see? Marx was adamant that "socially necessary labour time" is not something that can be empirically measured. It is something that can only be inferred or revealed ex post facto through the market process itself via price ratios. It is precisely the market that a post capitalist society gets rid of

If you are talking about actual labour expended - past labour - that is a different matter. But then that too has huge problems which are essentially insurmountable.

These ideas of "labour time accounting" and "labour vouchers" - two analytically separate but, in a sense linked, concepts - should in my opinion be scrapped completely. They are of no practical use for the organisation of a post capitalist spociety.

The only slight concession I wpould make is in relation to labour time accounting , A modified project-based version of this is acceptable which is purely based on accounting for living labour rather than dead labour, in Marxian parlance

Kotze

12th August 2012, 15:04

Why do you think a decentralised system has to entail markets?I don't think a decentralized system is neccessarily identical to having markets. I do think however that there's something to it that makes the emergence of markets in the long term likely and that even in the short term there's something very unattractive to decentralized decisions in terms of redundancy and chaos which it shares with markets (not that all redundancy is bad mind you).

Planning and markets are different concepts in that the former is about figuring out how much to produce for which uses before doing it and the latter about figuring that out during and after producing it. They are opposites, but not in the sense that one activity is there 100% and the other 0% (of course in a market economy people also plan to some degree and in a planned economy there are adjustments and re-evaluations and some half-finished projects will get cancelled), so "decentralized planning" is not a perfect example for a contradiction in terms.

But what some people on the left understand as what makes capitalism not so great for the working class is not only that a) the minority that controls access to the means of production has different interests from us and uses its powers to that end and at cost to us — which alone doesn't tell us something about a need for central planning — there is also something to market dynamics which b) causes inequality even in the absence of differences in skill, effort, thrift (and so even in a hypothetical blank slate lalaland would make the re-institution of classes over time probable) and c) screws us without even benefitting some other group, it even screws capitalists.

So when those who don't see the problem as purely one of property relations talk about getting rid of capitalism, they of course also mean to get rid of some chaotic shit, aspects b) and c), which utterances like decentralized/polycentric/spontaneous(!) planning smell like.

You are aware, I assume, of what you are saying by dening that such a non market decentralised system of planning is possible?I think "people take and contribute whatever they individually-spontaneously feel like" is completely unworkable. If you mean something else, you haven't said so. A
self regulating system of stock control which uses calculation in kind won't work if what an individual can take of a shelf that is not a shelf for that individual alone is limited by nothing else than what is on the shelf. Labour vouchers are a way of limiting abuse. For some items and services there are aspects to them that constrain how much abuse even the biggest psychopaths could do ("I will smash socialism by using free public transport all day MWAHAHAHAAA!") but relying on 100% of the people being nice 100% of the time won't work.

As for the rest of your post, this is a strawman about what central planning is (it is possible and desirable to centrally plan with some room for slack, and saying everything is connected isn't an argument against central planning at all) and we have been there before, and several times at that.

Lynx

12th August 2012, 15:50

There is no avoiding the need for formal reciprocity in the transition to communism. We have lived all our lives where we receive X for Y, and are paid A for B. Labour vouchers or their electronic version will be required until the workings of a gift economy become second nature to everyone.

All the descriptions I have read make clear that vouchers are not money. They are not interchangeable, do not bear interest, and (in some descriptions) carry an expiry date. When they are redeemed, they are destroyed. By design, vouchers cannot be used for capital accumulation.

RedMaterialist

12th August 2012, 18:18

No no no - you cant do this! Cant you see? Marx was adamant that "socially necessary labour time" is not something that can be empirically measured. It is something that can only be inferred or revealed ex post facto through the market process itself via price ratios. It is precisely the market that a post capitalist society gets rid of

Certainly true; price is the monetary expression of value, wages are the price expression of labor time. The question is how do you get from a capitalist society to a post capitalist society. Marx was adamant that the transition would include some defects of the capitalist system, such as unequal wages for unequal labor time.

If you are talking about actual labour expended - past labour - that is a different matter. But then that too has huge problems which are essentially insurmountable.

Modern capitalist society surmounts those problems every hour of every day. A socialist transition society simply takes control of those problems.

These ideas of "labour time accounting" and "labour vouchers" - two analytically separate but, in a sense linked, concepts - should in my opinion be scrapped completely. They are of no practical use for the organisation of a post capitalist spociety.

Marx called those concepts "labor certificates."

The only slight concession I wpould make is in relation to labour time accounting , A modified project-based version of this is acceptable which is purely based on accounting for living labour rather than dead labour, in Marxian parlance

Labor time accounting is not possible in a transition from capitalist to socialism because it does not take into account the different qualities or values of the time which was needed to produce each different type of labor.

One hour of the labor of a surgeon cannot be equal to one hour of labor of a computer programmer. Only in a fully developed communist society would the two workers be equal; each would contribute according to her ability and receive according to her needs.

It is simply not possible to go from a fully developed capitalist society to a communist society without first going through an intermediate stage which retains some of the characteristics of the capitalist society.

"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby." Marx, The Gotha Program

Paul Cockshott

12th August 2012, 18:43

RedMaterialist

12th August 2012, 18:52

Ergo, central planning in the literal sense of society-wide planning is a dead loss.

...

Howevr if you agree that it is an absolute non-starter but still think the only alternative to it is the deceneralised market then the logic of your position commits you to saying that the only feasible option there is in the modern world is the market economy

...

Are you seriously willing to embrace such a completely anti-socialist position?

World wide central planning is now an economic fact; Microsoft now controls about 85% of the computer operating system market. The question is what to do about it. Socialists believe, I would say, that society should take control of this behemoth and run it for the benefit of society. Another view is the utopian one: that Microsoft is a "dead-loss" and should be replaced by millions of little computer companies. The utopian view has two main problems: one, Microsoft is not going to let go of its monopoly profits without a fight; and two, giant companies will always have the advantage of economy of size.

It may seem idyllic to have billions of computers using a million different operating systems. It would result in complete chaos and would costs 10x as much as the current system.

We have reached the stage of world wide monopoly capitalism, with its gigantic bureaucratic central planning. Socialists should recognize this and instead of trying to go back to an Edenic past, should take over these monsters and run them for the benefit of society.

The_Red_Spark

12th August 2012, 19:08

I know this is about central planning, but I am new to much of this discussion and need to have someone explain something to me that I am having a hard time understanding. I see many people arguing against markets and referring to a market-less society, but isn't the term market multifaceted and even used to explain a social relation that applies to an exchange of goods in general? If it doesn't explicitly mean an exchange of goods or commodities in the capitalist sense I don't understand how it is intrinsically linked to capitalism alone? I think the term market is being used far too specifically, or even to subjectively, and that the exchange of goods without profit or the accumulation of capital would still entail a 'market' in the generic sense of the word i.e. used to define an exchange of commodified labor in the form of labor certificates and an actual good of equal labor value.

Is this idea or understanding wrong fundamentally? If so how is this usage of the word and the concept in general wrong? I am trying to understand this and I hope that someone with more understanding than I, can kindly and gently ;) shed some light on this for me? Lastly, I am supportive of centralized planning and I am in total agreement with Marx's concept laid out in the Gotha Program of a transition with some capitalist defects present in the lower or early phase of communism.

RedMaterialist

12th August 2012, 19:12

He says that when talking about capitalist society, he expresses no doubts that it would be possible in the first stages of communism because at that point competition between independent producers is gone. It is only in a society of competing independent producers that labour value has to appear in the fetishised form of money.

What then does Marx mean when he says:

"Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values...

"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor...

"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society."

(Gotha.)

The exchange of labor is still controlled by the laws of commodity exchange, the exchange of equivalents. One person contributes $100 to society and receives $100 in exchange, another $50, etc.

This is one of the defects of capitalist society which will be retained in the initial transformation to communism.

Paul Cockshott

12th August 2012, 19:20

I take him as saying that this will be reckoned directly in hours not in dollars.

RedMaterialist

12th August 2012, 19:49

I take him as saying that this will be reckoned directly in hours not in dollars.

But isnt this the same thing? Suppose the total social product is 100 hrs per day. The strong person produces 10 hours, the weaker person produces 5 hours. Doesn't the strong person receive 10 hours of commodities in return and the weaker 5, regardless of their individual need? Isn't this what Marx meant by unequal pay for unequal work, i.e., a defect of capitalism continuing into the first stage of transformation to communism?

Rowan Duffy

12th August 2012, 21:53

I see no reason why there should be different remuneration based on the amount of labour that was necessary to confer the human capital for someone to become, say, a doctor. Instead that should be treated, as other means of production, as a social cost that comes out of social surplus - and the doctor remunerated according to their work.

I can see some sense in very dangerous jobs that can not otherwise be filled, but are considered socially necessary making use of differentials if they are found to be useful and necessary in filling them. If someone has to mine coal they should be somehow compensated for their increased risk of death - perhaps an early retirement or the like.

Chrome_Fist

12th August 2012, 21:59

The only type of economy that has proved efficent and good at constructing socialism is an economy such as the one that existed in Albania 1946 to 1985.

Paul Cockshott

12th August 2012, 23:06

But isnt this the same thing? Suppose the total social product is 100 hrs per day. The strong person produces 10 hours, the weaker person produces 5 hours. Doesn't the strong person receive 10 hours of commodities in return and the weaker 5, regardless of their individual need? Isn't this what Marx meant by unequal pay for unequal work, i.e., a defect of capitalism continuing into the first stage of transformation to communism?

A qualified yes. The principle of unequal pay can apply if there are real measurable differences in output relative to 'norms' within a given trade, but not between different trades and professions since that amounts to the private appropriation of the social investment in training.
But the difference between money and labour accounts is significant
1. labour accounts are non circulating and non transferable and so can not be a basis for an m-c-m' circuit
2. labour accounts create a presupposition towards equality that is quite absent with money

Money is self validating - if I am paid £14 an hour and you are paid £25 an hour, that just proves that you are worth more than me, it needs no more justification. But if you are paid 1.5 hours for 1 hours work, there had better be some real evidence that you do one and a half times as much work as the average person doing your job.

RedMaterialist

12th August 2012, 23:46

Money is self validating - if I am paid £14 an hour and you are paid £25 an hour, that just proves that you are worth more than me, it needs no more justification. But if you are paid 1.5 hours for 1 hours work, there had better be some real evidence that you do one and a half times as much work as the average person doing your job.

Worker A receives $14 per hour; Worker B receives $25 per hour.
Worker A receives 1 hr of labor certificate per 1 hr of work; Worker B receives 1.5 hr of labor certificate per 1 hr. of work.

Is there really any difference? What does it mean to say that money is self validating?

Lowtech

13th August 2012, 06:34

I see many people arguing against markets and referring to a market-less society, but isn't the term market multifaceted and even used to explain a social relation that applies to an exchange of goods in general? If it doesn't explicitly mean an exchange of goods or commodities in the capitalist sense I don't understand how it is intrinsically linked to capitalism alone?

i'm glad you're asking this question.

when i say "market-less" economy/society i am referring to an economy where a market is not the core mode resources are exchanged. the word market itself is not exactly the same as the kind of market we have today within capitalism. the word itself is too in-general to adequately define what modern people have been conditioned to be dependent on.

the capitalist market in actuality loosely resembles the pure definition of the word.

capitalist "market" is a system that modern people are conditioned to be dependent on for survival. when you have people dependent on a system to provide sustenance and that system becomes insufficient, you have poverty. any perceived benefits of a market do not mitigate these facts.

capitalism, by design is meant to be insufficient, its not meant to sustain humans as a whole, instead it is designed to retain value for the few. retention of value creates artificial scarcity; production of commodities for exchange value causes resources to be utilized inefficiently; as an economic model the entire thing is crude, misguided and volatile.

the capitalist market is something that needs very close study as it really is the heart of the entire machine.

to put it in the simplest terms possible; the capitalist market is a system for the exchange of resources that modern people are conditioned to be dependent on, who's processes are exploited mathematically by the elites.

the reason it is economically invalid is, as with everything in capitalism, the market is a social construct; every excuse used to make it sound logical and beneficial are in reality only how capitalist's feel about economics and how they view their fellow human beings. in other words; elitism does not dictate the physical processes of economics, nor does it validate "selling" above production cost or under compensating workers.

Paul Cockshott

13th August 2012, 09:29

Worker A receives $14 per hour; Worker B receives $25 per hour.
Worker A receives 1 hr of labor certificate per 1 hr of work; Worker B receives 1.5 hr of labor certificate per 1 hr. of work.

Is there really any difference? What does it mean to say that money is self validating?

There is a significant difference. With money, the underlying social relation that price is the monetary expression of labour is hidden. In terms of price you are 'worth' whatever you can get somebody to pay you. Labour accounts unveil the basic social relation that is hidden by money. As Marx points out the law of large numbers operates in such a way as to ensure that once you have about 10 people randomly chosen working on a task using the same technology, then the social labour will be equivalent to 10 person days. If you have just two people there may be significant differences in how long they take to complete a task. Two groups of 10 people will have far less difference in how long it takes them.

Thus provided you have work groups of reasonable size, the total social labour performed by that group will be equal to the days worked times the number of people. That group of 10 workers may agree among themselves that Susan is a harder worker than Sam, and puts in 20% more effort, and may credit her with more than Sam, but they have to make the total add up to 350 hours assuming a 35 hour week.

Vladimir Innit Lenin

13th August 2012, 09:55

Paul - you're making the same difference I initially made in advocating labour vouchers. Even though you're disaggregating the price relation by moving from money to labour vouchers, you're still presenting the labour vouchers in a value form. The differential value of the labour vouchers you present mean that labour vouchers still have accumulation properties - even if they are socailly non-transferrable, i'm sure human ingenuity will find some way of accumulating a greater number of vouchers.

Rather, if you are going to press ahead with the idea of labour vouchers, you need to present them as the 'validation' of completion of a minimum necessary amount of labour time completed. I.e., you have a threshold below which productivity is unacceptable. If worker A's productivity is below the threshold level, they are entitled to 0 labour vouchers and may only access basic goods for that month (let us say labour vouchers are 'earned' monthly). If worker A's productivity is at or above the threshold level, they are entitled to their labour voucher, which essentially allows them access to all the goods produced, for the following month.

The labour voucher entitlement can be peer assessed by a demarchic workers' workplace council to ensure:

a) the voucher is non-transferrable
b) the threshold level is not corrupted by bureaucracy, 'friends' etc.

robbo203

13th August 2012, 11:47

World wide central planning is now an economic fact; Microsoft now controls about 85% of the computer operating system market. The question is what to do about it. Socialists believe, I would say, that society should take control of this behemoth and run it for the benefit of society. Another view is the utopian one: that Microsoft is a "dead-loss" and should be replaced by millions of little computer companies. The utopian view has two main problems: one, Microsoft is not going to let go of its monopoly profits without a fight; and two, giant companies will always have the advantage of economy of size..

This is not central planniing at all - not in its classical sense of society wide planning. at any rate. It is nowhere even near that. It doesnt matter if Microsoft controlled 100% of the computer operating systems market. It would still not be society wide planning

I think it is absolutely crucial to grasp what is meant by society-wide central planning. It means one single unimaginably vast plan encompassing, and specifying in advance the production targets for, literally everything - from computer operating systems to ballpoint pens , from cherry tomatoes to widgets and JCBs. Absurd? Of course its absurd. And I dont think Ive met anyone yet willing to put their head on the block and defend such a daft idea. It is merely a hypothetical "ideal type" which can only at best be approximated in reality - at least in theory. But the closer you approach this model the more difficult it is to achieve what it is you hope to achieve in the way of a so called "planned economy"

The crucial point to take away from all this is that if central planning in its cassical sense is an impossibiliyy then it inevitably follows that some degree of decentralisation is unavoidable. Difficult though some people might find it to accept the idea, they have no alternative

You cant have it both ways. Either you accept central planning in the sense of society wide planning or you reject it , in which case you are logically committed to accepting the need for a degee of decentralisation and hence spontaneity, in the way in which production units and distribution centres mutually adjust themselves towards one other in the process of planning

Lowtech

13th August 2012, 16:09

This is not central planniing at all - not in its classical sense of society wide planning. at any rate. It is nowhere even near that.

Wrong, redshifted is correct. "Planning" is simply logistics/resource management and large corporations do practice internal resource management, even on global scales spanning thousands of people.

If you assert that markets allow de-centralized logistics, what you are truly observing is the market attempting to be open-sourced. Which the elites would never fully allow, as at that point, the economy would become communist.

The more natural, functional and efficient the economy becomes, the more it resembles communism. Therefore, capitalists must allow some degree otherwise their system would become completely broken.

robbo203

13th August 2012, 17:56

Wrong, redshifted is correct. "Planning" is simply logistics/resource management and large corporations do practice internal resource management, even on global scales spanning thousands of people.

If you assert that markets allow de-centralized logistics, what you are truly observing is the market attempting to be open-sourced. Which the elites would never fully allow, as at that point, the economy would become communist.

The more natural, functional and efficient the economy becomes, the more it resembles communism. Therefore, capitalists must allow some degree otherwise their system would become completely broken.

With respect Im not wrong and I dont think you quite grasp what is meant by central planning in its classical sense as society wide planning. It does not mean just a greater degree of centralisation "spanning thousands of people". It means, quite literally, one single vast plan encompassing everything. And I mean everything. Nowhere has this ever happened, nor could it ever happen. It is, as I said, purely an abstract model , a hypothesis.

This concept of central planning was tossed around in the economic calculation debates from the 1920s onwards, It is what Hayek alluded to, for instance, in talking about the problem of information dispersal. Von Mises maintained that central planning embodied the "fuhrer principle" absolutely in which a single will prevailed over everything and everyone. It never ocurred to von Mises to seriously investigate the alternative of a moneyless socialist economy that was not centrally planned in that sense yet it is just such an alternative that completely does away with his whole economic calculation argument against socialism

What you and Redshifted mean by "central planning" is something quite different to classic central planning. Im not saying one use of the term is correct and the other wriong. I am just drawing your attention to the fact that they mean very different things and that if you are going to address the classical conception of central planning as a society wide planning you are into a whole different ball game

robbo203

13th August 2012, 18:05

I don't think a decentralized system is neccessarily identical to having markets. I do think however that there's something to it that makes the emergence of markets in the long term likely and that even in the short term there's something very unattractive to decentralized decisions in terms of redundancy and chaos which it shares with markets (not that all redundancy is bad mind you).

(snip)

So when those who don't see the problem as purely one of property relations talk about getting rid of capitalism, they of course also mean to get rid of some chaotic shit, aspects b) and c), which utterances like decentralized/polycentric/spontaneous(!) planning smell like

I think this is based on a serious misconception . It is true that with any kind of decentralised arrangement - whether market-based or not - there is the possibility of material imbalances or disproportionalities emerging from time to time (what you call "chaos)". This stems from the spontaneous aspect of the way in which the different units in decentralised system interact and adjust to each other. One unit cannot know fully what another unit is producing so the chances are that, together, they might both produce more of something than what is actually needed. However, that is where the similarity ends. There is a big difference in the way in which a non-market decentralised economy goes about dealing with the question of imbalances and the way a market version of this does this

To use Marxian parlance, we have what is called the "anarchy of capitalist production today. The "anarchy" in question which is expressed in the form of phenomena such as economic crises, has often been seen by generations of leftists as resulting from an alleged lack of "central coordination" . Such central coordination, it is alleged, is what is needed to overcome the problem of disproportionatre growth between different branches of industry that results in an economic crises. Hence, the need for a so called "centrally planned economy" which in its literal sense as society wide planning is utterly nonsensical. No complex modern economy can be run in that way as Ive already explained

I think, in any case, that leftists who argue in this way have profoundly misunderstood what Marx was getting at in his reference to "capitalist anarchy" and you are simply repeating here this selfsame mistake. It is NOT the fact that disproportionate or unbalanced growth occurs that is really the problem; that is a necessary but not sufficient cause of economic crises. In a decentralised communist society if it so happens that too much of one good is produced in relation to consumer demand and too little of another then the answer is simple - you cut back on the one good and increase the supply of the other. You adjust, in other words, and this is what a communist production will be about - a continuous process of adjustment or groping towards an optimal outcome. A self-regulating , self-correcting , economy

Its different with a market economy . Something gets in the way of smoothly carrying out this adjustment process. Marx put his finger on it in Theories of Surplus Value, (Chapter 11, 4c). when he argued that it is "the very connection between the mutual claims and obligations, between purchases and sales", that allows disproportionate growth to spiral out of control into full blown recession. When a certain industry overshoots in terms of output what the market can absorb, what happens then? Workers are laid off and orders to supplying firms are cut back. That in turns means there is less purchasing power sloshing around with which to buy goods produced by other industries so they too lay off some of their workers and so on and so forth. So it is not simply the case that the market system is decentralised that is the problem - rather it is the way in which the different parts or units are linked up in capitalism via the cash nexus that is the problem. This is actually a very crucial point to take on board - it changes everything you might say about decentralisation. The "chaotic shit" you refer to stems from this

The clinching argument in favour of this interpretation of what Marx and Engels was saying, is this. Bear in mind that they both subscribed to the idea that capitalism was subject to a tendency towards the increasing concentration and centralisation of capital. Taking this argument at face value what this means is that the degree of planlessness or spontaneity within the economy, expressed in the way production units would adjust to each other's plans, would tend to decline. With fewer and bigger production units around what this means is that there would be less plannlessness and anarchic spontaneity in the economy as a whole.

However, it is precisely in this connection we find Marx and Engels saying something completely different -and something quite extrordinary. They held that while capitalism was subject to a tendency towards the increasing concentration and centralisation of capital, they also held that there was increasing anarchy of production (read Socialism Utopian and Scientific and you will see for yourself). By this is meant crises will tend to get worse and worse. However, this forces us to radically reinterpret what is meant by this idea of "anarchy of production" in Marxian terms. It cannot logically be explained by the fact that a market economy is decentralised since as we have seen , Marx and Engels held that the market would become less and less decentralised over time and thefore less "anarchic"in those terms. But, at the same time, they assert that the market becomes more anarchic and not less so. So they obviously mean something else by "anarchic"

"Anarchy", I would suggest in this context. means "ungovernable" or not amenable to the conscious will of economic actors. It has nothing to do with decentralisation as such. Like I said, in a decentralised communist economy, if an excess of one goods is produced, one simply decides to cut back on the output of the goods in question. We consciously decides this, put our decision into effect and so remain in conscious control of the situation all along. In a market economy, by contrast, we are not in control of the situation . If we cut back on the good in question because more of it was produced than the market can absorb that gives rise to consequences that no one actually intended or planned at all - namely an economy spiralling out of control into a recession. This is what Marx meant by the impersonal laws of capitalism working themselves out regardless of peoples' intentions. The system governs us not the other way round

The problem with many on left - particularly those who prostrate themselves before the holy cow of the so called "planned economy" (without really understanding what this means) - is that they have been hoodwinked and deceived for decades by pro-statist propaganda into thinking that decentralisation is bad and decentralisation equates with "market anarchy". It does not . There is no realistic alternative to a polycentric system of production and our task as socialist revolutionaries is consider how such a system can be organised on a completely non market basis.

A clue to how it might be organised. I have suggested, lies under our very noses today and operates within the very shell of capitalist production itself: a self regulating system of stock control that uses calculation in kind

Lowtech

13th August 2012, 18:33

With respect Im not wrong and I dont think you quite grasp what is meant by central planning in its classical sense as society wide planning. It does not mean just a greater degree of centralisation "spanning thousands of people". It means, quite literally, one single vast plan encompassing everything. And I mean everything. Nowhere has this ever happened, nor could it ever happen.

You are paralyzing this discussion and limiting it to a historical context that has no barring on what is actually being considered. In their time, they were limited in the ability to apply logistics on large scales let alone on a global scale; this being before computers and modern communication.

you're trying to make us essentially debate solar power versus industrial age coal power, its silly honestly and outside the context of this discussion

What you fail to understand is that "central planning" even in the historical context was the concept of applying logistics to the entire planet's economy, that has not changed today, what's diferent is that logistics are now much more advanced and supported by technology, its not only possible, it is happening as we speak, simply manipulated and perverted by capitalist interests

robbo203

13th August 2012, 19:42

You are paralyzing this discussion and limiting it to a historical context that has no barring on what is actually being considered. In their time, they were limited in the ability to apply logistics on large scales let alone on a global scale; this being before computers and modern communication.

you're trying to make us essentially debate solar power versus industrial age coal power, its silly honestly and outside the context of this discussion

What you fail to understand is that "central planning" even in the historical context was the concept of applying logistics to the entire planet's economy, that has not changed today, what's diferent is that logistics are now much more advanced and supported by technology, its not only possible, it is happening as we speak, simply manipulated and perverted by capitalist interests

Sorry but again you are not making any sense. It is not a question of whether we possess the most super-duper computer technology imagimable that can makes billions of calculations per second. Get it through your head - this is not the point. Im not questioning the stupendous ability of computer technolgy to do wonderful things and you are barking up completely the wrong tree if you think that is where I am coming from.

Take a deep breath and read again carefully what Ive been talking about. The problem with classic central planning in the sense of society wide planning has nothing to do the lack or the presence of computing power. It is everything to do to with the relationship between the "single vast plan" and the economic reality it seeks to plan for . Technophiles on this forum constantly seem to miss this simple point.

Your contention that this "not only possible, it is happening as we speak, simply manipulated and perverted by capitalist interest" tells me that you have not even begun to grasp what the issue is. What you are saying is so preposterous as to begger belief. You cannot seriously maintain that what we see today "as we speak" is the implementation of some single vast plan - unless you are living in a parrallel universe or something and Im not privy to the esoteric knowlege you speak of. On the contrary, I see around me million upon milions of production units whose production targets are not predeterminmed by some god in the sky called the all powerful "central planning department". That idea is getting more and more patently absurd as society develops and becomes ever more complex

Of course the interrelationships between these millions upon millions of production units are perverted by capitalist interests, as you say . I have no doubt that you are correct here. But remove every last vestige of capitalism from the scene and you will still be left with millions upon millions of production units whose relationshis to one another cannot be preplanned in that sense within one humungus great plan encompassing everything. Rather they will develop on the basis of mutual adjustment.

Anyone who thinks any other option is on the cards is living in a fools paradise, frankly. Complexity necessitates decentralisation and the more complex and advanced a society the more does it needs this automatic self regulating mechanism of mutual adjustrment.

And you know what ? This is precisely where all that super duper computer technology could come in very handy - to enable this process of mutual adjustment to happen all the more smoothly

The_Red_Spark

13th August 2012, 19:49

@Robbo213... I have a few questions in regards to the position you have put forth. I think the best way to present them is to list them in a bulletin format. I am trying to fully understand your position and it has raised a few questions that perhaps you will be able to clear up for me.

Who will co-ordinate the stock control statistics and how will this be conducted among various producers of the same good or product that is being over or under-produced at any given point and time?

To whom would these statistics of stock control be submitted in order to increase or decrease production of a product like razor blades for instance?

How will a decentralized economic model effectively acquisition, distribute, and allocate needed resources amongst various branches of any said industry?

When over-production is present and production is scaled down, necessitating less labor, where will the surplus of labor go and how will it be absorbed back into other industries?

Will this require an organization in order to facilitate the flow of labor resources including any necessary training such a change will entail?

How can a given industry be guaranteed that it can be provided with the number of effectively trained personnel needed to meet the required output of a product if there is a dramatic and spontaneous spike in demand?

I think the building boom in the USA was a perfect example of a massively decentralized area of industry. However, it is something that may require an up close and personal experience with it in order to fully appreciate the true ramifications of what that means exactly. The industry was the definition of anarchy in so many ways that it was unreal. Lack of trained tradesman, lack of trained, experienced and knowledgeable superintendents, lack of trained building inspectors, lack of mortgage brokers, lack of resources like copper caused by huge demand, lack of mines and miners needed to meet said demand for copper, lack of civil infrastructure to support new communities like schools, roads, traffic lights, public transportation, water and electric services, and quite a few other things. It ultimately resulted in half a decade worth of complete and utter chaos culminating in an economic meltdown that rippled through the entire world. Even worse are the eventual repercussions that are yet to come.

By that I am exclusively referring to the pending problems that will arise due to shoddy construction, reliance on inferior building techniques and shortages of necessary materials in sufficient quantity that resulted in substandard production, a lack of quality control resulting from poorly trained and unqualified building inspectors and superintendents, a lack of trained tradesmen that meant poor application of this trade-work, etc. All of this in my opinion could have been avoided if there was a greater degree of central planning among the pieces of industry that were involved, from trained tradesmen to local inspectors to mining.

This is not suggesting a totally planned economy. Nor is it a reference to 1920's theses or material conditions present before the advent smart phones and computers. It is not a suggestion for a thoroughly planned economy, or an economy planned in totality, but how further decentralization can be considered the right direction in the above real world example I cannot fathom. This is irregardless of the 'cash nexus' or theoretical concerns.

This was a matter of mere logistics and trained personnel utilized efficiently and effectively in a common effort, while maintaining quality standards, and a spike in demand that still wasn't met in full. As we all know this boom in housing is the catalyst of the current economic depression. Though it was paired with an overabundance of cheap credit it is not the sole determining factor.

It was predominately spurred by deregulation and decentralized or spontaneous development by the industries attempts to meet demand. The only piece that can be addressed in the sense of any 'cash nexus' is the mortgage industry collapse and the fact that the industry could not meet the demand with cheap and easy credit due to overinflated prices. Other than that it was a matter of overproduction, lack of resources, and terrible quality control in building and personnel.

I do not see how the case for maintaining or propagating decentralization makes any more sense than complete and total central planning. I can also say that I think central planning is perhaps far more likely under present conditions due to computers and super computers than it has been at any other point in history. Using old examples to refute theory attempted under present conditions seems to be a case of apples and oranges. For that reason I refrain from passing judgement on complete central planning in this era and only feel that further centralization seems key to a efficient system under Socialism.

I also think this sounds a whole lot like the Libertarian Austrian School chain of thought that is outright utopian. Had the market been left to self regulate you would have seen a set of conditions far worse than the present conditions and one that could not be defended against being dubbed an outright depression. The world economy would have imploded or toppled like a set of dominoes due to the interdependence that we saw during the current crisis. The implications for that scenario are beyond description and this is why the bailouts became a matter of necessity for the elite. Global unemployment would have doubled and starvation and civil unrest culminating in a world revolution would have quashed the system of capitalism as we know it.

Kotze

13th August 2012, 20:21

The differential value of the labour vouchers you present mean that labour vouchers still have accumulation properties - even if they are socailly non-transferrable, i'm sure human ingenuity will find some way of accumulating a greater number of vouchers.Well.

The question is how to minimize dynamics of the type that getting vouchers is a function of having them in the first place, only if they are significantly free from that makes it sense to call them something else than money. It is true that owning land and factories, while playing a big role in that, is not all there is to it.

Let's take our eyes from the big factory and towards tools. Surely people will be able to use part of their income to obtain some tools for hobby purposes? But then what is stopping me from using such a tool on the job, if it is superior to the standard equipment that everybody else there uses, so I get judged more productive, and the others can't instantly catch up with me, because that "hobbyist" tool is a bit expensive and I'm already on my way to get an even better one from my extra income... Eh, I hope in the future people will have a certain consciousness and be very alert about situations that can start this sort of dynamic, so me having my own special tools that I won't share and talking about expecting more pay to get better tools for myself will get a reaction similar to what talking about kiddie-fiddling plans gets today.

Still, it is important to understand that if income will be to some degree dependent on performance (and I am certain about that), that what one can get by the performance-dependent part of income that itself enhances performance should be minimized, so we do well to dwell a bit more on that. I do privately own tools (non-hypothetically) that are very much related to my performance at work, that I do not take to work, that is exercise equipment. Individual access to exercise equipment should not depent on that individual paying. Same goes, of course, for study material and participation in tests necessary to qualify for certain work.

A system where your vote at your workplace is weighted by your contribution, and the votes in the group decision about how big your contribution is are also affected by such weighting, would also have an accumulation problem.

Lowtech

13th August 2012, 21:39

Sorry but again you are not making any sense. It is not a question of whether we possess the most super-duper computer technology imagimable that can makes billions of calculations per second. Get it through your head - this is not the point.

If the context of this discussion doesnt make sense to you, how can you contribute anything meaningful to it?

you're making many assumptions I will list here...

1- planning is a fairly static set of policies that is centrally dictated without the dynamic response needed to manage resources

-this was true in the historical context because they didnt have real time communication or computing machines to track activities or for resource accounting which is nolonger an issue today. Planning in a communistic sense is simply logistics, period. I'm sure there's another forum section available if you wish to discuss historical topics.

2 - planning means a totalitarian policy machine that ignores the actual function of an economy

-this assumption is aligned with capitalist misconception regarding marxian economics. A market-less economy does not need to be totalitarian, nor is it included in the communist model

3 - a market is necissary because of the sheer amount of information needed to be processed to manage an economy in a "planned" fashion

-more capitalist misconception. decentralization is not the cure to this "problem," it is the cause. a nervous system is not decentralized. If you want something to work cohesively, you cannot break it down into many individuals acting irraticaly. that notion only works in the mind of someone that believes in the capitalist's "invisible hand" garbage

Resource managment happens all the time even on global scales, saying it doesn't isn't debating with me, its the attempt to debate with reality

robbo203

13th August 2012, 23:10

Red_Spark;

To take your last point first, I consider this decentralised approach to socialism is the one thing that nails the lie of the Austrians once and for all that socialism lacks any means of economic calculation and therefore would drift into a state of absolute material deprivation through want of knowing how to efficiently allocate resources. To the contrary, a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind provides precisely the means with which to identify the relative scarcities of different inputs in terms of such things as stock levels and technical ratios and to allocate them accordingly. Classic central planning, on the other hand, lacks this self regulating or self adjusting mechanism.

Your point about economic depression and the "self regulation" of the market is based on a misunderstanding. The fact that the state may get involved in reformist attempts to mitigate the consequences of recession does in no way signifiy that we are talking about a centrally planned economy in the classic sense. As I suggested to Lowtech, you have to analytically separate that concept from the notion of "centralisation". Certainly you can have degrees of centralisation - I dont deny that. I simply deny that total central planning in the sense I have outlined is remotely possibe. Like some others on this thread, when you are using the term "central planning" you clearky mean by this something quite different to what I mean so to an extent we are perhaps talking at cross purposes

I dont know if what you are saying here has a Keynesian subtext to it - that state involvement in the form of "macro economic planning" and "deficit spending" is the way to combat recession and prevent capitalism from sliding into a recession but if that is your point then I think you will find that Keynesian reformism has proven to be a more or less complete failure on that score. Keynes was the man who said Marx's ideas were irrelevant. History has demonstrated the converse to be the case

As to your various questions concerning the mechaniscs of a decentralised non-market economy, I think you are still reading into it a central planning perspective

For example you say

"Who will co-ordinate the stock control statistics and how will this be conducted among various producers of the same good or product that is being over or under-produced at any given point and time? "

Well, the stock control statistics will collected and maintained by the production unit or distribution centre in question. Who else is better placed to do that? Actually its much like what happens today. A supermarket monitors its stock levels and takes note of any changes in these levels. When the stock level of a good declines beyond a certain threshold this automatically triggers a fresh order to the suppliers - the wholesaler, perhaps The wholesalers in turn may request more stock from the relevant factory should its stock levels fall beyond a certain threshold and so on and so forth. No one is dictating or predetermining from above in godlike fashion all this complex movement of finished goods and inputs. It happens naturally and spontaneously in response to changing circumstances

All this information about stock levels can be fed into distributed computer data base systems so any one can have access to data concerning the state of stock levels and anywhere in a socialist economy. The big difference is, of course, that money does not enter into the equation at all at any point

Nevertheless and this is the point that i want to emphasise again and again - this mechanism of a self regulating decentralised system of socialist/communist production already exists within the very shell of capitalism today. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We need simply to take it over and use it for the benefit of humanity as a whole and not for benefit of a small parasitic class of capitalists

robbo203

14th August 2012, 00:03

If the context of this discussion doesnt make sense to you, how can you contribute anything meaningful to it?

you're making many assumptions I will list here...

1- planning is a fairly static set of policies that is centrally dictated without the dynamic response needed to manage resources

-this was true in the historical context because they didnt have real time communication or computing machines to track activities or for resource accounting which is nolonger an issue today. Planning in a communistic sense is simply logistics, period. I'm sure there's another forum section available if you wish to discuss historical topics.

2 - planning means a totalitarian policy machine that ignores the actual function of an economy

-this assumption is aligned with capitalist misconception regarding marxian economics. A market-less economy does not need to be totalitarian, nor is it included in the communist model

3 - a market is necissary because of the sheer amount of information needed to be processed to manage an economy in a "planned" fashion

-more capitalist misconception. decentralization is not the cure to this "problem," it is the cause. a nervous system is not decentralized. If you want something to work cohesively, you cannot break it down into many individuals acting irraticaly. that notion only works in the mind of someone that believes in the capitalist's "invisible hand" garbage

Resource managment happens all the time even on global scales, saying it doesn't isn't debating with me, its the attempt to debate with reality

Ive tried to decipher what you are trying to say here but again it makes no sense to me whatosever. I cannot relate any of your criticisms to what I have been actually saying

You are employing weasel words which signifiy sod all. Take your last para

" Resource managment happens all the time even on global scales, saying it doesn't isn't debating with me, its the attempt to debate with reality"

Now perhaps it is conceivable that a particular resource somewhere is somehow being managed on a global scale - that is to say, by a single global planning entity. I cannot personally imagine what pasticular resource you have in mind - can you give even a single example, perhaps - but am content to let you delve the depths of that pervid imagination of yours to concoct some kind of answer to the question Nevertheless even if you could come upwith an answer you would be nowhere near to proving your point - which seems to be , as I can tell, that central planning is a reality today. Central planning in the sense of society-wide planning means ALL resoruces - I repeat, ALL resoices, - are allocated in a aproriri fashion by one single planning entity. You cannot surely be serous about suggesting that this is a reality. If so I would be extremely concerned about your state of mind if you really did think that

Do you understand what Im getting at all - what I am actually talking when I refer to the classical defintion of central planning? I seriously wonder...

Your metaphor of the nervous system is utterly naff if I might say so and you need to be wary of the injudicious use of organismic metaphors to society as a whole which is not an organism at all. That apart, it reveals yet another misunderstanding on your part. Things can be linked or connected without them being centrally directed. The decisions that capitalist enterprises make for example, may have practical repercusions that go way beyond just the enterprise in question . A decision to switch products for instance has definite implications for other enterrpises further down the production chain but I dont think even you would argue in this case that this is an example of central planning. The fact that the different parts of society's system of production are interrelated or interlinked in a practical sense is NOT the same thing as saying these different parts are all centrally directed

The third assumption which you say I was making is just so obviously ridiculous it hardly warrants spending much time rebutting it - namely:

" a market is necissary because of the sheer amount of information needed to be processed to manage an economy in a "planned" fashion

I dont assume anything of the sort. Where did you get such a dotty idea from? I thought I had made it abundantly clear that the whole thrust of my argument is that a decentralised system of production is entirely possible without the market

The_Red_Spark

14th August 2012, 03:01

Red_Spark;

Your point about economic depression and the "self regulation" of the market is based on a misunderstanding. The fact that the state may get involved in reformist attempts to mitigate the consequences of recession does in no way signifiy that we are talking about a centrally planned economy in the classic sense. As I suggested to Lowtech, you have to analytically separate that concept from the notion of "centralisation". Certainly you can have degrees of centralisation - I dont deny that. I simply deny that total central planning in the sense I have outlined is remotely possibe. Like some others on this thread, when you are using the term "central planning" you clearky mean by this something quite different to what I mean so to an extent we are perhaps talking at cross purposes
I think you missed the point I was attempting to make here. I was referring to how if the market was left to it's own device, as suggested by Libertarian Austrian School types, it would have eliminated the banks that bankrupted themselves and the world economy would have been thrown into total chaos. The market did not get the chance to self regulate because it was necessary to prevent a total implosion on a global scale through Keynesian policy. All of this happened here in the USA due to deregulation in the financial sector, or an absence of oversight from above.

I dont know if what you are saying here has a Keynesian subtext to it - that state involvement in the form of "macro economic planning" and "deficit spending" is the way to combat recession and prevent capitalism from sliding into a recession but if that is your point then I think you will find that Keynesian reformism has proven to be a more or less complete failure on that score. Keynes was the man who said Marx's ideas were irrelevant. History has demonstrated the converse to be the case
Here you are reading into what I am saying too much. I was using it in a capitalist economic model context and was not placing any value or professing any preference on Keynesian economics or policies. I was simply using a contemporary example of how a market that was deregulated and left to self regulate itself nearly imploded the world economy and how a intervention from above was needed to prevent total disaster. You could make a case that it(intervention) was late but I think it is foolish to consider the alternative a feasible option(by this I mean allow the market to correct itself). Greenspan made his 'fatal flaw' comment regarding his belief that markets will regulate themselves if left alone or self regulate. He changed his mind after the building bubble fiasco due to this 'fatal flaw'. Again this applies to contemporary conditions but my only point here was that this is the only area that applies to a cash flow nexus.

The rest of my post was on resources and other pieces that came about due to a highly decentralized area of the economy, e.g. the housing market. That was the real kernel of what I was trying to demonstrate in my post. The Keynesian stuff was in regard to the Libertarian types like Ron Paul fans. Had the building boom been centrally planned even to a tenth of a degree it would not have had such a chaotic and destructive impact which is still in the process of developing. If you are wondering what I am getting at go back and read the last post(after the questions but before the last paragraph). I am short on time at the moment.

As to your various questions concerning the mechaniscs of a decentralised non-market economy, I think you are still reading into it a central planning perspective
No, I think you saw the angle I was coming from on this point, came to the same conclusions in a way, and see that much of this needs to have or would benefit from a concerted effort or far more extensive central planning. I am not a believer in a God in the sky but that doesn't mean I don't believe a larger degree of centralized planning isn't necessary or that it is impossible either. I don't think debating on drastic and extreme ideas of absolute central planning is addressing my post or position here at all. My position is far more moderate than every last resource on earth but is very much against decentralization.

I do want to thank you for reading my rather long post and for taking the time to reply to it. I do appreciate it. I don't have time tonight to post a long and well formulated piece on your take on Marx and central planning that was a few posts back but I plan to address that tomorrow. I look forward to continuing this discussion tomorrow comrade. Cheers

Lowtech

14th August 2012, 03:29

you would be nowhere near to proving your point - which seems to be , as I can tell, that central planning is a reality today. Central planning in the sense of society-wide planning means ALL resoruces - I repeat, ALL resoices, - are allocated in a aproriri fashion by one single planning entity. You cannot surely be serous about suggesting that this is a reality.

its very obvious that i and others have not referred to planning as a static plan conceived before making necessary observations of the current state of the society.

no matter if that is the "classical" definition of planning or not, again, you are asserting a historical context upon this discussion which no longer applies, this is 2012 not 1860

i appreciate all the insults, minus those your posts have little left to say.

society is a social matter, however social constructs and economics are separate; combining the two is what created our current state of economic inequality in the first place. therefore, we should look to the natural world for answers to a problem created by social bias. the assertion that economics and organic processes are completely separate things is not much more than a superficial contrast. economics is bound by natural laws, biological behavior in nature adheres to those natural laws much more closely than anything humans have yet to invent; nature has had millions of years to put into practice and test what we have only begun to discuss let alone refine. ponder that before telling me its silly to look to nature for solutions to human problems.

with that said, i wanted to say i agree that a decentralized economy does not have to be a market. however debating the semantics of the term "central planning" will not get us anywhere

the reason i define central planning as logistics is not only that it is accurate but also because, regardless of classical central planning's historical limitations, we need to eliminate the misconception that the communist model entails, as you eloquently described, allocation in "a aproriri fashion by one single planning entity"

rather, communist "planning" entails logistics or resource management; the term itself is not limited to any historical context.

and with that, i will leave you to debate history with historians

robbo203

14th August 2012, 09:02

I
No, I think you saw the angle I was coming from on this point, came to the same conclusions in a way, and see that much of this needs to have or would benefit from a concerted effort or far more extensive central planning. I am not a believer in a God in the sky but that doesn't mean I don't believe a larger degree of centralized planning isn't necessary or that it is impossible either. I don't think debating on drastic and extreme ideas of absolute central planning is addressing my post or position here at all. My position is far more moderate than every last resource on earth but is very much against decentralization.

As Ive said before , society-wide central planning entailing one single vast plan, is a specific construction - an abstraction - that emerged from the economic calculation debate commencing in the 1920s. It is a completely unrealistic proposal but then, as Ive said, no one seriously puts forward such a proposal. Almost everyone who claims to support "central planning" means by that something quite different to society-wide central planning. They envisage, perhaps as you do, merely a "larger degree of centralised planning"

But a "larger degree of centralised planning" still means that the overall configuration of the economy is essentially unplanned. It still presupposes, in other words, a polycentric system of planning. This is what I am trying to get people here to understand and seemingly having great difficulty in doing so.

There seems to be an ingrained resistance to the idea of decentralisation as though even to talk about a decentralised economy is to imply a market. What I have attempted to show is that this is a completely bogus idea

Paul Cockshott

14th August 2012, 10:34

Paul - you're making the same difference I initially made in advocating labour vouchers. Even though you're disaggregating the price relation by moving from money to labour vouchers, you're still presenting the labour vouchers in a value form. The differential value of the labour vouchers you present mean that labour vouchers still have accumulation properties - even if they are socailly non-transferrable, i'm sure human ingenuity will find some way of accumulating a greater number of vouchers.

I dont see how this is going to be done with electronic non transferable accounts

Rather, if you are going to press ahead with the idea of labour vouchers, you need to present them as the 'validation' of completion of a minimum necessary amount of labour time completed. I.e., you have a threshold below which productivity is unacceptable. If worker A's productivity is below the threshold level, they are entitled to 0 labour vouchers and may only access basic goods for that month (let us say labour vouchers are 'earned' monthly). If worker A's productivity is at or above the threshold level, they are entitled to their labour voucher, which essentially allows them access to all the goods produced, for the following month.

The labour voucher entitlement can be peer assessed by a demarchic workers' workplace council to ensure:

a) the voucher is non-transferrable
b) the threshold level is not corrupted by bureaucracy, 'friends' etc.
The threshold idea is too crude. Suppose I only want to work 20 hours a week, and the social threshold to provide public services etc is 15 hours, but Susan is willing to work 30 hours a week, then why should I be able to withdraw as much from communal stores as somebody who has done more work than me?
The fair rule would be to allow me to withdraw goods containing 5 hours for personal use (20-15)and allow her to withdraw goods containing 15 hours (30 -15).

The_Red_Spark

14th August 2012, 15:32

As Ive said before , society-wide central planning entailing one single vast plan, is a specific construction - an abstraction - that emerged from the economic calculation debate commencing in the 1920s. It is a completely unrealistic proposal but then, as Ive said, no one seriously puts forward such a proposal. Almost everyone who claims to support "central planning" means by that something quite different to society-wide central planning. They envisage, perhaps as you do, merely a "larger degree of centralised planning"

But a "larger degree of centralised planning" still means that the overall configuration of the economy is essentially unplanned. It still presupposes, in other words, a polycentric system of planning. This is what I am trying to get people here to understand and seemingly having great difficulty in doing so.

There seems to be an ingrained resistance to the idea of decentralisation as though even to talk about a decentralised economy is to imply a market. What I have attempted to show is that this is a completely bogus idea
Maybe you should explain that by using the term 'decentralized' you are meaning it as polycentric. Using the term decentralized makes me think of moving away, or taking the economy in the opposite direction from the existing levels of central planning. In other words moving the hands on the clock of history backwards. It may be the reason you are having trouble or finding so much resistance here. This is assuming that I am beginning to understand your case.

I do not think you will find as much resistance if you dropped the word decentralized or made it clear that what you mean is a more moderate form of central planning based around polycentric planning. I am a firm believer that communication and communicating an idea to another is a very difficult task and is completely based on the perceptions of the individuals involved.

So with that out of the way, how would a polycentric planning model operate differently than the existing capitalist model? Of course there will be a lack of capital accumulation but how will it look and progress? Would it be more like China of today? I think the easiest way to explain that is to take a branch of industry and outline the process etc.

RedMaterialist

14th August 2012, 23:37

There is a significant difference. With money, the underlying social relation that price is the monetary expression of labour is hidden. In terms of price you are 'worth' whatever you can get somebody to pay you. Labour accounts unveil the basic social relation that is hidden by money. As Marx points out the law of large numbers operates in such a way as to ensure that once you have about 10 people randomly chosen working on a task using the same technology, then the social labour will be equivalent to 10 person days. If you have just two people there may be significant differences in how long they take to complete a task. Two groups of 10 people will have far less difference in how long it takes them.

Thus provided you have work groups of reasonable size, the total social labour performed by that group will be equal to the days worked times the number of people. That group of 10 workers may agree among themselves that Susan is a harder worker than Sam, and puts in 20% more effort, and may credit her with more than Sam, but they have to make the total add up to 350 hours assuming a 35 hour week.

Ok. So Susan gets 1.20 labor credits (or vouchers, etc.) per hour of work, Joe gets 1.0, and Sam gets .80. The three of them produced 3 hrs of work. So Susan goes to the commodity store and can buy 1.2 credits of commodities. However Jane, from another factory, has a certificate worth 3.0 credits. Susan wants to know why she has fewer credits than Jane. What then?

As you say, price is the monetary expression of labor, but further, the relationship of price, money, and labor is a hidden relationship, i.e., it is a kind of fetishistic relationship.

However, I think the average working person would say that the relationship between their wages (the money-price of their labor) and the labor is quite clear. They work for 40 hrs at $10 per hour. The pay for their work is $400. They are paid $10 per hour because that is the value of what has gone into the production of them as workers, as commodities.

The problem is that, as I understand Marx, the workers are actually producing $800 of value, but they can't actually see they are being shortchanged. (Although once the process is explained to them, they understand it pretty quickly. Also, the average worker would have no trouble explaining that he or she produces far more value than what is paid in wages.)

This reminds me of a story I read about a Venezuelan factory owned and run by the factory workers. They made the decisions about the big issues and hired managers to run the day to day operations, always subject to the workers' control. But they also paid themselves in Venezuelan bolivars, I think. They used the wages to buy things in the local markets, etc.

This seems to me to be a perfect example of the Marxist transition from capitalism to socialism: worker control of a factory, but retention of some of the characteristics of capitalism, payment for labor in wages.

RedMaterialist

15th August 2012, 00:16

This is not central planniing at all - not in its classical sense of society wide planning. at any rate. It is nowhere even near that. It doesnt matter if Microsoft controlled 100% of the computer operating systems market. It would still not be society wide planning

Allright, call it world-wide planning.

I think it is absolutely crucial to grasp what is meant by society-wide central planning. It means one single unimaginably vast plan encompassing, and specifying in advance the production targets for, literally everything - from computer operating systems to ballpoint pens , from cherry tomatoes to widgets and JCBs. Absurd? Of course its absurd.

Absurd? It happens everyday. It's called WalMart, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Apple, GM, etc. etc.

And I dont think Ive met anyone yet willing to put their head on the block and defend such a daft idea. It is merely a hypothetical "ideal type" which can only at best be approximated in reality -

I not only defend it, I say I look at it every day. Why let gigantic global corporate behemoths control life on this planet? Sometimes an approximation is the best you can get.

The crucial point to take away from all this is that if central planning in its cassical sense is an impossibiliyy

I doubt there is such a thing as classical central planning. But, I would say we are in a world wide, globally controlled neo-classical society wide planning economy anyway.

,
in the way in which production units and distribution centres mutually adjust themselves towards one other in the process of planning

...and this planning is neighborhood wide, block wide, village wide, town wide, but not society wide planning?

Monopoly capitalism is like a gigantic river that floods every 7-10 yrs. Nobody can figure out what to do about it. Some people want to pray to the river god and sacrifice small children. Some people say that you have to build a system of levees around each small town on the river. The river priests say this is unnatural.

A really radical idea is to actually take control of the river, build a complex set of levees, damns, floodways and early warning systems of possible floods. This is what Marx meant when he said that economic forces are like forces of nature and which must be controlled by human beings, i.e. controlled socially, along the entire 1500 mile length of the river if necessary.

Lowtech

15th August 2012, 03:02

Absurd? It happens everyday. It's called WalMart, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Apple, GM, etc. etc.

i absolutely agree. as long as some comedian babbles on about communism = society wide planning = absurd, we can't actually get to business discussing market-less economies and how they work compared to our current model

Honestly, I often wonder if forum members among us aren't as left or marxist minded as they say they are while they defend or perpetuate capitalist contentions

RedMaterialist

15th August 2012, 06:18

i absolutely agree. as long as some comedian babbles on about communism = society wide planning = absurd, we can't actually get to business discussing market-less economies and how they work compared to our current model

Honestly, I often wonder if forum members among us aren't as left or marxist minded as they say they are while they defend or perpetuate capitalist contentions

Marx talked somewhere (i'll try to find the quote) about socialists who want the benefits of socialism without the necessity of first destroying capitalism, or something like that. I think the idea of trying to return to an economy of small independently planned enterprises cannot possibly work, at least not now. It would be like having Mom and Pop stores on every corner again. It sounds like Mayberry, N.C., with sheriff andy taylor.

Lowtech

15th August 2012, 06:28

the only situation that a planned economy may have an issue with resource accounting would be if one assumed it needed to emulate our current commercialized economy. which is a false assumption.

currently, our economy produces a lot of noise, in that there is a continuous strong push to stimulate "demand" for exchange-value based commodities in the form of commercialism and that people are completely confused as to what they want, need and should and shouldn't have, out of complete conditioning to the dependence on a market; this noise is easily misconceived as the "uncertainty principle" of economics, used to undermine the preference for a planned or resource managed economy --an artificial conundrum.

however a market-less economy does not suffer from such noise. as a market-less economy serves to simplify which is the essence of logistics.

although it is natural for the human individual to be indecisive, need as a whole, spanning billions of people, follows very logical terms. the economy does not need to compensate for the indecisiveness of the individual, instead it simply needs to provide enough choices that the individual may deal with the uncertainty of "want" himself.

in our current market economy, the indecisiveness or erratic "wants" of individuals is allowed to interfere with logistical resource management causing more of the noise mentioned above.

not to suggest that "wants" are to be eliminated, rather i am saying that wants should not dictate moving trillions of units of a resource to one area instead of another if one thing is more popular than another. we need to prioritize the management of resources based on need and resources available first, preference second.

the way "wants" are addressed currently is completely illogical anyway. instead of making chairs customizable or providing the pieces so you may build a chair to your liking, companies choose on their own a few designs of chairs to mass produce and put them on a shelf for people to pick and choose from. its resource allocation based on people maybe wanting a chair of a specific weight, color and design, very archaic and silly form of "resource allocation"

robbo203

15th August 2012, 11:49

Allright, call it world-wide planning.

Absurd? It happens everyday. It's called WalMart, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Apple, GM, etc. etc.

I not only defend it, I say I look at it every day. Why let gigantic global corporate behemoths control life on this planet? Sometimes an approximation is the best you can get.

Im sorry but, as I suspected, you have clearly not undertood what is meant by "society wide planning" in this context. You've got it completely wrong in fact.

It is NOT to do with the scale of operations of those corporate behemoths you refer to - such as Walmart, Microst , Apple etc. Yes, these are global players that have a global - or what you might call, society-wide - perspective on their operations but this has got nothing to do with the concept of society wide planning in the classical sense of "central planning".

Afterall, each of these entities formulates its own plans more or less independently of the others and no doubt within each of these entities there are relative degrees of autonomy at different levels of decisionmaking as well as between the different countries in which they are located. And of course, outside of this select circle of mega corporations there are millions upon millions of other planning entities, right down to the self employed plumber touting for business in the housing estates. In short what we have is a stupendously complex system of polycentric planning.

Now, what society wide planning literally entails is to do away with this whole system of polycentric planning ive just outlined. So your wouldnt have your Walmarts, your Microsofts and your Apples etc etc. Nor would you have your little independent plumber planning his or her workschedule for the next month or so. What you would have instead is just one single planning entity in which all such planning is vested - an entity that literally plans for everything within the framework of a single giant plan. THIS is what undestood by classical central planning, not what you understand by the term

Of course it is absurd as I said. In denying that it is absurd you have clearly not understood what is being proposed at all, Im afraid.

My point is simply that central planning in this classical sense of literal society-wide planning is a pure abstraction, an ideal type. No one seriously advocates it that I know of. It is of no practical use, in and of itself, since there is no way in which any society, let along a complex modern society , could be organised along these lines.

Nevertheless, the concept is a useful one. Its usefulness is of a heuristic nature in forcing us to see what follows from recognising it is completely impracticable. This is what Ive been trying to say all along but obviously not expressing myself clearly enough. If society wide planning is a literal impossibility in this sense then that means we are bound to accept that any kind of realistic proposal for the future has to be based on the concept of polycentric planning - meaning "many planning centres" or entities. That, in turn, entails something else. Insofar as you have a multiplicity of planning entities this can only mean that the relationship between these planning entities is something that is spontaneous or unplanned. Once you start planning the relationship between these separate planning entitities in an apriori sense, they cease to exist as separate planning entities and you are back to central planning

This is crucial to understand . It is only in a posteriori sense that these different planning entities can relate to each other - that is by adjusting their own plans in the light of plans made by other entities. So the increased demand for a certain product expresses itself as a request for more of that product which is transmitted to the factory producing that product , which factory then adjusts its own scheules to meet that request. This is what is meant by a "self regulating system". There is nothing complex or esoteric about the term and it is most important to understand that it has nothing essentially to do with a market economy as such . It can just as easily apply to a completely non-market economy

My argument is quite simply that such a method or procedure already exists within the shell of capitalist production - a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind. We do not need to reinvent the wheel here. In point of fact, capitalism completely depends on such a system as would any alternative to capitalism - without stock control how can you possibly organise the physical prpduction and distribution of goods? Of course, capitalism depends on other things as well (which make capitalism, capitalism) but these things e.g. monetary calculation - we would and can dispense with completely in establishing a future socialist society

ckaihatsu

15th August 2012, 14:00

Certainly there is. There is no reason why a planned economy can not use a market in consumer goods to guide the plan targets for output in terms of quantity and quality.

My concern / question here is what the underlying basis of valuation could possibly be.

What, exactly, constitutes the 'market' in a *non-market* planned economy -- ?? This is simply circular reasoning without providing a standard for how consumption is to be determined.

Ok let us assume that every person fit enough to work and not currently on parental leave works say 30 hours a week. 10 of those hours are worked for the benefit of the community to contribute towards schools, health clinics, support of the elderly etc. If they have 20 hours work done for their own benefit then they have a social credit at the end of the week of 20 hours. With this they can go to cooperative stores and get consumer goods that took 20 hours in total to make.

The cooperative stores cancel out the credits and keep records of what is sold placing replacement orders for the goods distributed.

The total consumption figures for each type of good are then used to set the plan targets for the consumer goods sector.

It may be the case that certain goods are temporarily in shortage or have been oversupplied. This could happen for several reasons.

There may be a bad harvest meaning that certain types of food are in short supply. When this occurs the same amount of agricultural labour will have resulted in less corn or soy having been harvested, so the marked labour value of all foods containing these will have to rise. Similarly if unseasonable frosts harm the orange crop, the labour required to produce an orange will rise.
This means that the labour content, which is the true social standard of value, changes with climate and weather conditions and thus the number of oranges that a worker can obtain in the cooperatives for an hour of her labour goes down.

Another reason might be that there has been a new invention - say for the sake of argument 3D holographic TV. Now the technology to make these may have been solved, but it is unclear whether people will really want holographic TV. You could do consumer surveys and have people vote on it, but people dont want to have to waste time filling in such surveys so you will get a poor response.
Instead the plan is likely to allocate an initial trial production run, setting up a factory and supply chain to make them. But it would be risky to set divert a lot of people into their production if you dont know if people will really want them.

So the initial rate of production will not be enough for everyone to buy one. Two things can happen:
1. Once the new goods appear, people decide that they are not such a good idea after all and they remain unsold at their true labour content.

2. Lots of people want them and the cooperatives sell out as soon as new delivery comes in - this was a familiar occurence apparently for some goods in the USSR.

In the first case the cooperative retail organisation should discount the goods to ensure that they do at least sell and get used until the plan can be adjusted to produce less, or withdraw the line from production.

In the second case it may be a good idea to mark the price up, showing the true labour content and the temporary premium to prevent queues forming until new factories making holovision sets can come on stream.

The net effect of the two mechanisms should be for the cooperative stores to break even with the discounted goods and the innovation premium goods cancelling.

I'll maintain that we should 'fast-forward' as quickly as possible to a political economy that *disassociates* (liberated) labor from the material quantities it uses and produces. (See post #14.) Even though production can be boiled down to the sum of labor that produces it, the ongoing matching of discrete amounts of cascading past and present labor inputs, to resulting material interweavings and outputs, is too unwieldy and complicated, regardless of the mode of production.

I think some comrades are doing more of a *disservice* to socialism by concentrating on the description of *incremental* transitional steps that might very well be *bypassed*, given sufficient revolutionary momentum.

In attempting to move past the market mechanism of valuation, yet falling short of a full communization of all assets and resources, one gets trapped in the unnecessary complications of trying to match labor values to material values.

For example, you're noting that various types of labor have varying levels of productivity, as with labor for harvesting corn or soy during normal conditions vs. that required for a (*lesser*) output during harsher weather conditions -- but, when it comes to *consumption* this differential *isn't* accounted-for -- instead there's a less-precise system that only recognizes *arbitrarily*-set quantities for socially necessary labor and an additional 'personal surplus' that enables the laborer to access more-discretionary goods and services. This method of valuation for labor inputs is *very* similar to The Boss' proposal of a simple two-step *threshold* for determining the same.

I appreciate that the *political* component could serve as the in-between, to adjust the threshold on-the-fly, according to fluctuating material conditions, but then this only begs the question: Should we focus more on the political *planning* process for determining production, or should we be more guided by the *consumption* side of things, as the more-market-sided dynamic would suggest -- ?

Again, I'm seeing an awkward 'no-mans-land' area here that attempts to reconcile administrative planning with market-type labor-time-based valuations for material items. I think this would be as irreconcilable as the entire current market system is to the post-commodity mode of production -- we shouldn't be the ones at the service of trying to sell this compromise.

ckaihatsu

15th August 2012, 14:50

I finally caught up on all the posts I missed from the last week -- in going over the centralization vs. decentralization exchanges I'm noticing that there's something missing, which I'll address....

The current 'hands-off' approach to economic matters is also "hands-off" for *political* matters, as well, by association. Without any material basis separate from "the invisible hand" for guiding society's (and humanity's) overall direction, *all* political policy is predicated -- and ultimately subservient to -- the fulfillment of profit. In matters of state this leads inexorably to imperialism and the conquest of markets.

A break from this would require a *political* coordination that *takes the place* of a steerless rudder. It would be insufficient to have political discussions at geographical levels that *couldn't* be discussed and resolved at more-generalized levels, and finally at the most-general, *global* level. Any possible dispute over political / economic policy would *necessitate* a resolution at a more-generalized scale, which would require a politics-in-common over that larger scale as well.

I think the logistics of day-to-day production would be the *least* of our worries here, since a coherent societal / humanity plan for a liberated global way forward would be of far more importance, and would provide motivation at all smaller scales for the resolving of logistical matters.

Lowtech

15th August 2012, 16:27

Im sorry but, as I suspected, you have clearly not undertood what is meant by semantics

This is crucial to understand condescension

My argument is quite simply that such a method or procedure already exists within the shell of capitalist production - a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind.
Right, the contention that an invisible hand regulates our wonderful capitalism

We do not need to reinvent the wheel here.
Our economic system doesn't need to be reinvented? Are you SERIOUSLY preaching that HERE??

You sound dangerously like those that contend "communism doesn't propose a new system, it just tears down old ones"

In point of fact, capitalism completely depends on such a system as would any alternative to capitalism - without stock control how can you possibly organise the physical prpduction and distribution of goods? Of course, capitalism depends on other things as well (which make capitalism, capitalism) but these things e.g. monetary calculation - we would and can dispense with completely in establishing a future socialist society

The only functionality capitalism has is the little communism allowed to accur....you blatantly contend the reverse; that communism doesn't work unless it is more capitalism-like

That is what is absurd

robbo203

15th August 2012, 19:37

semantics
condescension

Right, the contention that an invisible hand regulates our wonderful capitalism

Our economic system doesn't need to be reinvented? Are you SERIOUSLY preaching that HERE??

You sound dangerously like those that contend "communism doesn't propose a new system, it just tears down old ones"

The only functionality capitalism has is the little communism allowed to accur....you blatantly contend the reverse; that communism doesn't work unless it is more capitalism-like

That is what is absurd

Sorry but this is ridiculous. Laughably ridiculous. You dont seem to have a clue , friend

Lets start with your crass comment that is "just semantics". Its not just semantics actually. There are some pretty important logical inferences to be drawn from this discussion on central planning if you cared to look at the question more closely.

Now I have described to you -or rather to Redshifted - what central planning in the classical sense of society wide planning entails. So here's my question to you. Do you accept my assertion that such a system is completely inpracticable? Yes or no? if yes, do you accept my inference that follows logically from that that this necessarily means any kind of realistic model of production has to be based on a system of polycentric planning (many planning entities as opposed to just one)

And please - do not tell that what you mean by central planning bears no relation to the above description of central planning as society wide planning. I have already said - several times in fact - that when people generally advocate "central planining" they mean by that something quite different. However Ive also said this classic definition of central planning as involving one single plan for the whole of society does have a heuristic value even if the concept itself is totally impracticable. By that I mean it draws our attention as to why we need a polycentric system and what this actually entails - a process of spontaneous mutual adjustment of the different planning entities to each other's plans

Now you have already said , in an earlier post that you "agree that a decentralized economy does not have to be a market", I find it completely baffling therefore that you should deciude to pooh pooh the idea of self regulating system of stock control . How in your opinion - assuming you have even considered the matter - would a decentralised nonmarket economy work if it did NOT involve a self regulating system of stock control. ???? What other mechanism could it use that would replace the need for a self regulating system of stock control? Lets have some specifics from you - not just this constant stream of negative sneering

Incidentally, when I said we did not need to "reinvent the wheel here" I did NOT mean by that, as well you know, that we do not need a new system to replace capitalism and its is disingenuous on your part to suggest that I did. The reference to the "wheel" was precisely an allusion to the self regulating mechanism of stock control. Thats is not an "economic system" in case you didn't understand this. It is simply an institutional tool or procedure , albeit a vitally important one.

In your rush to blindly condemn without thought of what it is you are condemning, you assert: "The only functionality capitalism has is the little communism allowed to accur....you blatantly contend the reverse; that communism doesn't work unless it is more capitalism-like" If you stopped for a moment in your breathless pursuit of point scoring and calmy considered what you are saying you would see just what a load of tripe this is

What you are implying here is that a self regulating system of stock control is a capitalist mechanism and therefore cannot be used in a communist society or any other kind of society for that matter. This is ridiculous. Again I put it to you - how would a decentralised non-market society - which you have agreed can exist - mesh supply and demand if not by means of such mechanism? What other mechanism do you have in mind? Lets hear form you specifically on this point

Saying that capitalism depends on such a self regulating mechanism of stock control is emphatically NOT saying that such a mechanism is a "capitalist mechanism". Every conceivable kind of society imaginable would equally depend on such a mechanism as well. The necessity for such a mechanism stems from the very practical exigencies of organising the production and distribution of wealth. How else do you distribute wealth without knowing what there is to distribute, for example? How else do you organise the production of a good without knowing the stock levels of inputs which will will very much affect how much of that particular good you can produce and so on and so forth?

In your kneejerk rejection of what I have written, you make certain assumptions which are truly astonishing. What is is that makes a self regulating system of stock control "capitalism like" and a communist society "capitalism like" for adopting such a system? You leave us with no clue as to how you arrived at this astounding conclusion.

Its like arguing that the factories and farms that produce many of things we need today under capitalism will have to be abandoned and shunned come a communist society because they are clearly "capitalism-like" operating as they do under a system of capitalism today. I guess that means we shall just have to forsake manufactured products and food under a communist society becuase the means of producing them have been developed under capitalism

Actually, the fact that capitalism relies completely on something that does not pertain to capitalism as such but is a functional necessity under any system, is a rather comforting thought. It demonstrates that a communist society need not be such a remote and impossibly distant prospect that some people like to pretend it is and that we have the means of make it a reality today which means exist under our very noses if we could only but see their potential application in a communist society

robbo203

15th August 2012, 20:11

i absolutely agree. as long as some comedian babbles on about communism = society wide planning = absurd, we can't actually get to business discussing market-less economies and how they work compared to our current model

Honestly, I often wonder if forum members among us aren't as left or marxist minded as they say they are while they defend or perpetuate capitalist contentions

Just spotted this peice of crass idiocy above . To the comedian who authored it, let me clarify my position in no uncertain terms:

Communsim does NOT entail society wide planing in myview and it is only by claiming that it does entail such a thing that communism would appear "absurd"

This same rather confused individual has admitted "i agree that a decentralized economy does not have to be a market" However when I say a decentralised non-market is possible I am perpetuating ...ahem.. a "capitalist contention".:rolleyes:

You just can't win with some people....

Paul Cockshott

15th August 2012, 22:24

blake 3:17

15th August 2012, 23:41

Thanks all for the excellent discussion.

I'm having trouble seeing what particular advantage labour credits have over money, or at least some kind of exchange currency used by all. Or am I missing something? The way people are discussing it seems like we're talking about fairly atomized individuals

I think we may also be having some difficulties communicating around questions of subsistence and reproduction. How do people envisage the allocation of housing, food and clothing? Should people be paid more based on their number of dependents? What about rewarding production and labour practices which are socially healthy, which in many cases may mean people working less?

@r203
Yes or no? if yes, do you accept my inference that follows logically from that that this necessarily means any kind of realistic model of production has to be based on a system of polycentric planning (many planning entities as opposed to just one)

Unless I'm totally mistaken, I don't think anyone on this thread would dispute the need for multiple planning entities. There might be some confusion over "polycentrism" as a term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentrism

What I thought you meant was more like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentricity

National and regional consciousnesses will remain significant and one of the worst mistakes we could make in creating a planned socialist economy would be in destroying local knowledges.

robbo203

16th August 2012, 01:03

T

Unless I'm totally mistaken, I don't think anyone on this thread would dispute the need for multiple planning entities.

Yes I wouldn't disagree with what you say here. The problem seems to arise with what logically follows on from the fact of having multiple planning entites inasmuch as some people here seem to have some difficulty in accepting the simple fact that this means that the interactions between these planning entities cannot therefore be planned in an apriori sense. That in turn necessarily calls for some kind of self regulating feedback mechanism whereby these planning entities forumulate and adjust their plans aposteriori and in the light of plans made by other planning entities.

This is the line Ive been trying to push but seemingly in the face of resistance from some here who seem to think there is something quasi-capitalist about anything to do with decentraliation or polycentric planning. That is sheer bunkum, of course, and does kind of make wonder at times whether such individuals actually dont "dispute the need for multiple planning entities" I think they dont but I think also they dont understand what that imples

blake 3:17

16th August 2012, 01:53

Yes I wouldn't disagree with what you say here. The problem seems to arise with what logically follows on from the fact of having multiple planning entites inasmuch as some people here seem to have some difficulty in accepting the simple fact that this means that the interactions between these planning entities cannot therefore be planned in an apriori sense. That in turn necessarily calls for some kind of self regulating feedback mechanism whereby these planning entities forumulate and adjust their plans aposteriori and in the light of plans made by other planning entities.

This is the line Ive been trying to push but seemingly in the face of resistance from some here who seem to think there is something quasi-capitalist about anything to do with decentraliation or polycentric planning.

The planning entities we're talking about are vague -- from what I understand of what you're saying is that they should be organized more horizontally than vertically.

I work in front line social services, and a relatively recent essentially good major policy change has created total chaos in the sector, making it very hard for workers, boards/management, and people who use the services. I think it has been really good for some people, but overall it has probably caused more problems than it has solved or eased. There's been a loss of local democracy and recognition of varying needs. Anyways...

ckaihatsu

16th August 2012, 01:56

Unless I'm totally mistaken, I don't think anyone on this thread would dispute the need for multiple planning entities.

Yes I wouldn't disagree with what you say here. The problem seems to arise with what logically follows on from the fact of having multiple planning entites inasmuch as some people here seem to have some difficulty in accepting the simple fact that this means that the interactions between these planning entities cannot therefore be planned in an apriori sense. That in turn necessarily calls for some kind of self regulating feedback mechanism whereby these planning entities forumulate and adjust their plans aposteriori and in the light of plans made by other planning entities.

This is the line Ive been trying to push but seemingly in the face of resistance from some here who seem to think there is something quasi-capitalist about anything to do with decentraliation or polycentric planning. That is sheer bunkum, of course, and does kind of make wonder at times whether such individuals actually dont "dispute the need for multiple planning entities" I think they dont but I think also they dont understand what that imples

Robbo, I don't think that decentralized *logistics* would automatically bring back capitalism, but such an implementation *does* implicitly bring forth the question of *political* (societal) planning, as a *driver* to the system of decentralized logistics.

To this point I don't think that the method of *societal* planning should be decentralized as well as its logistics, because that *would* enable political separatism and a return to market-type relations. We should be clear about making this distinction.

(An overall framework, for conceptualization purposes, would be political-principle vertical "posts" that support wooden "platforms" of politics-in-common over adjacent posts. These supported platforms undergird specific operations and their logistics, according to pre-planned arrangements.) (See attached illustrations.)

Despite neighboring areas' best intentions and purest politics there could certainly be instances of disputes arising over the best social plans for material ways forward, and the allocation of regionally limited resources. This is why we shouldn't *limit* ourselves to a concept of administrative and/or consumer planning that is circumscribed by the geography of a local planning entity. While much could very well remain on-the-ground and local in day-to-day practice, at the same time there would also have to be levels of geographic *generalization* over planning so as to resolve disputes and leverage the benefits of mass administration, economies of scale, and large-scale production.

[21] Ideologies & Operations

http://postimage.org/image/1d2pk9lok/

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

http://tinyurl.com/mtspczpcpe
http://postimage.org/image/ccfl07uy5/

robbo203

16th August 2012, 01:59

In the absence of people having to pay hours for what they personally consume you will end up with the stock control system telling you that all the better quality goods which require more labour to produce are out of stock, and the low labour cost goods are in stock. The system then tells you to produce more of the high labour input goods than you have available labour, what happens then Robbo?

Well, my view has always been that there is likely to be a spectrum in terms of the relative availability of finished goods - though Im not too sure that this will correlate precisely with product quality in the way you suggest. What I do think will happen at the production stage is that a number of different constraints will come into play which will conjointly determine the relative availability of goods for consumption.

One of these constraints will be a kind of social hierarchy of production goals / priorities. I dont necessaruly means something that is consciously articulated or democratiocally voted on; it could simp;y be the emergent outcome of the social values of a communist society that will serve as a kind rough and ready commonsensical rule of thumb that production units will use in the allocatiion of inputs thereby skewing the allocation process in favour of higher prority goods with the result that the demand for these will tend to be more easily met. There will be other constrainsts as well. For example the better quality goods you refer to may have a more a complex configuration or make use of more difficult-to-obtain materials and these supply side considerations will tend to have a sifting effect as well in terms of the relative availability of the finished goods in qurestion

In any event the outcome of these different constraints acting upon production is likely to be. as I said, a spectrum of goods differing according to their relative availability. Some, probably most, could be made available on the basis of communist free access but Im quite amenable to the idea, certainly in the early stages of a communist society, that other might have to be rationed in some way. So you will have a dual model of distribution - free access and rationing

I reject the system of rationing by labour vouchers which i think would be hugely cumbersome and prone to all sorts of difficulties. My preference would be for somethingthat Ive dubbed the "compensation model of rationing" which uses the assessed (graded) quality of housing stock as the core criterion upon which such a system of rationing would be based. I think this would be much more starightforward to administer and, as well as that, would do much more to promote social cohesion and address the problem of glaring inequalities in housing stock that we will inherit from capitalism and will probably have to contend wioth for quite a while afterwards. A not unimportant consideration since the houses that we live in constitute a pretty significant component of our quality of life.

There is much more to this "compensation model of rationing" than what Ive written here but if you PM I can provide you with a much longer peice Ive written on the subject

robbo203

16th August 2012, 02:07

The planning entities we're talking about are vague -- from what I understand of what you're saying is that they should be organized more horizontally than vertically..

Not necessarily . For example, Im quite amenable to the idea of a nested hierachy of planning levels - local regional and global (but obviously mainly local)
This is something that the SPGB has promoted in its old pamphlet "Socialism as a Practical Alternative" (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/socialism-practical-alternative)

RedMaterialist

16th August 2012, 02:48

This is crucial to understand . It is only in a posteriori sense that these different planning entities can relate to each other - that is by adjusting their own plans in the light of plans made by other entities. So the increased demand for a certain product expresses itself as a request for more of that product which is transmitted to the factory producing that product , which factory then adjusts its own scheules to meet that request. This is what is meant by a "self regulating system". There is nothing complex or esoteric about the term and it is most important to understand that it has nothing essentially to do with a market economy as such . It can just as easily apply to a completely non-market economy

My argument is quite simply that such a method or procedure already exists within the shell of capitalist production - a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind. We do not need to reinvent the wheel here. In point of fact, capitalism completely depends on such a system as would any alternative to capitalism - without stock control how can you possibly organise the physical prpduction and distribution of goods? Of course, capitalism depends on other things as well (which make capitalism, capitalism) but these things e.g. monetary calculation - we would and can dispense with completely in establishing a future socialist society

What you have just described is the "invisible hand" of the free market of Adam Smith. Going backward in history is no longer an option.

ckaihatsu

16th August 2012, 03:30

Well, my view has always been that there is likely to be a spectrum in terms of the relative availability of finished goods - though Im not too sure that this will correlate precisely with product quality in the way you suggest. What I do think will happen at the production stage is that a number of different constraints will come into play which will conjointly determine the relative availability of goods for consumption.

One of these constraints will be a kind of social hierarchy of production goals / priorities. I dont necessaruly means something that is consciously articulated or democratiocally voted on; it could simp;y be the emergent outcome of the social values of a communist society that will serve as a kind rough and ready commonsensical rule of thumb that production units will use in the allocatiion of inputs thereby skewing the allocation process in favour of higher prority goods with the result that the demand for these will tend to be more easily met. There will be other constrainsts as well. For example the better quality goods you refer to may have a more a complex configuration or make use of more difficult-to-obtain materials and these supply side considerations will tend to have a sifting effect as well in terms of the relative availability of the finished goods in qurestion

In any event the outcome of these different constraints acting upon production is likely to be. as I said, a spectrum of goods differing according to their relative availability. Some, probably most, could be made available on the basis of communist free access but Im quite amenable to the idea, certainly in the early stages of a communist society, that other might have to be rationed in some way. So you will have a dual model of distribution - free access and rationing

I like all of this, and I agree with it.

I reject the system of rationing by labour vouchers which i think would be hugely cumbersome and prone to all sorts of difficulties.

Agreed.

My preference would be for somethingthat Ive dubbed the "compensation model of rationing" which uses the assessed (graded) quality of housing stock as the core criterion upon which such a system of rationing would be based.

This, though, is off on a tangent and displaces liberated labor and its control of the means of mass production as the driver of a liberated post-capitalist productivity.

Basing a system of valuation on a single, non-productive index of measurement is just *asking* for the return of abstract valuations and political separatism.

I think this would be much more starightforward to administer and, as well as that, would do much more to promote social cohesion and address the problem of glaring inequalities in housing stock that we will inherit from capitalism and will probably have to contend wioth for quite a while afterwards. A not unimportant consideration since the houses that we live in constitute a pretty significant component of our quality of life.

There is much more to this "compensation model of rationing" than what Ive written here but if you PM I can provide you with a much longer peice Ive written on the subject

Please feel free to post a link here if you like.

robbo203

16th August 2012, 08:16

What you have just described is the "invisible hand" of the free market of Adam Smith. Going backward in history is no longer an option.

But there's not the slightest trace of the market anywhere in this scenario. There are no quid pro quo exchanges at all at any point. So how can it possibly be Adam Smith's invisible hand of the free market that is being decribed here?

Paul Cockshott

16th August 2012, 09:56

ckaihatsu

16th August 2012, 11:01

How many priorities of different kinds of goods are there - hundreds of thousands at least. How many people are going to vote on these? How much of the lifetime are they going to have to waste on attending meetings and voting? Is there even enough time in their lifetimes to do all the voting that would be required?

Here are relevant excerpts from a model I developed....

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

This is an 8-1/2" x 40" wide table that describes a communist-type political / economic model using three rows and six descriptive columns. The three rows are surplus-value-to-overhead, no surplus, and surplus-value-to-pleasure. The six columns are ownership / control, associated material values, determination of material values, material function, infrastructure / overhead, and propagation.

http://postimage.org/image/35sw8csv8/

Ownership / control

consumption [demand] -- Individuals may possess and consume as much material as they want, with the proviso that the material is being actively used in a personal capacity only -- after a certain period of disuse all personal possessions not in active use will revert to collectivized communist property

Associated material values

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

Determination of material values

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination

Material function

consumption [demand] -- All economic needs and desires are formally recorded as pre-planned consumer orders and are politically prioritized [demand]

Infrastructure / overhead

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process

Propagation

consumption [demand] -- Individuals may create templates of political priority lists for the sake of convenience, modifiable at any time until the date of activation -- regular, repeating orders can be submitted into an automated workflow for no interruption of service or orders

[17] Prioritization Chart

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

[10] Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy

http://postimage.org/image/1bxymkrno/

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

http://postimage.org/image/35sw8csv8/

robbo203

16th August 2012, 13:09

Well now we are at the nub of the matter. Since stock control feedback without labour pricing will simply tell you to make more of lots of goods, more than the available labour resources, some other decision making mechanism has to step in to decide on the priorities. Who makes the decision?
How many priorities of different kinds of goods are there - hundreds of thousands at least. How many people are going to vote on these? How much of the lifetime are they going to have to waste on attending meetings and voting? Is there even enough time in their lifetimes to do all the voting that would be required?

This is precisely what I was trying to say would not be the case. In a polycentric system of communist production it would be one of the functions of production units producing the inputs needed by other production units, to allocate those inputs in response to the demand for them in some appropriate fashion . If the supply is enough to satisfy all the demands for the input in question then you don't have a problem. If the supply falls short of the aggregate demand for them, pon the other hand, then you need to discriminate and prioritise between these end uses in some way in my opinion

How you do that is not something that you need to explicitly codify in the course of countless comittee meeting. That is a grotesque caricature. In my view, this something better left simply to the discretion of people on the ground faced with what would after all be a fairly limited number of rival demands for the input in question. For the most part I see absolutely no problem with allowing them to use their intuition to decide how the input should be allocated and in what proportions. By people on the ground I mean the people working in the production unit itself. What is the worst thing that could possibly if you allowed this to happen. Think about this for a moment in the spirit of a thought experiment

I base my confidence on the assumption that a convergent value system in a communist society will tend to result in a pattern of decision making with regard to the priorities of resource allocation that is broadly consistent across the board, It does not have to be 100% consistent only roughly so. There is no such thing as a perfect society or indeed a perfect decisionmaking process. We can allow for a certain amount of slack and what might be called "error"

Clearly a production unit anywhere in a communist society producing a given input that could be used as a component in, let us say for the sake of argument, a 1) luxury yacht or 2) medical equipment for a hospital is very likely to prioritise 2) if that input is insufficient to meet both these demands in full. You dont need a committee to tell you that , surely? The closer two competing end uses are in this hierarchy of priorities the more likely are dirvergences to arise in the allocation process but also the less serious the consequences of any such divergences from the standpoiunt of what society considers important

The reductio ad absurdum boils down to this. If a given input is short in supply in relation to the multifarious demands then by definition there is no way you can satisfy every demand fully. That is the bottom line. Inevitably it will have to allocated in some way . Naturally the self regulating system of stock control will be signaling to the producers of that input to get on with the business of stepping up the production of that input but in the meanwhile it is in short supply. How would you go about dealing with this problem in this hypothetiical sitiuation? Do you knock off an equal percentage from each request for the input in question - in effect treat each demand for it on equal terms? Or do you discriminate so that more important end uses receive priority in the allocation of the input?

Im inclined to think the latter would be the case. I am also inclicned to think that it is a matter that can best be left to those who do the allocating. If they err in that respect people will take note and communicate their concerns soon enough. In a communist society based on common ownership and cooperation, theprpducers would not have a separate interest to that of society in general . Their values will be our values and vice versa. Indeed, there will be no distinction between us amnd them. We will all be both producers and comnsumers barring of course the infirm or the very younh or very old. Since a communist society is based on free volunteer labour , people will , I suspect, be moving in and out of production units all the time, experiencing a much greater variety of work experiences than is the case today. Thus the very notion of a vested interest bound up with a particular production unit would be senseless for that reason alone

That said, there may well be occasions when the proritisation process involved in the allocation of goods might need to be formalised and take the form of a specific request to commandeer certain resources. That has to do with what I called community decisonmaking. This is where decisions are made democratically by a community concerning the provision of public goods, which decisions might then relayed to the relevant production units involved in providing the kind of resources needed. Indeed these production units may well be involved in an advisory capacity in spelling out the resource implications of a community's decision to build - let us say - some elaborate peice of infrastructure like a school or hospital

One final thought on the subject . Because a low priority end use may temporarily be denied the full amount of given input it has requested (insofar as the supply of such input is lacking overall), this does not prevent it from resorting to other methods to overcome this bottleneck such as technological substition , using more abundant alternatives instead. I think a communist system of production will be quite fluid and dynamic in that respect. And if it so happens that all too frequently not enough of a certain low priority good is produced that would satisfy the demand for it then there is nothing for it - this good would then become a serious candidate for some form of social rationing and I have already given you some indication of how such a system of rationing might be organised. I would definitely not favour a system of labour vouchers for the several reasons I offered.

Which brings me neatly to your point about labour pricing. Apart form the insurmomountable theoretical difficulties associated with this which I explained in an earlier post (about measuring "socially necessary labour time" or using past labour as a criterion) there are enormous transaction costs involved in pricing such goods - which pricing you would need to do if you wanted to implement a system of labour vouchers. And you would have to ensure that the face value of all labour vouchers issued tallied with the combined labour values established through labour pricing otherwise you could arrive at situation in which individuals could literally not but back some of the goods they had produced (given that LVs do not circulate ands are instantly redeemable) Introducing a more flexible pricing arrangement, more responsive to supply and demand, opens the door to the return of the capitalist market in my view

So I see no advantage in this arrangement you suggest at all. Your argument for labour pricing concedes too much ground to , and indeed helps to reinforce, the Austrian argument concerning the need for commensurability between production factors. For them it is money that does the trick; for you it is labour values but you are both singing from the same hymmsheet basically. My counterargument to that would be that the need for "commensurability" only arises out of the exigencies of trade and economic exchange. It is not relevant at all to the question of how to efficiently allocate resources. In fact capitalism is gross inefficient from the standpoint of meeting human needs. The entire financial sector for example contributes absolutely nothing in real terms to the enhancement of human welfare but on the contrary draws massive resources away from that objective. Yet capitalism could not function without its financial sector.

To economise wisely on resources you have to have some measure of their relative scarcity . That is what counts - not some metaphysical yardstick by which to purportedly measure chalk against cheese. I say you can obtain a reasonable idea of the relative scarcity of a resouce from 1)the relevant stock levels and 2) from the known technical ratios involved. In any given configuration of factor inputs you can, making use of such information , identify what is called a limiting factor - that factor which most restricts the output of a given good, Indeed you can even rank these inputs using this information, in their degree of restriveness from this point of view and calculate more or less precisely how much more of a given output you can produce by perhaps slightly changing the technical ratio and using more of some more relatively abundant input and less of one that is relatively scarce. Obviously this would have to commence with the limiting factor itself and changing the technical ratio might then mean that some other input becomes the limiting factor instead.

Justius von Liebig, a 19c agricultural scientist who forumulated the "law of the minimum" as this is called, postulated that nitrogen fertilser was the limiting factor in agriculture and that farm output could be increased by the introduction of artificial fertiliers to supplement organic sources of the same, In that case some other factor would become the limiting factor e,g water supply. What I am speaking of above is merely an extension of Liebig's thinking into the realm of economics generally

This is the rational and sensible way to allocate resouces effectively because it takes into account fluctuations in supply and demand generally. Labour pricing doesnt do that for me because simply looking at inputs in terms of their alleged labour input - assuming you could even do this - does not satisfactorily deal with the the wider picture of supply and demand overall. It ignores, for example, unproduced resources - raw materials Thus, you might decide to give priority to goods with a low labour content or price but which in fact use raw materials that are precariously scarce. You would have no way of knowing this from labour values alone. This would result in a misallocation of resources in that case.

You need a procedure that takes into account the relatively availability of all resoruces across the board, not just labour inputs and saying that labour inputs are implicated in making available to production every other kind of input, whist true, is rather besides the point.

I believe a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind is the way forward. It enables the efficient and rational allocation of resouces to happen that no other system, and certainly not the capitalist market, can match.

Paul Cockshott

16th August 2012, 22:43

If a given input is short in supply in relation to the multifarious demands then by definition there is no way you can satisfy every demand fully. That is the bottom line. Inevitably it will have to allocated in some way . Naturally the self regulating system of stock control will be signaling to the producers of that input to get on with the business of stepping up the production of that input but in the meanwhile it is in short supply. How would you go about dealing with this problem in this hypothetiical sitiuation? Do you knock off an equal percentage from each request for the input in question - in effect treat each demand for it on equal terms? Or do you discriminate so that more important end uses receive priority in the allocation of the input?
The problem is that in your scheme of things demand for the great bulk of products will exceed supply so this is not a matter applying to just a few products but to most.
The 'input' that will be in short supply will be labour, the majority of products will, according to your stock control rule be trying to expand their production. At first, this might be possible as the unemployed were given jobs.
But the available supply of labour will quickly be used up, indeed the aggregate labour supply will fall, as you propose that people will be paid nothing for their work. Some people will go on working because they like it, or out of a sense of duty, but another fraction of people will cut their working hours if they are not paid but can pick up whatever is available for free.

So a year or two after putting your scheme into operation we will have declining production due to labour shortages, excess demand for lots of goods, and very evident shortages in the shops, where things will vanish from the shelves almost as soon as things are delivered from the depots.

The sections of the population who want to return to the old system will then be making hay with propaganda against the economic incompetence of the new order and will find a ready audience for their propaganda.

The new regime will be forced either to introduce rationing or some form or priceing. I would not give your scheme more than a couple of years before shortages forced a change of course.

You need a procedure that takes into account the relatively availability of all resoruces across the board, not just labour inputs and saying that labour inputs are implicated in making available to production every other kind of input, whist true, is rather besides the point.

Well yes, and Kantorovich provided a mechanism for this in his ODVs but in the long run he says these equate to marginal labour values. The question then arises of who allocates labour and other resources between different possible uses. If it is done in a decentralised way, these decentralised units have effective ownership of resources and will only give them up if given something in return. If you dont do that, you require some public state body that will allocate labour and other resources between alternative uses, and you are back to requiring a central plan.

robbo203

17th August 2012, 09:32

The problem is that in your scheme of things demand for the great bulk of products will exceed supply so this is not a matter applying to just a few products but to most.

How would you know this? What makes you think this would be the case? But even if is was the case this can be comfortably accomodated within the kind of dual strategy that I am talking about with some goods (that are scarce) being rationed and others being made available on a free access basis.

The 'input' that will be in short supply will be labour, the majority of products will, according to your stock control rule be trying to expand their production. At first, this might be possible as the unemployed were given jobs.

Its not just the currently unemployed we are talking about. Your vision is actually a very limited one if you think that. In fact MOST of the economic activity currently undertaken in the formal sector of any capitalist state today would disappear - would no longer serve any useful purpose. Such activity is completely and utterly socially useless from the standpoint of meeting human needs. Its only purpose is to keep a market economy ticking over on its own terms. A pretty obvious case in point is the financial sector which would completely cease to exist in a socialist society. Analysis of the data provided by such bodies as the American Bureau of Labour Statistics ( http://www.bls.gov/) would suggest that, overall, at the very least , half of the economic actiuvity currently undertaken by the formal sector would no longer be required

What that means in effect, is that a vast amount of labour power and material resources would then be freed up for socially useful production. We are talking here at the very least about an effective doubling of the available workforce for socially useful production which would easily overcome your objection. Not only that there are numerous other aspects highlighting the irrationalities and inefficiencies of capitalism which are easily overlooked but need also to be taken into consideration as far as this matter is concenred

A small example - here in Spain there are estimated to be 3-4 million empty homes. And yet many people are homeless. Its not just homes - there are thousands upon thousands of empty commercial buildings. Its an absolutely monumental waste and a staggering indictment of the market system.
Appalling though this figure is, it pales in comparison with the situation in China where according to one Hong Kong-based real estate analyst, Gillem Tulloch, there are an astonishing 64 million empty apartments!!! According to Tulloch housing units are priced well above what an average Chinese person can afford and while it might promote GDP it "doesn't add to the betterment of people's lives" (http://www.grist.org/cities/2011-03-31-chinas-ghost-cities-and-the-biggest-property-bubble-of-all).

In a socialist society this kind of problem will simply cease to exist once the barrier of money has been eliminated. The homeless will and can be easily housed and apart from the refubishment and upgrading involved that does not require that much extra effort. Its not so much increasing production that is the problem as the mode of production which, in turn affects the distribution of goods. The same argument incidentally can be applied to food - a staggering amount of which is simply wasted. We have the means to completely eliminate hunger today. We dont really need to increase gross output by that much more (though we might need to reconfigure our approach to farming on more sustainable lines) Again, it is the market that gets in the way

But the available supply of labour will quickly be used up, indeed the aggregate labour supply will fall, as you propose that people will be paid nothing for their work. Some people will go on working because they like it, or out of a sense of duty, but another fraction of people will cut their working hours if they are not paid but can pick up whatever is available for free.

So a year or two after putting your scheme into operation we will have declining production due to labour shortages, excess demand for lots of goods, and very evident shortages in the shops, where things will vanish from the shelves almost as soon as things are delivered from the depots.

The sections of the population who want to return to the old system will then be making hay with propaganda against the economic incompetence of the new order and will find a ready audience for their propaganda.

The new regime will be forced either to introduce rationing or some form or priceing. I would not give your scheme more than a couple of years before shortages forced a change of course.

Come on - this is just a variation of the old "human nature" argument against socialism which socialists have always had to contend with. According to this argument people are inherently greedy or inherently lazy (or both) and the combination of these two things will result in rampant scarcities and the desire on the part of the population to "return to the old system"

To be honest, I am quite surprised that you of all people should even see fit to dredge up such a sociologically crude and inept argument which is precisely the argument deployed by the ideologists of capitalism against socialism. All of the assumptions you make - about what people will "demand" in socialism and about the nature of work in socialism - are highly questionable yet you dont seem inclined to want question them at all. Why?

For example , have you considered the motivational basis that lies behind today's consumerism and how individuals' sense of their own worth is very much tied in with the consumption and accumulation of material wealth? In a society in which goods are made freely available such a rationale for consumption for the sake of consumption, falls away. It becomes meaningless. One earns the respect of one's fellow not through what you take from society (consumption) but from what you put into it . That would be , in fact. the only available route through which one could earn such respect and if you think the desire for respect and the esteem of your fellows is not a significant source of motivation you are seriously misinformed

Indeed that is one reason why your arguments about volunteer labour do not stand up to serious scrutiny. There are other reasons besides. In fact, even under capitalism - and one might say , despite capitalism - slightly over half of all work is completely unpaid work. Most of this is in the household sector but a significant minority of it falls outside that sector. Such a thing would simply not be possible if what you said held any water at all. Study after study, and I can provide you with tons of data on this, demonstrate that volunteer labour tends to be more highly motivated than paid labour and that, indeed, monetary inducements tend to have a demotivating effect if anything. All of this is to say nothing of the totally transformed nature of work and working conditions in a socialist society when we are no longer working for a boss but rather for ourselves and our communities

And that is the point isnt it? There is no more "us" and "them" in a socialist society. Yet your talk of the "new regime" in socialism presupposes just such a thing. You are looking at socialism from a capitalist and indeed statist perspective.

As I see it , socialism will be the very essence of what is called a moral economy in anthropological terms. The clear recognition of our mutual interdependence as the material basis of our existence will colour everything. If the road outside your front door needs to be swept, there is no authority or "regime" to complain to in a socialist society. By a reductio ad absurdum argument the problem resolves itself . Insofar as you see it as a problem you either deal with it yourself in a responsble mannner and/or nag your neighbour to help . No doubt communitiies will organise road sweeping on a more formal large scale basis so it wont actually be left up to just you to do it but the point Im trying to convey is that the social dynamics behind that all would be totally different to what we have today. You cannot just project in to a future socialist society what happens under capitalism today

Above all, of course, the movement to establish socialism has to be a grassrooots movement ; it cannot be a vanguard-led movement. Workers generally have to know what such a society entails and want it.

Is it conceivable that having striven to rid themselves of a capitalist society and all the insecurities and deprivations that goes with it , that these same workers would want to jeopardise the very society they had just established with all the advantages it entails? I think not. I think the cultural adaptation it will bring about will be profound and sweeping and, quite frankly, irreversible

Well yes, and Kantorovich provided a mechanism for this in his ODVs but in the long run he says these equate to marginal labour values. The question then arises of who allocates labour and other resources between different possible uses. If it is done in a decentralised way, these decentralised units have effective ownership of resources and will only give them up if given something in return. If you dont do that, you require some public state body that will allocate labour and other resources between alternative uses, and you are back to requiring a central plan.[/QUOTE]

RedMaterialist

17th August 2012, 14:17

I believe a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind is the way forward. It enables the efficient and rational allocation of resouces to happen that no other system, and certainly not the capitalist market, can match.

Your system of polycentric planning units without labor pricing:

1. what would stop these units from turning into an anarchy of self-contained competitive enterprises?

2. How would the workers get paid, vouchers, currency, electronic credits; who decides how much each worker receives?

3. self-regulating system of stock control...that sounds an awful lot like the self-regulating market of Adam Smith and Alan Greenspan.

Paul Cockshott

17th August 2012, 20:46

Manic Impressive

17th August 2012, 21:59

Paul Cockshott

17th August 2012, 23:28

Paul have you ever eaten at an all you can eat buffet? Did you stuff your face? I remember when I was a teenager I took it as a challenge. I saw it as How much can you eat? I don't behave in the same way anymore, the novelty wore off, now I would eat as much as I need. Same shit people may go a little crazy in the beginning and consume more than they need. But this is only a result of having grown up within a society of private property. The novelty will wear off pretty soon.
You are right that food consumption has ultimate physical limits, but we do know that even here, as food prices have fallen obesity has gone up, so internal 'moral' limits are not necessarily that effective even here. But for consumption of other goods, we are not limited by the size of our guts.
Our ability to enjoy a higher material standard of life is limited in the end only by the productivity of labour, and the class division of income. We can abolish the class division of income, and over time improve the productivity of labour, but that does not mean that people do not desire a better life.

Compare the consumption of the average Brazilean with that of the average person in the Netherlands, the people in Brazil would love to consume what the Dutch do, but at the current productivity of labour in Brazil that would not be possible even with the most equitable distribution of output. Are the Dutch hopelessly greedy, no surely not. So apply Robbo's economics to Brazil, what is supposed to be special about the Brazileans that they should be satisfied with so much less than the Dutch?

What does a good really cost you, it costs you the number of hours that you have to work to earn the money to get it.
The less hours you have to work to get things the more and better the quality of the things you can consume.

If every thing were free, goods in Brazil would be available to individuals there more cheaply than they are to Dutch workers today. and so Brazilian workers would attempt to consume at least on a par with the Dutch. But labour productivity in Brazil would not support that, so shortages would result.

This is not hypothetical, this is what happened in socialist countries when goods were available free or at subsidised prices. It is one of the key reasons why fuel consumption was relatively inefficient in the USSR : free district heating is nice, but if it is free, it is as easy to open the window to deal with overheating as it is to turn down the radiator. Under pricing of fuel led to inefficiencies in industry, aviation etc.

This un-Marxist idea that you can abolish the law of value had support there too, and let to serious inefficiencies.

ckaihatsu

18th August 2012, 00:05

[T]here is no reason to suppose that if goods were all free, that people would simply limit their consumption at a level that matched social production.
So you would be forced back on rationing. Now rationing is inflexible. Each person gets the same ration irrespective of different tastes and desires. What on earth is supposed to be the advantage of that?

For the record I'll note that 'rationing' does not have to be the typical equal-slices-of-a-smaller-pie-for-everyone-so-that-everyone-gets-a-slice. It could just as well be those-who-participate-more-should-have-more-of-a-say-in-its-production-and-consumption-to-begin-with.

Also, under any generic method of material accounting there'd be *no* accounting for a weighting of 'tastes', or desire relative to others'. In a commodified economics this is presumably measured by increasing prices offered, as at an auction, for instance. But if the unit of value measurement is, instead, *labor*-based, and there's a flat undifferentiated value assigned to the unit of labor representation -- say, a labor-hour -- then all bearing such labor-hour vouchers would have equal claim, based on labor-hour vouchers held, to society's production. There'd be nothing to indicate any *variability* in demand from one person to the next -- if administrative planning somehow didn't anticipate and account-for a sudden surge in demand from those holding labor vouchers then an impromptu *political* measure would have to be devised on-the-spot, which would defeat the whole point of administrative planning -- the dynamic would resemble a *market*-based swirling of fluctuating, fickle consumer expectations from production. The situation would encourage the *bartering* of labor vouchers, so as to provide flexibility and liquidity where it's lacking. This would effectively be a black market and would defeat the point of a collectivized, planned economy.

The problematic resides in the anonymous-consumer quality of the labor vouchers themselves, where value is allowed to be generically socked-away, without addressing its standing potential for impacting the economy and its planned production at a later -- possibly imminent -- date. Hopefully the political / administrative component of all of this *would* have measures in place to track and address such stores of potential consumption, but perhaps those need to be explicitly spelled-out, then.

Better yet would be a method that resolves both the issues of consumer prioritization, and that of labor-participation-based claim to productivity. These could be resolved *together*, in a *complementary* way, since they are connected to each other:

communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

This is an 8-1/2" x 40" wide table that describes a communist-type political / economic model using three rows and six descriptive columns. The three rows are surplus-value-to-overhead, no surplus, and surplus-value-to-pleasure. The six columns are ownership / control, associated material values, determination of material values, material function, infrastructure / overhead, and propagation.

http://postimage.org/image/35sw8csv8/

Associated material values

communist administration -- Assets and resources have no quantifiable value -- are considered as attachments to the production process

labor [supply] -- Labor supply is selected and paid for with existing (or debt-based) labor credits

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

Determination of material values

communist administration -- Assets and resources may be created and sourced from projects and production runs

labor [supply] -- Labor credits are paid per hour of work at a multiplier rate based on difficulty or hazard -- multipliers are survey-derived

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination

So what this means is that those who decide to participate more by providing their liberated labor, at more-difficult tasks, will receive proportionately more labor credits. These labor credits enable the organizing of additional liberated labor, in like fashion, to initiate free-access communist production. Those who put in the work to produce anything will also be closest to the point of production and will certainly be able to satisfy their own personal requirements from its output.

Demand for productive output will be formally submitted on a weighted (ranked) basis, so not all claims to output will be equivalent -- those who commit to higher / greater 'demand' (vs. all other conceivable demands) will get greater proportional consideration for their claims, relative to all others making the same claim. Such demand, if common enough, could reach a 'critical mass' and become self-organizing, also pooling existing labor credits from within to empower a liberated labor force specifically for a certain, mass-desired kind of production on free-access implements of communist production.

robbo203

18th August 2012, 01:35

Robbo it is very well established that if things are cheaper more will be consumed. It is lack of money rather than vows of asceticism that lead the working class majority to consume so much less than the upper classes. If you remove that obstacle people will attempt to consume lots of things that we can not currently afford.
Now the abolition of exploitation could probably allow consumption per head by the working class population to rise by perhaps 80% and that would be achieved using payment by labour vouchers. But if you look at people with more than twice the average income, their consumption does not level off so there is no reason to suppose that if goods were all free, that people would simply limit their consumption at a level that matched social production.
So you would be forced back on rationing. Now rationing is inflexible. Each person gets the same ration irrespective of different tastes and desires. What on earth is supposed to be the advantage of that?

Come on, now - this is the sort of naff argument that apologists for capitalism routinely come out with - the "greedy person" argument. The idea that we are driven by insatiable demands that is the sine qua non of bourgeois economics. Why are you spouting such nonsense if you call yourself a socialist?

You havent really taken on board any of the arguments I presented in my previous post, have you?. It is "very well established", you say, that if "things are cheaper, more will be consumed." Presumably our consumption will go through the roof, according to you, if a communist free access system is established

However, the "very well established" fact that you refer to is a fact only pertaining to capitalism. Have you perchance read Marshall Sahlin's classic - Stone Age Economics: The Original Affluent Society: In that book we learn that our hunter-gatherer forebears were affluent by wanting less rather than producing more and this affluence consisted in levels of leisure that our modern wage slave can only wistfully dream of.

Of course, I am not suggesting we all return to a hunter gatherer way of life - that's not possible anyway - but since we talking about "well established facts" well then one such fact is that in such a society the accummulation of possessions was actively frowned upon and morally disapproved of since it clearly impeded the mobilty of the group. Since 95% of our existence on this planet has been as hunter-gatherers, you cannot possibly attribute the "welll established fact" that people consume more as their income rises to something called human nature". Human nature does not change that quickly. If human nature was the explanation form our comsumerism we would be behaving much more like hunter gatherers and disapproving of all unnecessary consumption

Certainly people will tend to consume more as their income rises under capitalism. But have you asked yourself why they consume more? You don't seem offer any kind of sociological insight into the matter at all. You just seem to blandly accept what you call a well established facts is a well established fact. End of story..

Now Ive suggested one or two possible reasons why in my previous post - though no doubt there are other reasons beside these . Do you not have any thoughts on what I haf to say, for instance, about consumerism and status acquisition based on the conspicuous consumption of wealth under capitalism? Do you not consider that the sea change in cultural values that must - I suggest - inevitably accompany a socialist revolutiuon will have a profiund bearing on this whole issue of consumption? Do you not consider that a working class that has knowingly and consciously brought into being the new society, would be fully aware of the behavuoural implications of such society for each and everyone of us.

If we really are going to behave like pigs with our snouts in the trough all the time then, yes, of course, such a society is not going to be sustainable for very long But surely people will fully understand this and it is on the basis of just such an understanding that taking more than what people deem to be a fair and resaonable share will attract strong moral disapprobabtion. In capitalism by contrast, being rich and conspicuously consuming all those little consumer goodies we can lay our hands on is something to be admired and to aspire to . Little wonder people consume more as their income rises

But we are not talking about capitalism are we? We are talking about a completely different kind of society. Nobody is suggesting we all take a vow of ascetism but you dont have to go to the other extreme either, so you? . Rather, what we should be considering is what is enough to ensure a reasonable and decent standard of living for all. We dont really "need" more than that, do we? . We dont really "need" more than one home for example and in communist society I dont see how you could ensure your own exclusive right to own more than home would obtain secure anyway. It would quite rightly be regarded as morally reprehesensible - particularly if there are still people not yet having access to a decent home.

Point is we already have the means to ensure a reasonable and decent standard of living for all.. It is only capitalism that gets in the way of making this a reality. All those empty properties I spoke of, for example - nearly 4 million in Spain alone - will be made directly available to the people needing a decent home. Homelessness could be eliminated in one stroke

It is abundance that kills greed stone dead and it is only capitalism that induces greed through the creation and maintenace of artifical scaricity (which inter alia helps to push up prices and profits). It needs people to "buy buy buy" and to builld up a sense of self worth through consumption. It needs to people to compete economically and to be economically competitive and what do they compete over if not ostensibly the consumer objects which their money income allows them to buy.

Competition is open ended and unceasing. A millionaire feels a failure by comparison with a billionaire and so will strive for ever more wealth, It is no longer a question of the use value of the wealth itself but of the ability to convert the currency of wealth into a power. That is one helluva reason why people want to consume more

Just to renforce what Manic Impresive has said. I live near a litle spa town in Southern Spain. Potable water flows freely and in abundance in the many fuentes scattered around the town. I cannot say i have ever observed an individual rushing the the nearest fuente in mad frenzy, grabbing every available container he or she can lay his or her hands on just becuase said water is freely available in abundance. People know the water will still be there tomorrow and the next day and the next. Just as in a communist society they would know this would be the case with most if not all things

Is is this deep deated sense of pychological uncertainty - oif not knowing if you will have access to things you need tomorrow - that is another reason why people consume more than they need under capitalism. In communism, that access is guaranteed on a free and equal basis for everyone.

Well established facts as you call them are the product of particular conditions. It is up to us to establish the conditions and the habits of thinking that go with those conditions that will allow us to trust each sufficiently that we will not feel inclined to behave irrationally and, like that non-existent fictious individual in my home town , take as much water as we can - even though this would be massively inconvenient to transport and store as well as being totally unnecessary.

If anything is designed to instill a sense of defeatism and political apathy towards radical change it is your talk of so called "well established facts"that appear to bolster that essentially bourgeois prejudice that people are intrinsically greedy, selfish and will never be able to learn to trust others enough to make a decent society work in the interest of everyone. Let us not take the standard by which the bourgeoisie judges itself to be the yardstick by which judge the potential of our fellow workers

robbo203

18th August 2012, 09:08

You are right that food consumption has ultimate physical limits, but we do know that even here, as food prices have fallen obesity has gone up, so internal 'moral' limits are not necessarily that effective even here. But for consumption of other goods, we are not limited by the size of our guts.
Our ability to enjoy a higher material standard of life is limited in the end only by the productivity of labour, and the class division of income. We can abolish the class division of income, and over time improve the productivity of labour, but that does not mean that people do not desire a better life.

Compare the consumption of the average Brazilean with that of the average person in the Netherlands, the people in Brazil would love to consume what the Dutch do, but at the current productivity of labour in Brazil that would not be possible even with the most equitable distribution of output. Are the Dutch hopelessly greedy, no surely not. So apply Robbo's economics to Brazil, what is supposed to be special about the Brazileans that they should be satisfied with so much less than the Dutch?

What does a good really cost you, it costs you the number of hours that you have to work to earn the money to get it.
The less hours you have to work to get things the more and better the quality of the things you can consume.

If every thing were free, goods in Brazil would be available to individuals there more cheaply than they are to Dutch workers today. and so Brazilian workers would attempt to consume at least on a par with the Dutch. But labour productivity in Brazil would not support that, so shortages would result.

This is not hypothetical, this is what happened in socialist countries when goods were available free or at subsidised prices. It is one of the key reasons why fuel consumption was relatively inefficient in the USSR : free district heating is nice, but if it is free, it is as easy to open the window to deal with overheating as it is to turn down the radiator. Under pricing of fuel led to inefficiencies in industry, aviation etc.

This un-Marxist idea that you can abolish the law of value had support there too, and let to serious inefficiencies.

Far starters, this last bit is complete nonsense. Here's Raya Dunayevskaya:

Value, Engels has written, is “a category characteristic only of commodity production, and just as it did not exist prior to commodity production, so will it disappear with the abolition of commodity production.”[16] It would be sheer absurdity, argued Engels, “to set up a society in which at last the producers control their products by the logical application of an economic category (value) which is the most comprehensive expression of the subjection of the producers by their own product.”[17]
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1944/revision.htm(

The logic of your argument would lead one to think you are a rampant support of privatisation everywhere - a closet Tory. Lets scrap the NHS and the principle of free healthcare 'cos it leads to "serious inefficiencies". You cant seem to see that actually it is the system of generalised commodity production we call capitalism (which existed in the Soviet Union as well) that is itself intrinsically highly inefficient in terms of the massive transaction costs it involves

Ive pointed out to you that one of the biggest productive advantages of a free access communist society over capitalism in all its forms is the simple fact that it removes a whole swathe of occupations in the formal sector of today's capitalist economies - occupations that produce nothing whatsoever that is socially useful in terms of enhancing human wellbeing but exist simply and solely to keep the capitalist system ticking over on its own terms. The removal of the entire financial sector, pay departments, supermarket check out assistants, tax collectors , arms production, armies and a thousand and one other useless occupations associated with a capitalism will mean quite literally, an immense increase in the overall social productivety of labour in communism. By freeing up all that labour (and resources!) tied up in these socially useless occupations we can produce much more with the same workforce or - alternatively, if you like - we can produce the same level of socially useful output as today at a fraction of the time it takes today

None of this you factor into your assessement of the situation in your top down managerialist-cum-technocratic approach to the whole matter. The workers need to be economically restrained - rationed - for their own good under a regime of labour vouchers (which, by the way, will only reproduce the competitiveness and divisiveness of wage labour anyway). So if you give them enough food, all they will do is get obese. They dont know any better. This is utterly simplistic and ignores all sorts of considerations. For instance, obesity in some societies is considered a status symbol, a means of distinguishing yourself from the hungry massses. In other societies it is a form of compensation in a world of marketed images of catwalk models. There is no point in even trying to live up to those images held up as the very exemplar of beauty - though some do and with tragic consequences such as the eating disorder, bulimia - so you compensate by going the other way by asserting a sense of self empowerment through the excessive consumption of food. "Beauty" as a possible passport to fame and riches is however denied to you.

Frankly, I find your whole approach to the question of consumption utterly depressing and mechanistic in its echoing of capitalist values. There is more to life, surely, than just one's standard of living - though I would assert that in the department too, free access communism would represent a big improvement on what we have now and for the reasons already given. There is also something called the "quality of life" Does this not count with you? The elimination of that constant nagging sense of insecurity that accompanies the life of a wage slave - and i speak here from bitter personal experience - is more than enough incentive to want a society of free access and voluntary effort. The ability to choose freely the work I want to do and to experience a much greater diversity of work experiences is something I would love to have but, under the current regime (which ties me down to just one particular job), cannot have

You problem frankly is that youve not really transcended the capitalist mindset in your thinking at all. You talk about the workers in Brazil and the workers in Holland almost in terms that bear comparison with different sets rats on a laboratory treadmill. They have to be pushed and pulled , incentivised and restrained to achieve the right balance of comsumption and production . What happened to the idea of global working class solidarity, huh? It just doesnt seem to figure in your case ar all. The idea that people are capable of making the connection between their own consumption levels and material deprivation elsewhere and feel morally obligated to exercise a degree iof self restraint is something that doesn't even seem to occur to you. Yet this is something that we often do in our daily lives - we share things equitably precisely because we value others and not just ourselves all time time . Indeed, there are whole societies in which this principle is institutionalised in the form of "leveling mechanisms" (look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_mechanism)

I dont see what you advocate, or your way of thinking about things, as part of the solution. I see it as part of the problem . It is what we need to get rid of if we are to realise a decent society for everyone

Paul Cockshott

18th August 2012, 20:30

Value, Engels has written, is “a category characteristic only of commodity production, and just as it did not exist prior to commodity production, so will it disappear with the abolition of commodity production.”[16] It would be sheer absurdity, argued Engels, “to set up a society in which at last the producers control their products by the logical application of an economic category (value) which is the most comprehensive expression of the subjection of the producers by their own product.”[17]
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/duna.../revision.htm(

Engels confuses exchange value, the form of appearance of value, with value itself. He uses the wrong technical terminology here, but he is right in the substance of what he advocates as he is in favour of the direct calculation and regulation of the economy on the basis of labour time. Technically regulation and calculation on the basis of socially necessary labour is regulation and calculation directly in terms of value rather than in terms of the alienated representation of value : money.

NHS works because it is rationed on the basis of need. I can not just go into a pharmacist and ask for antibiotics, beta-blockers or opiates. I need a prescription from an authorised doctor showing that I have a medical need for them.
This rationing model can not be applied to the generality of retail distribution of consumer goods. It would be impossibly time consuming for you to have to make an appointment to go before an assessor ( equivalent to a GP) who would assess your needs for individual consumer goods and then write you a chit allowing you to withdraw them from communal stores.

robbo203

19th August 2012, 04:30

Engels confuses exchange value, the form of appearance of value, with value itself. He uses the wrong technical terminology here, but he is right in the substance of what he advocates as he is in favour of the direct calculation and regulation of the economy on the basis of labour time. Technically regulation and calculation on the basis of socially necessary labour is regulation and calculation directly in terms of value rather than in terms of the alienated representation of value : money..

No sorry but this is incorrect. I remind you what you said. You said "This un-Marxist idea that you can abolish the law of value had support there too, and let to serious inefficiencies." The law of value is NOT the same thing as labour time accounting. I think we ve been here before a while back. The law of value relates specifically to commodity exchange. Marx's point was that you cannot directly measure socially necessary labour time . The latter can only be inferred from or or only becomes evident through market exchange . In a society where there is no market exchange there is no way of knowing what SNLT is. You cannot "calculate" it in that sense. All we have available to work with so to speak is past labour - what was directly or indirectly embodied in a good - as a criterion and basis for labour time accounting.

I agree that Marx advocated labour time accounting but I think he grossly underestimated the difficulties this would ential - not to mention the huge trasaction costs. I reject labour time accounting at least in its full blown sense which strives to account for both direct and indirect past labour. A limited form of labour time accounting might be acceptable however

NHS works because it is rationed on the basis of need. I can not just go into a pharmacist and ask for antibiotics, beta-blockers or opiates. I need a prescription from an authorised doctor showing that I have a medical need for them.
This rationing model can not be applied to the generality of retail distribution of consumer goods. It would be impossibly time consuming for you to have to make an appointment to go before an assessor ( equivalent to a GP) who would assess your needs for individual consumer goods and then write you a chit allowing you to withdraw them from communal stores

This is a bit of a silly example, is it not?

No one is suggesting that in a free access society you go along to a pharmacist and just help yourself to antibiotics, beta-blockers or opiates. Obviously, if you have a medical problem you would seek the advice of a doctor who would then prescribe an appropriate medication . Indeed it would be in your interest that you be guided in this matter as to what you require by way of medication rather than just take what you want The point about free access is not so much that you can just "help yourself" but rather that there is no quid pro quo exchange involved - no payment

In many cases such as with individual consumer goods it might well be the case that in free access communism one can just leave it to individuals to "help themselves" as they see fit - assuming there are no chronic shortages of the goods in question - since the individual himself or herself is the best judge in this case. This could apply also to some kinds of medication such as aspirin. If there are shortages then I have acknowleged the need for ratioing in that case so you would have in effect two basic classes of goods- free access goods and rationed goods- existing alongside each other

With the latter you do have some kind of quid pro quo exchange involved. You have to present some kind if chit or something to the store to enable or authorise you to take the good in question. However it is rather silly to suggest that this is analogous to a doctors precription which obviously is tailored to your individual medical requirements.

If this is how you thing a rationing system would work - with individuals having to "make an appointment to go before an assessor ( equivalent to a GP)" who would "assess" their needs for individual consumer goods - then I suggest you have a very narrow understanding of what rationing might entail. Something that has already been pointed out by ckaihatsu

Although I dont agree with your system of labour vouchers it is nevertheless a form of ratioining that does not require the subjective valuation of some assessor of what your needs are. So I am at loss to know what prompted you to come up with such an idea , There are other kinds of ratioining which do not entail this either and which I consider to be superior in many respects to the idea of labour vouchers

Lowtech

19th August 2012, 08:36

how would a decentralised non-market society - which you have agreed can exist - mesh supply and demand if not by means of such mechanism? What other mechanism do you have in mind? Lets hear form you specifically on this point

what other mechanism do i have in mind? you may start by reading the stickies in this very forum.

to bring up the question of "supply and demand" is to drag us all to square-one in the economics debate between capitalism and communism.

none here wishes to debate market dynamics. but you obviously need the right kick in the-- *ahem* guidance in the right direction.

to assume market dynamics has any place in a serious discussion regarding economics, is to assume our current system actually has any success in sustaining a modern civilization. to assert this is to be apologetic and to blatantly advocate capitalism. simply put, if you give any merit to our current system, you are a capitalist. forgive me if you take that as a personal insult, however this distinction is accurate.

our current economy is not concerned with supply, if it had, things would be designed with the best use of resources taken into account, rather exchange value versus production cost currently takes precedence. the current system is also designed to produce artificial scarcity, which is not only ignoring need but also directly increasing that need for the benefit of the elites. this is mathematically observable.

within our current economy, demand does not equate to need. when demand is stimulated to increase the exchange value for commodities that otherwise would have less value if regarded for their use value alone, actual need is ignored.

if you want to play the semantics game, we can do that too..

markets won't completely be eradicated, however they are wholly insufficient for any sort of resource allocation as they ignore need/supply.

true need and supply cannot be accounted for unless we move away from exchange value based systems - exactly what the market is

market self-regulation does not actually occur, rather it is an assumption built on other assumptions as follows;

self-regulation <= naturally occurring regulation that maintains logical processes and ultimately desirable results <= the system produces desirable results

those results being measured differently if you are a capitalist who's desired economic result is that value is retained for his own benefit or if you are a common person requiring that the economy be a public utility and infrastructure who's intended purpose is to sustain a civilization

essentially, to assume that our current economy is an example of any kind of "self regulation" or some other insert-bullshit-semantic-crap is to assert that our current system produces desirable results, and in doing so would mean one is a capitalist.

without honesty regarding your own true position on economics, you lose much of your credibility.

and before you start calling me absurd or not making sense, take a minute and ponder that it may be YOU that doesn't understand

robbo203

19th August 2012, 13:01

what other mechanism do i have in mind? you may start by reading the stickies in this very forum.

to bring up the question of "supply and demand" is to drag us all to square-one in the economics debate between capitalism and communism.

none here wishes to debate market dynamics. but you obviously need the right kick in the-- *ahem* guidance in the right direction.

to assume market dynamics has any place in a serious discussion regarding economics, is to assume our current system actually has any success in sustaining a modern civilization. to assert this is to be apologetic and to blatantly advocate capitalism. simply put, if you give any merit to our current system, you are a capitalist. forgive me if you take that as a personal insult, however this distinction is accurate.

A capitalist is someone who owns significant amount of capital. I can assure you I am not a capitalist and, even if I were, that would not in any way bar me from opposing capitalism and seeking to replace it with a complete non-market or non-capitalist alternative. The manufacturing capitalist, Frederich Engels, springs to mind here

That said, I still cannot make head our tails of what you are on about. There is nothing at all "capitalistic" or "market-oriented" about the question of supply and demand. What links "demand" to the market system is merely the particular form it takes - that is to say, what economists call "effective demand" or demand backed up by purchasing power. In a completely non market economy such as socialism in which money no longer exists there is no such thing as "effectve demand" in these terms - obviously.

But that does not mean people are not going to "demand" or want things, does it now? So we then face the challenge of organising a system of production geared to meeting this non-market demand. How else do you do it if not by catering to "demand" in this direct sense. By diktat? On a purely random basis? On whim? What? Where is your mechansim for adjusting supply to demand? Or maybe you think one shouldnt bother? Just churn a whole lot of stuff and hope people will take it without knowing what they want in the first place. Have you consider just how extraordinarly wasteful that could turn out to be - having a mass of products languishing in some store which nobody ever wanted in the first place?

You have agreed that a non market decentralised economy can exist but you still havent explained how such a system would work in your view. I have offered what I think is the only realistic way in which such a system could work based on the concept of a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind which transmits information to production units based on what people are actually taking from the stores. I have also suggested that this could be supplemented by other methodologies such as consumer surveys which anticipate changes in the pattern of demand

Not only that - I have argued that no advanced modern economy, including capitalism, could dispense with such a system of stock control but you continue to think that this somehow makes such a system "capitalistic" or to do with "market dynamics" It doesnt!!!. Stock control is simply a technical procedure. It is not a social relationship. The social relationships of a non market economy are totally different from that of a capitalist market but both those kinds of economies can and indeed inevitably will have to depend on stock control as a technical procedure

essentially, to assume that our current economy is an example of any kind of "self regulation" or some other insert-bullshit-semantic-crap is to assert that our current system produces desirable results, and in doing so would mean one is a capitalist.

without honesty regarding your own true position on economics, you lose much of your credibility.

and before you start calling me absurd or not making sense, take a minute and ponder that it may be YOU that doesn't understand

But you dont understand and this is absolutely clear from what you are saying here. The problem with capitalism is not that it self regulates - every possible kind of society has to self regulate to some extent anyway and there is no such thing - or ever could be such a thing - as a system that does not involve self regulation - the automatic adjustment of the different plans in society to each other . The problem with capitalism arises from something else entirely. That has to do with the socio-economic relationship of capitalism that mediate all economic activity under capitalism.

People starve or go homeless NOT because there is a self regulating system of production of food or housing in capitalism but becuase they lack money - the wherewithal - to express their real demand for food and housing. Once you grasp this you will see why it is that you have been barking up thr wrong tree completely.

The self regulating nature of the economy is not the problem at all and its got nothing to do with why we need to get rid of the market completely.

ckaihatsu

19th August 2012, 14:05

If there are shortages then I have acknowleged the need for ratioing in that case so you would have in effect two basic classes of goods- free access goods and rationed goods- existing alongside each other

With the latter you do have some kind of quid pro quo exchange involved. You have to present some kind if chit or something to the store to enable or authorise you to take the good in question. However it is rather silly to suggest that this is analogous to a doctors precription which obviously is tailored to your individual medical requirements.

If this is how you thing a rationing system would work - with individuals having to "make an appointment to go before an assessor ( equivalent to a GP)" who would "assess" their needs for individual consumer goods - then I suggest you have a very narrow understanding of what rationing might entail. Something that has already been pointed out by ckaihatsu

*My own* concern with the standard labor vouchers model is that the individual voucher has a nebulous value in relation to material productivity and availability.

If everything that everyone could possibly need and want is in total, unflagging abundance, then *great* -- labor vouchers would work just fine and as long as people worked to some degree they'd get some roughly-proportional equivalent in labor vouchers, and would be able to obtain some roughly-proportional share of society's production. In other words, all the "pies" would match up just right, per the model implied by the theory.

But we've *already* explored the far-reaches of human desire and found that it does *not* neatly overlap with standard 'humane need' (or human need). A post-capitalist political economy that picks up with today's technological prowess and productive capabilities would have to *not* be limiting, but would instead need to *enable* and *surpass* what can be accomplished presently under capitalism.

The talk of rationing and assessors is probably *accurate* if a system of *labor vouchers* is used, because how else would goods and services be matched-up to the pool of earned labor vouchers -- ? (The convention is to allow the exchange ratios, or 'prices', to float, which is a market system.)

[...] So I am at loss to know what prompted you [Paul] to come up with such an idea , There are other kinds of ratioining which do not entail this either and which I consider to be superior in many respects to the idea of labour vouchers

You may want to provide these other rationing methods, then, since there is a dearth of theory that applies to the consumer-side of things. Yes, the workers would certainly be able to control production and pre-plan it in ways that would make sense for needed consumption, but how is such a society to decide on more-*discretionary* production?

If it's not a general societal concern then it would have to be d.i.y. and labor vouchers would be superfluous. But if it *is* a general societal concern and generic labor vouchers were to be used to provide flexibility, then that method just doesn't provide enough economic information about demand for adequate priorities to be set for production.

The use of assessors -- like medical practitioners for everyday goods -- sounds absurd because it would be the *unavoidable* dependence on bureaucratic, official-subjective decision-making, for lack of anything better that makes sense.