Socialism - Which Economic Model?

[Evo2]

Hi

In reading about socialism and Marxist economics I'm confused as to which economic system would be best to implement socialism, and then lead to communism.


I see the merits of market socialism in helping to check supply and demand, yet this system keep money and the profit motive (it seems)

Planned economy seems to lead to classless and leads closer to being moneyless, yet the state remains and in its soviet type it seems inefficient.

Decentralised planned economy seems to be the best option, yet I don't see how an economy can function effectively without falling back into a market system.

Can anyone point me in the right direction of where to find pros and cons of these systems? Which system did Marx argue for?

I am new so apologies for the basic questions

[tuwix]

You're confused because as far as I know Marx hasn't answered the question in details. We know only that means of production should be socialized.
I think he, as a briliant economic observer, wouldn't be for something that is highly ineficient.

[Marshal of the People]

I am a fan of the planned economy personally I also like the decentralised planned economy but not as much as the planned economy, I don't really like the idea of market socialism because I am a perfectionist and a control freak.

[Venas Abiertas]

We already live in a planned economy. Planned by the transnational corporations, international money speculators, and big banks.

They make prices and wages rise and fall, millions lose jobs and move to new places, demand for useless products to be created, shortages of necessary goods to occur, industries move overseas, propaganda and misinformation to be distributed, etc.

And all of this is implemented and enforced by government agencies, "security" forces, news and entertainment media, schools, churches, "think tanks"...

Of course, every so often they screw up and there's another economic crisis and millions of people suffer, but hey...that's capitalism. The "only" workable economic system, they say.

Any kind of "market" system is going to allow for capitalist accumulation, and that means that some people are going to have more than others, which means that people won't be really equal, which means that you can't have a true democracy, which means that some people will still be taken advantage of to benefit others. And that's exactly what we're trying to avoid.


I say...with all of our advances in computers and communications, couldn't a planned socialist economy work much better? If workers actually controlled production and their own government? The Soviet Union, with all of its obvious flaws, almost overtook the US and its allies back in the 50's. I refuse to believe that today we couldn't do better than GOSPLAN. :lol:

I wouldn't mind seeing everybody live in agrarian communes, trading with each other and sharing resources...but realistically, with 7 or 8 billion people on the planet today, we're going to need a more complex industrialized system to handle things. Marx and Engels realized this. They wanted the government to play a role in designing and managing the new economy. Surely with all the great minds and technological resources we have today, we can figure out how to do this better than it has been done in the past.

There are some good observations and criticisms of planned economies on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy

[Venas Abiertas]

You might also like to read this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_economics which describes the different models for a socialist economy, including market socialism, state socialism, centralized and decentralized planning, modern models like Richard Wolff's or Paul Cockshott's. Clearly there's a lot more research and experimentation to be done before the optimal system is developed.

[CyM]

You're confused because as far as I know Marx hasn't answered the question in details. We know only that means of production should be socialized.
I think he, as a briliant economic observer, wouldn't be for something that is highly ineficient.
Marx said enough for us to know planning was a part of the communist programme from the beginning, but it is certainly true that the details have been filled in by historical experience and Marx never liked to run ahead of that.

"Market socialism" is not socialism.

The whole point of taking the means of production into the hands of the workers themselves is to abolish the anarchy of the market and rationalize humanity's economic life. This can only be done by embarking on a scientific plan worldwide, under worker's control. Producing for social need and not private profit. This would need to be an integrated plan internationally, so there is that centralized aspect to it, but it must also be democratic, so local control would be balanced in it.

Generally speaking, workplaces would elect councils, and those would elect industry and regional councils, which would elect to a council for the whole world.

This is a simplified answer, but that's the general idea. It is also the original thought behind the soviet system, since soviet means council. It is only through mass murder that the bureaucracy, with stalin at their head, was able to bury any thoughts of this in russia and replace it with a bureaucratic dictatorship. But even the nationalized planned economy, even bureaucraticly planned, was still an advance over capitalism. But the degeneration is a whole other discussion.

[Q]

Although I don't think CyM is quite right regarding soviets (see here why (http://www.revleft.com/vb/government-vs-no-t184074/index.html?p=2676834#post2676834), they are not democratic), he's spot on regarding the need for democratic input. Without the input on what is needed and why, there is little planning to be done.

In Towards a new socialism (http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/), Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell make the point that we also need quite a lot of computing power for a globally planned economy, which we only have since the last decade or two. In the 1970's some first prototyping was done along these lines in Project Cybersyn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn). This answers the question of how things will interact in an economy of several million product items.

The market under capitalism does this too, but at a very high efficiency cost and with the constant risk of total collapse (see chaos theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory) for a mathematical model why this is the case). The fundamental reason why crisis under capitalism are universal is because money is the universal commodity. This universality gives it the position that if something goes wrong with this "lubricant" commodity, that keeps all other commodities on the move, then the whole system grinds to a halt. This is why the banks played such an important role in the crisis since 2008.

You could liken this to the blood circulation in a human body, where the blood is the money delivering the goods to the rest of the system and the heart are the banks that act as central pump for this circulation. In this light the whole system had a heart attack in 2008 and we're still recovering from that.

However, the USSR was hardly an example of an alternative. As I argued before (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=18844), the USSR knew no rational form of planning and, as such, could not be called "planning" at all. The term target economy would cover it much better, because that was the essence of this bureaucratic system: It set arbitrary targets. This was a system that knew no inherent social logic in the same way that capitalism does have and it could only but collapse in the end.

Without democracy socialism is nothing, without socialism democracy is nothing.

[ckaihatsu]

The whole point of taking the means of production into the hands of the workers themselves is to abolish the anarchy of the market and rationalize humanity's economic life. This can only be done by embarking on a scientific plan worldwide, under worker's control. Producing for social need and not private profit. This would need to be an integrated plan internationally, so there is that centralized aspect to it, but it must also be democratic, so local control would be balanced in it.

Generally speaking, workplaces would elect councils, and those would elect industry and regional councils, which would elect to a council for the whole world.





4. Ends -- Flat, all-inclusive mode of participation at all levels without delegated representatives

[In] this day and age of fluid digital-based communications, we may want to dispense with formalized representative personages altogether and just conceptualize a productive entity within a supply chain network as having 'external business' or 'external matters' to include in its regular routine of entity-collective co-administration among its participants.

Given that people make *points* on any of a number of *issues*, which may comprise some larger *topics* -- and these fall into some general *themes*, or *categories* -- wouldn't this very discussion-board format of RevLeft be altogether suitable for a massively parallel (ground-level) political participation among all those concerned, particularly workers, for *all scales* of political implementation -- ?

I think there's conventionally been a kind of lingering anxiety over the political "workload" that would confront any regular person who would work *and* wish to have active, impacting participation in real-world policy, along the lines of the examples you've provided for this thread's discussion.

But I'll note that, for any given concrete issue, not everyone would *necessarily* find the material need to individually weigh in with a distinct proposal of their own -- as I think we've seen here from our own regular participation at RevLeft, it's often the case that a simple press of the 'Thanks' button is all that's needed in many cases where a comrade has *already* put forth the words that we would have said ourselves, thereby relieving us from the task of writing that sentiment ourselves.

Would concrete issues at higher, more-generalized levels be so different, so inaccessible to the regular, affected person on the ground? Wouldn't the information gathered within such an appropriate thread of discussion "clue everyone in" as the overall situation at that level -- say, from the participants of several different countries -- ?

I'll ask if delegated representatives *are* really required anymore when our current political vehicle, the Internet-based discussion board, can facilitate massively participatory, though orderly and topic-specific conversations, across all ranges of geography and scales of populations.


tinyurl.com/ckaihatsu-concise-communism


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In Towards a new socialism (http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/), Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell make the point that we also need quite a lot of computing power for a globally planned economy, which we only have since the last decade or two.


I'm going to call bullshit on this assertion since I think all that would be needed would be a *sorting* routine, for the function of 'mass prioritization' (of demands). Here's the basic idea:


[17] Prioritization Chart

http://s6.postimage.org/jy5fntvcd/17_Prioritization_Chart.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/jy5fntvcd/)


[10] Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy

http://s6.postimage.org/9rs8r3lkd/10_Supply_prioritization_in_a_socialist_transi.jpg (http://postimage.org/image/9rs8r3lkd/)


Also:


Detailed Alternatives to ParEcon?

http://www.revleft.com/vb/detailed-alternatives-pareconi-t184018/index.html

[reb]

The problem that you are having is that socialism is not an economic model to be implemented. Socialism isn't a question of computation power either. It is the abolition of capital by the proletarian class. Anyone submitting plans or theories on how socialism will operate, or the best way to socialism such as market socialism or central planning involving computation power, are utopians who either don't understand the essential class characteristics of the proletariat and the whole of Marx's understanding of revolution, capital and socialism.

[ckaihatsu]

The problem that you are having is that socialism is not an economic model to be implemented. Socialism isn't a question of computation power either. It is the abolition of capital by the proletarian class.




Anyone submitting plans or theories on how socialism will operate, or the best way to socialism such as market socialism or central planning involving computation power, are utopians who either don't understand the essential class characteristics of the proletariat and the whole of Marx's understanding of revolution, capital and socialism.


You're painting with a very broad brush here, and you're tarring a subset of revolutionaries as being stereotype "utopians" -- do you *really* think that such *don't* understand what the class divide in society is -- ?

It's *not* sidestepping the class struggle to conceive of possible societal implementations, post-class, as long as there's no fetish arising from that practice.

I, for one, think it can be helpful and instructive to consider various civilizational possibilities, given certain 'knowns' (like surplus-production), for a post-capitalist social order.