Economic Calculation Problem?....

[Pentrazemine]

Hi, guys, proud to be the latest addition on this forum after enough lurking and spying. I don't know if anyone here has brought this conundrum up before but is anyone familiar with the Economic Calculation Problem and how does one fix it if living in a Communistic or Socialist society?

I've been debating Anarchy-Capitalists on Steam and they seem to use that as the main sword of their argument. Any solid refutations of the ECP in relation to Capitalism and a hypothetical left-anarchist system?

[MarxSchmarx]

Great question. Funny you should mention steam. Modern means of communication have done much to address the originators concerns regarding the calculation problem.

Also, I'm moving this to economyics where you can go further in depth on this.

[cyu]

This right here is capitalism's economic calculation problem:

http://i.imgur.com/e1zyepx.jpg

Money determines how economic resources are allocated. If capitalists support inequality, then some people will have much more money than others. The result is that economic resources are misallocated and used to produce ever more useless things for the rich, while the poor get to sleep under bridges.

[tuwix]

Hi, guys, proud to be the latest addition on this forum after enough lurking and spying. I don't know if anyone here has brought this conundrum up before but is anyone familiar with the Economic Calculation Problem and how does one fix it if living in a Communistic or Socialist society?

I've been debating Anarchy-Capitalists on Steam and they seem to use that as the main sword of their argument. Any solid refutations of the ECP in relation to Capitalism and a hypothetical left-anarchist system?

First of all, socialism doesn't assume an obligatory central planning to extent of the Soviet Union. In the first phase money will still exist and there won't be any calculation problem. The higher phase happens in environment where there is no scarcity in the most of products and services. Then money become obsolete. In abundance of products and services the economic calculation problem is just irrelevant.

[Five Year Plan]

Hi, guys, proud to be the latest addition on this forum after enough lurking and spying. I don't know if anyone here has brought this conundrum up before but is anyone familiar with the Economic Calculation Problem and how does one fix it if living in a Communistic or Socialist society?

I've been debating Anarchy-Capitalists on Steam and they seem to use that as the main sword of their argument. Any solid refutations of the ECP in relation to Capitalism and a hypothetical left-anarchist system?

Yes, I am aware of the supposed problem. Pat Devine has written about it pretty extensively, most notably in his articles "The Economic Calculation Debate: Lessons for Socialists," "Participatory Planning as a Deliberative Democratic Process," and in his book Democracy and Economic Planning. I find his rebuttal to be most powerful I have come across.

[Strannik]

Economic calculation problem is indeed an argument against detailed central planning. It can be mathematically proven, that only society as a whole can calculate social economic balance. That being said, capitalist enterprises are just smaller central planning units who additionally relate to rest of the world only through money - therefore have the "social calculation problem". Moreover, since with each monetary transaction there's a loss of economic information and private property allows these losses to accumulate, free market economy ends in similar situation as buying power accumulates in one end of society and needs at the other end. (Btw, central planning can still work and works - it just can't be detailed).

"Decentralized calculation in kind" is brought up as an alternative, but I think what Marx had in mind was rather a society where production and consumption are one process. There is no exchange of resources/products/commodities at all. There is no anonymous consumption; people and organizations provide services to each other in sustainable manner; when a "bottleneck" appears in production chain, people just go and work at that particular place.

[Ledur]

First of all, socialism doesn't assume an obligatory central planning to extent of the Soviet Union. In the first phase money will still exist and there won't be any calculation problem. The higher phase happens in environment where there is no scarcity in the most of products and services. Then money become obsolete. In abundance of products and services the economic calculation problem is just irrelevant.

Ancaps would say that, since human wants are endless, every resource is scarce, even those not in use.

ECP basically means that, in absence of prices, production wouldn't rationally allocate resources.

The greatest refutation of ECP I've seen is "Economic Calculation controversy: unravelling of a myth" by Robin Cox. Unfortunately, it's not online anymore.

[Tim Cornelis]

Indeed, socialism has an economic calculation problem, and labour time calculations mitigate this problem, but do not solve it. It will always be a problem. I tend to see many socialists misinterpret what it means and come up with solutions that do not address the problem at all, so be wary of this. Using these arguments against the 'anarcho-capitalists' will probably result in you losing the argument. I would consider the text adviced in the post above one such example.

However, capitalism has a 'calculation problem' which is worse, which prioritises profits over human needs.

Also note that the reason the USSR collapsed was not due to economic calculation -- usually the free market fundamentalists just assume or postulate this is the case. It collapsed because of comparatively slow implementations of innovative production technology which halted economic growth and resulted in ever-increasing market reforms being implemented, until liberal-ish capitalism was embraced.

[robbo203]

Ancaps would say that, since human wants are endless, every resource is scarce, even those not in use.

ECP basically means that, in absence of prices, production wouldn't rationally allocate resources.

The greatest refutation of ECP I've seen is "Economic Calculation controversy: unravelling of a myth" by Robin Cox. Unfortunately, it's not online anymore.

Its here. http://www.des4rev.org.uk/cv3cox.htm

There is also something here http://mailstrom.blogspot.com.es/2006/11/how-socialism-can-organise-production.html

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Economic calculation problem is indeed an argument against detailed central planning. It can be mathematically proven, that only society as a whole can calculate social economic balance. That being said, capitalist enterprises are just smaller central planning units who additionally relate to rest of the world only through money - therefore have the "social calculation problem". Moreover, since with each monetary transaction there's a loss of economic information and private property allows these losses to accumulate, free market economy ends in similar situation as buying power accumulates in one end of society and needs at the other end. (Btw, central planning can still work and works - it just can't be detailed).

"Decentralized calculation in kind" is brought up as an alternative, but I think what Marx had in mind was rather a society where production and consumption are one process. There is no exchange of resources/products/commodities at all. There is no anonymous consumption; people and organizations provide services to each other in sustainable manner; when a "bottleneck" appears in production chain, people just go and work at that particular place.

I think Marx and Engels were fairly explicit that in socialism, the "anarchy in production" is replaced by "systematic, definite organisation" (Engels in anti-Duehring). What you propose seems to be closer to "anarchy in production" in the sense that it is entirely reactive, with producers moving in reaction to problems as they arise. I don't see the particular appeal of that, and non-anonymous consumption is pretty much an impossibility in a modern, global, socialised economy, thank Christ nonexistent.

As for the first paragraph, even if the mathematical proof you have in mind checks out, and is relevant to the situation (you can, of course, have proofs that are mathematically correct but completely irrelevant because they rely on faulty assumptions), it does not follow that detailed central planning is impossible, only that non-democratic or local detailed central planning is impossible. Thankfully very few people would propose a non-democratic sort of central planning.

[robbo203]

I think Marx and Engels were fairly explicit that in socialism, the "anarchy in production" is replaced by "systematic, definite organisation" (Engels in anti-Duehring). What you propose seems to be closer to "anarchy in production" in the sense that it is entirely reactive, with producers moving in reaction to problems as they arise. I don't see the particular appeal of that, and non-anonymous consumption is pretty much an impossibility in a modern, global, socialised economy, thank Christ nonexistent.

As for the first paragraph, even if the mathematical proof you have in mind checks out, and is relevant to the situation (you can, of course, have proofs that are mathematically correct but completely irrelevant because they rely on faulty assumptions), it does not follow that detailed central planning is impossible, only that non-democratic or local detailed central planning is impossible. Thankfully very few people would propose a non-democratic sort of central planning.

Classic or, as you call it, detailed, central planning is an impossiblity and an absurdity. It is quite ridiculous to propose apriori the input output ratios of literally millions of goods within some kind of giant Leontief type matix. The reason is obvious. If for any number of reasons the production of, say, steel, wheat, titanium or whatever falls short of the target specified in the Plan, this will have knock on ramifications that will feed through and affect the ability of producers to meet the numerous other detailed targets specified in the Plan. That is the nature of modern-day interconnected socialised production: the inputs of one sector are the outputs of another. They all hang together. The Plan will this inevitably generate massive inefficiencies - over production in some sectors mirroring under production in others

Point is that all sorts of factors could intrude to knock producers off course as far as meeting their specific target is concerned : a bad wheat harvest, a mining disaster, a flood or whatever. Every single moment of every single day something is going to happen that causes reality to diverge sharply from the Plan. But classic central planning, and the finely honed interdependence of all the parts of the plan, commits us to implementing the Plan in toto or not at all. Realistically there is no chance of it even getting off the ground. The very moment the Plan had been devised it will have to be redrawn again and again and again. The sheer rigidity of the plan - and the Plan is no longer a plan without it being rigid - condemns it to utter irrelevance.

We are left with no other option but to acknowlege the need for some kind of feedback mechanism. Capitalism has its feedback mechanism in the form of the market. Communism will have its feedback mechanism in the form of a self-regulating system of stock control. This article advances some ideas as to how the latter might work http://www.des4rev.org.uk/cv3cox.htm

I would also assert that central planning in the classical sense is implicitly anti-communist and indeed anti democratic. How in a free society are you going to enforce the meeting of targets? Labour regimentation? Trotsky's militarisation of labour? How are you going to ensure that people take no more than they are strictly rationed (and how indeed is rationing compatible with communist free access)? What about changing tastes and patterns of consumption. Are people not gpoing to be allowed to change their consumptions habits over the next 5 or 10 years because this will upset the intricately worked out calculations embodied in the Plan? And of course woe betide those who have more, or less, offspring than allowed for in the Plan!

More to the point, how is a global population of 7 billions going to meaningly legislate for the needs of everyone on planet Earth? Are the citizens of Washington going to help decide on the provision of public toilets for the citizens of Warsaw and vice versa? Obviously not, but this rather trite example does go to underscore a more serious point - that, almost inevitably, detailed central planning lends itself to decision making by a tiny technocratic elite which will soon enough evolve into a new ruling class with the power to enforce (or attempt to enforce) what its single giant plan had specified. By default, if not design, the capacity to make such decisions will steadily gravitate towards, and concentrate more and more in the hands of, that elite.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Classic or, as you call it, detailed, central planning is an impossiblity and an absurdity. It is quite ridiculous to propose apriori the input output ratios of literally millions of goods within some kind of giant Leontief type matix. The reason is obvious. If for any number of reasons the production of, say, steel, wheat, titanium or whatever falls short of the target specified in the Plan, this will have knock on ramifications that will feed through and affect the ability of producers to meet the numerous other detailed targets specified in the Plan. That is the nature of modern-day interconnected socialised production: the inputs of one sector are the outputs of another. They all hang together. The Plan will this inevitably generate massive inefficiencies - over production in some sectors mirroring under production in others

Point is that all sorts of factors could intrude to knock producers off course as far as meeting their specific target is concerned : a bad wheat harvest, a mining disaster, a flood or whatever. Every single moment of every single day something is going to happen that causes reality to diverge sharply from the Plan. But classic central planning, and the finely honed interdependence of all the parts of the plan, commits us to implementing the Plan in toto or not at all. Realistically there is no chance of it even getting off the ground. The very moment the Plan had been devised it will have to be redrawn again and again and again. The sheer rigidity of the plan - and the Plan is no longer a plan without being rigid - condemns it to utter irrelevance.

We are left with no other option but to acknowlege the need for some kind of feedback mechanism. Capitalism has its feedback mechanism in the form of the market. Communism will have its feedback mechanism in the form of a self-regulating system of stock control. This article advances some ideas as to how the latter might work http://www.des4rev.org.uk/cv3cox.htm

I would also assert that central planning in the classical sense is implicitly anti-communist and indeed anti democratic. How in a free society are you going to enforce the meeting of targets? Labour regimentation? Trotsky's militarisation of labour? How are you going to ensure that people take no more than they are strictly rationed (and how indeed is rationing compatible with communist free access). What about changing tastes and patterns of consumption. Are people not allowed to change their consumptions habits over the next 5 or 10 years because this will upset the intricately worked out calculations embodied in the Plan. And of course woe betide those who have more, or less, offspring than allowed for in the Plan!

More to the point, how is a global population of 7 billions going to meaningly legislate for the needs of everyone on planet Earth? Are the citizens of Washington going to help decide on the provision of public toilets for the citizens of Warsaw and vice versa? Obviously not but this rather trite example does go to underscore a more serious point - that, almost inevitably, detailed central planning lends itself to decision making by a tiny technocratic elite which will soon enough evolve into a new ruling class with the power to enforce what its single giant plan had specified

The problem is not with the notion of a feedback mechanism, the problem is with the assumption that the feedback mechanism needs to be automatic, instead of conscious and explicit. This, in the end, results merely in a simulated market with all of the attendant inefficiencies.

People might deride input-output matrices, but in fact we can deal with matrices pretty well, particularly if they're sparse (which they would be to a great extent). That is, however, essentially a technical question.

The other two objections are, I think, fairly spurious. How will society enforce the plan? It won't need to, in communism subjection to the socially-decided course of action is a matter of habit. And planning is compatible with free access since we can consistently overproduce (in fact, I'm not sure how free access would be possible in "your" system without shortages).

And plans are surely corrected all of the time. What makes a planned economy planned is that it is consciously guided by a definite scheme. It doesn't matter if the plan needs to be corrected from time to time (you might as well say train departures aren't planned because the time-table needs to be changed when accidents etc. happen).

[robbo203]

The problem is not with the notion of a feedback mechanism, the problem is with the assumption that the feedback mechanism needs to be automatic, instead of conscious and explicit. This, in the end, results merely in a simulated market with all of the attendant inefficiencies.

Not at all. Modern enterprises like supermarkets operate a self regulating system of stock control using physical calculation in kind which operates alongside a system of monetary calculation. Communism simply dispenses with the latter but retains the former. Im not quite sure why you counterpose "automatic" to "conscious" and "explicit". The people who operate a communist distribution store, say, could presumably install automatic electronic devices that register the rate at which stock is removed form the store in an automatic sense and so helps to make explicit in a quite consciuous fasion the fact that fresh stock needs to be ordered.




People might deride input-output matrices, but in fact we can deal with matrices pretty well, particularly if they're sparse (which they would be to a great extent). That is, however, essentially a technical question.


I can do no better than quote Xue Muqiao, an adviser to the Chinese state Planning Commission

An all inclusive plan setting arbitrary targets for the grasssroots is impractical because..there are millions of products and even a greater number of varieties and specifications of these products which cannot be covered by a single plam. In China only a few hundred products, accounting for a little over half of the GNP value, are handled directly by the State Planning Commission. While the commision can work ourt accurate figures for a few dozen products, it can only make rough estimates for the rest. Even in the case of the former, the figures can cannot possibly cover all the vaieties and specifications which can only be determined by business agencies or between supply and user (State Capitalism. The Wages system under New Management Buick and Crump p.82)

In the Soviet Union, Gosplan's "plans" were a joke. Almost routinely, plans had to be modified to fit in with changing realities and to appear as if the plan had been filled. The plans were litte more than a wishlist. They did not shape economic circumstances as were shaped by the latter



The other two objections are, I think, fairly spurious. How will society enforce the plan? It won't need to, in communism subjection to the socially-decided course of action is a matter of habit. And planning is compatible with free access since we can consistently overproduce (in fact, I'm not sure how free access would be possible in "your" system without shortages).

No this is a straw argument. Capitalism is after all compatible with planning. In fact capitalism is full of plans. Enterprises plan everyday. The argument here is whether there should be one single plan for the whole oif society or numerous plans that mutually interact and adjust to each other over time. Im arguing for the latter. And of course communist production units would aim as a general rule to overproduce in the sense of producing a buffer of stock so as to accommodate unpredictable changes in demand or supply. That is an aspect of the largely self regulating system of communist production that Im advancing.

But what of your detailed central planning involving a single society-wide planning. You say it wont need to enforce the plan becuase "subjection to the socially-decided course of action is a matter of habit". This raises more questions than it answers. How is the plan to be socially decided? I suggest to you that even if your arrangement were technicaly feasible the plan would be decided not by society but a very small technocratic elite claiming to speak for society.

Secondly, it is not a question of the inculcation of appropriate habits but of information and coordination. Your diligent communist workforce can turn up for work everyday but still the problem could and almost certainly will arise that I am speaking about . Shortfalls in certain targets for whatever reason will have knock on consequences for other targets leading to massive wastages and inefficiencies. If product X require two inputs A and B and the production of A for some reason is curtailed what is the point of the producers of B slavishly continuing to produce B at the same rate of production in order to meet their specified target?



And plans are surely corrected all of the time. What makes a planned economy planned is that it is consciously guided by a definite scheme. It doesn't matter if the plan needs to be corrected from time to time (you might as well say train departures aren't planned because the time-table needs to be changed when accidents etc. happen).

But if you are talking about plans that are corrected from time to time, you are no longer talking of classical central planning in the sense of a single society wide plan covering everying. I agree that plans "needs to be corrected from time to time" and it is significant that you talk of plans in the plural which is to slide away from the conception of central planning as such since you are no longer talking of a single plan. But this is precisely what makes that conception unrealisable.

What you are in fact alluding is is what is or was called indicative planning but that is far removed from full on central planning. You come up with a wishlist of targets to reach - so many tonnes of steel, so many units of housing and so on - which you hope producers will consciously take on board and somehow orientate themselves towards fulfiling. But this is predicated on the idea of relatively autonomous units making their own decisions albeit consciously guided by a definite scheme as you say.

However, indicative planning which was attempted in places like France and the UK in the early post war area proved to be more or less a complete flop precisely because it lacked any teeth. Central planning might possess teeth in that sense of joining up all the dots but in order for the concept to be implemented the plan has to be applied in toto and without being subject to corrections. If you correct parts of the Plan it is the whole Plan that in effect needs to be corrected becuase of the interdependence of the parts of the Plan. This cannot happen without destroying the very coherency of the Plan itself since it means endlessly having to correct the Plan. Which is why in practical terms classic central planning is completely unrealisable

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Not at all. Modern enterprises like supermarkets operate a self regulating system of stock control using physical calculation in kind which operates alongside a system of monetary calculation. Communism simply dispenses with the latter but retains the former. Im not quite sure why you counterpose "automatic" to "conscious" and "explicit". The people who operate a communist distribution store, say, could presumably install automatic electronic devices that register the rate at which stock is removed form the store in an automatic sense and so helps to make explicit in a quite consciuous fasion the fact that fresh stock needs to be ordered.

I counterpose automatic action to explicit, conscious decisions, and I think this is fairly elementary, because if something is done automatically it is not subject to conscious decision. In any case, even in the example above, it is individual economic units that are making the decision (possibly - if there is a rate of stock depletion that should automatically lead to ordering new stock, it really isn't a matter of their decision), not society as a whole.

Now, let's see how your system would actually work. Let us suppose that the stock of computers in one distribution centre has been depleted to the extent that an order is made for new computers. Now, what does this mean? It means that the computer factory, in turn, needs to make new orders for plastic, for microchips, the microchip factory in turn needs to send an order to the silicon manufacturers and so on. And not only that, the transportation of all of these has to be organised on an ad hoc basis, which is no trivial matter considering that almost any individual economic unit will need resources from the entire planet, from the rare metals of former China to copper of the Congo basin.

So in fact, if shortages are to be avoided, the demand for various goods needs to be assessed in advance (so that the various economic units know how much to (over)produce), transportation needs to be arranged in advance and, in fact, you end up with a planned economy.


I can do no better than quote Xue Muqiao, an adviser to the Chinese state Planning Commission

An all inclusive plan setting arbitrary targets for the grasssroots is impractical because..there are millions of products and even a greater number of varieties and specifications of these products which cannot be covered by a single plam. In China only a few hundred products, accounting for a little over half of the GNP value, are handled directly by the State Planning Commission. While the commision can work ourt accurate figures for a few dozen products, it can only make rough estimates for the rest. Even in the case of the former, the figures can cannot possibly cover all the vaieties and specifications which can only be determined by business agencies or between supply and user (State Capitalism. The Wages system under New Management Buick and Crump p.82)

Ah, see, that's because in China, planning outside the industrial core of the state economy is a bad joke. And of course the Chinese bureaucracy can't assess the figures for products, as it does not allow any democratic input. Likewise the Soviet Union. All this shows is that, surprise surprise, if you don't ask the members of society, you can't know what they want.


No this is a straw argument. Capitalism is after all compatible with planning. In fact capitalism is full of plans. Enterprises plan everyday. The argument here is whether there should be one single plan for the whole oif society or numerous plans that mutually interact and adjust to each other over time. Im arguing for the latter. And of course communist production units would aim as a general rule to overproduce in the sense of producing a buffer of stock so as to accommodate unpredictable changes in demand or supply. That is an aspect of the largely self regulating system of communist production that Im advancing.

But what of your detailed central planning involving a single society-wide planning. You say it wont need to enforce the plan becuase "subjection to the socially-decided course of action is a matter of habit". This raises more questions than it answers. How is the plan to be socially decided? I suggest to you that even if your arrangement were technicaly feasible the plan would be decided not by society but a very small technocratic elite claiming to speak for society.

"Technocratic elite", it that a Marxist term? It is not. The point is that any social plan needs to be the result of a democratic decision of the member of society, as the planners do not magically know what people want unless they ask them. Of course a dedicated organ of the central authorities would probably have the responsibility for drawing up the plan, or several plans, after having consulted the members of society by questionnaire, and so on - it really isn't important to draw up a precise plan of social planning in the year 2030 now - and then the democratic organs of society would either approve of the plan or reject it.


Secondly, it is not a question of the inculcation of appropriate habits but of information and coordination. Your diligent communist workforce can turn up for work everyday but still the problem could and almost certainly will arise that I am speaking about . Shortfalls in certain targets for whatever reason will have knock on consequences for other targets leading to massive wastages and inefficiencies. If product X require two inputs A and B and the production of A for some reason is curtailed what is the point of the producers of B slavishly continuing to produce B at the same rate of production in order to meet their specified target?

Obviously there would be supervisory and monitoring organs, and obviously human society has had the capacity to communicate these things since the invention of the telegraph.

Let's suppose that Dildo Factory 108 has blown up. The workers notify the relevant organ, which briefly consults the remaining factories and re-divides the production quotas, informing each factory. I don't see anything problematic about that.


But if you are talking about plans that are corrected from time to time, you are no longer talking of classical central planning in the sense of a single society wide plan covering everying. I agree that plans "needs to be corrected from time to time" and it is significant that you talk of plans in the plural which is to slide away from the conception of central planning as such since you are no longer talking of a single plan. But this is precisely what makes that conception unrealisable.

What you are in fact alluding is is what is or was called indicative planning but that is far removed from full on central planning. You come up with a wishlist of targets to reach - so many tonnes of steel, so many units of housing and so on - which you hope producers will consciously take on board and somehow orientate themselves towards fulfiling. But this is predicated on the idea of relatively autonomous units making their own decisions albeit consciously guided by a definite scheme as you say.

However, indicative planning which was attempted in places like France and the UK in the early post war area proved to be more or less a complete flop precisely because it lacked any teeth. Central planning might possess teeth in that sense of joining up all the dots but in order for the concept to be implemented the plan has to be applied in toto and without being subject to corrections. If you correct parts of the Plan it is the whole Plan that in effect needs to be corrected becuase of the interdependence of the parts of the Plan. This cannot happen without destroying the very coherency of the Plan itself since it means endlessly having to correct the Plan. Which is why in practical terms classic central planning is completely unrealisable

No, indicative planning is not what I was talking about. I was talking about the trivial fact that any plan, not just general social production plans, but train departure time-tables, university curricula etc. (hence "plans", not because I think that there would be multiple social production plans in a socialist society, which would mean there is no central planning at all and the anarchy of production has not been abolished), needs to be corrected when unforeseen circumstances arise. This does not mean the plan is not a plan but a suggestion (as in planned-for circumstances it is to be followed to the letter), but that humans can not control all of the variables for production (yet). Accidents, droughts etc. happen.

[robbo203]

I counterpose automatic action to explicit, conscious decisions, and I think this is fairly elementary, because if something is done automatically it is not subject to conscious decision. In any case, even in the example above, it is individual economic units that are making the decision (possibly - if there is a rate of stock depletion that should automatically lead to ordering new stock, it really isn't a matter of their decision), not society as a whole.

Now, let's see how your system would actually work. Let us suppose that the stock of computers in one distribution centre has been depleted to the extent that an order is made for new computers. Now, what does this mean? It means that the computer factory, in turn, needs to make new orders for plastic, for microchips, the microchip factory in turn needs to send an order to the silicon manufacturers and so on. And not only that, the transportation of all of these has to be organised on an ad hoc basis, which is no trivial matter considering that almost any individual economic unit will need resources from the entire planet, from the rare metals of former China to copper of the Congo basin.

So in fact, if shortages are to be avoided, the demand for various goods needs to be assessed in advance (so that the various economic units know how much to (over)produce), transportation needs to be arranged in advance and, in fact, you end up with a planned economy.

You are making my case for me. It is the very forbidding complexity of the productive inter-relationships within a modern industrial economy whether under capitalism or communism that completely rules out what you seem to be advocating - detailed central planning. Spontaneity, what you characterise as ad hocery, on the basis of an institutionalised feedback mechanism and the mutual adjustments of numerous production and distribution units to each others' plans - that is, an essentially self regulating system of production - is the only realistic basis on which to proceed.

You seem to overlook that it is just such a mechanism -a system of self regulating stock control - that affords us the very means to assess the demand for various goods and ensure an adequate buffer stock to accomodate any unexpected changes in demand. What is your solution in the absence of such a feedback mechanism? Are you literally proposing to consult the entire world's population on what they want in respect of a vast range of products runing into several millions before you proceed to embark on producing for those wants. The idea is absurd. But that seems to be exactly what you are suggesting by your statement that "if shortages are to be avoided, the demand for various goods needs to be assessed in advance". We dont need to assess this demand "in advance". There is already in place an ongoing dialectic between supply and demand which is effectively mediated by a self regulating system of stock control.





Ah, see, that's because in China, planning outside the industrial core of the state economy is a bad joke. And of course the Chinese bureaucracy can't assess the figures for products, as it does not allow any democratic input. Likewise the Soviet Union. All this shows is that, surprise surprise, if you don't ask the members of society, you can't know what they want.


No this is just so wrong. Its not because of the lack of "democratic input" that the Chinese State Planning Cpommission could at best manipulate only a few hundred products within an input output matrix when in the real world there are literally millions upon millions of products to deal with. Nor is it becuase of the lack of computational power. The problem resides in the real world itself, in the ever changing complex inter-relationships of the multiple variables you have to work with.

Actually, trying to operate a system of detailed central planning "democratically" is even more impossibly daunting, if one can talk in such terms, than trying to operate it by authoritarian top-down diktat. It adds an additional and indeed insurmountable layer of complexity to the whole procedure. How exactly are you going to go about asking every single member of society "democratically" on what they want out of a list comprising millions of products ? This not to mention , as Xue put it, the even "greater number of varieties and specifications of these products" e.g.clothing styles, colour or size of cars etc etc




"Technocratic elite", it that a Marxist term? It is not. The point is that any social plan needs to be the result of a democratic decision of the member of society, as the planners do not magically know what people want unless they ask them. Of course a dedicated organ of the central authorities would probably have the responsibility for drawing up the plan, or several plans, after having consulted the members of society by questionnaire, and so on - it really isn't important to draw up a precise plan of social planning in the year 2030 now - and then the democratic organs of society would either approve of the plan or reject it.


Technocratic elite may not be a Marxist term (so what, anyway?) but that is what your central planners operating out of your single planning centre will become by default if not by design. Decisionmaking, of sheer logistical necessity, will concentrate relentlessly in the hands of this elite which will in due course, Im convinced, transmute into a new ruling class (which is of course , very much a Marxist term).

And this idea of yours of consulting members of society - all 7 billion of us - by questionnaire - what exactly do you propose to include in this questionnaire? And again why would you need such a questionaiire given that you already know what people want judging form the ever shifting pattern of consumption as revealed via the self regulating system of stock control? Thus, persistant shortages of stock will suggest robust and possibly unmet demand whereas conversely a slow take up rate will suggest sluggish demand.

Im not averse to some forms of pro-active interventions to determine more precisely what people are wanting - such as consumer surveys - to supplement the data provided by a self regulating system of stock control but thats an entirely different matter. What you are proposing is something monumentally daunting and by that token incredibly rigid and inflexible. By the time you have consulted all 7 billion people and worked out what they wanted, it is quite likely that that their needs will have changed significantly - or do you intend to insist that they should not alter what they want by one iota for the duration of the next five years? Tough if in the meanwhile you develop a life threatening cancer and the store has not been allocated a big enough supply of the drug to accomodate your need for it.



Obviously there would be supervisory and monitoring organs, and obviously human society has had the capacity to communicate these things since the invention of the telegraph.

Let's suppose that Dildo Factory 108 has blown up. The workers notify the relevant organ, which briefly consults the remaining factories and re-divides the production quotas, informing each factory. I don't see anything problematic about that.



Apart from the word "quota" which is grounded in the ideology of central planning there is nothing much problematic about that. I dont know whether, with today's distributed computer networks, there would be much call for some kind of middleman to liaise between the different factories and distribution store requesting a supply of dildos but thats another matter




No, indicative planning is not what I was talking about. I was talking about the trivial fact that any plan, not just general social production plans, but train departure time-tables, university curricula etc. (hence "plans", not because I think that there would be multiple social production plans in a socialist society, which would mean there is no central planning at all and the anarchy of production has not been abolished), needs to be corrected when unforeseen circumstances arise. This does not mean the plan is not a plan but a suggestion (as in planned-for circumstances it is to be followed to the letter), but that humans can not control all of the variables for production (yet). Accidents, droughts etc. happen.

I am not suggesting that a plan is not a plan if it is not correctible. In capitalism there are millions of interacting plans. Central planning is the proposal to replace these millions of plans by one single plan embracing the entirety of production so that there is no no longer any spontaneous interaction or what you call "anarchy of production". (Marx and Engels argued that anarchy of production would grow under capitalism even as they held that capital would become more and concentrated - which suggests that they had a sonewhat different understanding of the expression "anarchy of production" than you have and that it is not necessarily to do with sheer number of planning units operating in the economy)

All planning is by defintion apriori. We conceive of the plan in advance and then implement it in practice. In capitalism that happens all the time and so will it happen in communism. You suggest that there will be no multiple social production plans in a socialist society, becuase that would mean there is no central planning at all and the anarchy of production has not been abolished. So you clearly have in mind society-wide planning involving one single gigantic plan and hence one single planning aiuthority. It is not logically possible in these circumstances to talk of there being several "plans"; there is and can only be one plan otherwise it is not strictly central planning but polycentric planning

In the case of a polycentric planning system I am advocating you have multiple plans spantaneously interacting with each other and adjusting towards each other. There is in other words a built in form of correction going on all the time. You correct your plan in the light of other peoples' plans. If a distribution stores orders more of X you increase your planned output of X. Simples. But what of your system of unicentric central planning. How is the Plan to be "corrected"?

You have simply failed to address my central point. Any change that happens to any part of your single society wide Plan means the whole Plan has to be reconfigured from scratch . This is becuase the different parts of the plan necessarily hang togther within the nexus of input output relationships. If the global output of steel unexpectedly declines by 2 % this will adversely affect the output of tractors which in turn will affect the wheat harvest next year and so on and so forth. So the plan will have to be redrawn in its entirety with new production targets being allocated for each of the millions and millions of producer and consumer goods comprising the Plan


The point is that these kind of divergences between the Plan and the reality it seeks to "plan" are occuring, and will occur, at every moment of every day and every time that happens you will have to reconfigure the Plan. Which basically means that you will never ever actually get round to producing such a comprehensive plan in the first place. It will be constantly stuck in the drawing room at the formulation stage, so to speak, with the hardpressed and harrased central planners desparately trying to play catch up with the ever shifting pattern of real world material balances.

For that reason alone, and there are several more, it will be doomed from the get go.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

You are making my case for me. It is the very forbidding complexity of the productive inter-relationships within a modern industrial economy whether under capitalism or communism that completely rules out what you seem to be advocating - detailed central planning. Spontaneity, what you characterise as ad hocery, on the basis of an institutionalised feedback mechanism and the mutual adjustments of numerous production and distribution units to each others' plans - that is, an essentially self regulating system of production - is the only realistic basis on which to proceed.

You seem to overlook that it is just such a mechanism -a system of self regulating stock control - that affords us the very means to assess the demand for various goods and ensure an adequate buffer stock to accomodate any unexpected changes in demand. What is your solution in the absence of such a feedback mechanism? Are you literally proposing to consult the entire world's population on what they want in respect of a vast range of products runing into several millions before you proceed to embark on producing for those wants. The idea is absurd. But that seems to be exactly what you are suggesting by your statement that "if shortages are to be avoided, the demand for various goods needs to be assessed in advance". We dont need to assess this demand "in advance". There is already in place an ongoing dialectic between supply and demand which is effectively mediated by a self regulating system of stock control.

This misses the point of my question entirely, which is a shame because, even though I don't particularly care for your politics, I think your approach to problems of production and distribution is both more coherent and Marxist than the sort of market "socialism" that is standard on this site.

So, let me rephrase the question: you expect projected shortages to send signals, mostly automated, to production units, where in turn either projected or real shortages would send signals to other production units and so on. In order to avoid delays and shortages, two things are necessary. First, a "buffer" of overproduction that would take care of any momentary shortages, and second, transportation and logistics in general.

Both, it seems to me, require planning in advance, first of all because the size of the buffer needs to be calculated (the socialist society, of course, does not need to worry about capitalist "inefficiency", but there is still something less than socially optimal about an iron smelting operation producing tonnes of unneeded iron to rust, deform, get lost in warehouses etc.

Second, the transportation needs to be planned out in advance as there is a given number of freight ships, trucks etc., and it is preferable to space them so as to avoid congestion. With central planning, this is simply a computational problem that needs to be solved together with the input-output segment etc. But if transport is arranged in an ad hoc basis, well, I am sure we know where that leads.

That, at least, is my take on the problem. The question, then, is how you propose that shortages and transport bottlenecks be prevented without planning in advance.

Two minor point: it seems that in your proposal, production units would work haltingly and sporadically, producing enough for one "order" and then going idle, but this is probably the worst way to operate a factory and similar units. Second, how would the "order" be forwarded to the "correct" factory so as to minimise the delay between an order being made and the final product being received, the usage of certain priority resources etc.?


No this is just so wrong. Its not because of the lack of "democratic input" that the Chinese State Planning Cpommission could at best manipulate only a few hundred products within an input output matrix when in the real world there are literally millions upon millions of products to deal with. Nor is it becuase of the lack of computational power. The problem resides in the real world itself, in the ever changing complex inter-relationships of the multiple variables you have to work with.

Actually, trying to operate a system of detailed central planning "democratically" is even more impossibly daunting, if one can talk in such terms, than trying to operate it by authoritarian top-down diktat. It adds an additional and indeed insurmountable layer of complexity to the whole procedure. How exactly are you going to go about asking every single member of society "democratically" on what they want out of a list comprising millions of products ? This not to mention , as Xue put it, the even "greater number of varieties and specifications of these products" e.g.clothing styles, colour or size of cars etc etc

But in fact, most people consume only a small subset of those millions of products on a daily basis. I never said that questionnaires would be the only method of assessing demand, or even the primary one (that would be as tedious as ParEcon). I explicitly did not present a finished proposal for how demand would be assessed in a planned economy, as I lack the necessary expertise (I'm a physicist, currently working as a computer monkey), and in the absence of an actual entirely centrally-planned economy, I would be forced to speculate far too much. Perhaps when I'm forty and commissar for the construction of heavy industry or something.

Nonetheless, I imagine there are several methods of assessing this demand (and I've said the phrase too many times and now it sounds weird): looking at the consumption in the previous period and extrapolating (preferably using several models and assumptions), questionnaires, having the consumers rank their preference, and so on. Generally, if you think that a decentralised system would be able to assess consumer demands, there is no reason why this data can not be collated and linked together.

In any case, what makes planning democratic is the element of political decision - it should be a democratic decision of society to approve of or reject any plan drawn up by the planning organs.


Technocratic elite may not be a Marxist term (so what, anyway?) but that is what your central planners operating out of your single planning centre will become by default if not by design. Decisionmaking, of sheer logistical necessity, will concentrate relentlessly in the hands of this elite which will in due course, Im convinced, transmute into a new ruling class (which is of course , very much a Marxist term).

Except, of course, the ruling class is a very specific social group, defined not by its position in the planning process but its relation to the means of production. I'm not sure how to address this, to be honest, as you don't say why planning bodies (which, in socialism, would be elected, recall-able, which would not be composed of "specialists" as there would be no spetsy in socialism etc.) would become a "technocratic elite", whatever that means, "by default".


And this idea of yours of consulting members of society - all 7 billion of us - by questionnaire - what exactly do you propose to include in this questionnaire? And again why would you need such a questionaiire given that you already know what people want judging form the ever shifting pattern of consumption as revealed via the self regulating system of stock control? Thus, persistant shortages of stock will suggest robust and possibly unmet demand whereas conversely a slow take up rate will suggest sluggish demand.

Suggest, but the actual situation on the ground might be different. Things like fads, consumer products becoming obsolete and so on, these are all things that a "self-regulating system of stock control" would not be able to predict (of course, strictly speaking it can't predict anything, bless'im, which is why human planners are always preferable to automatic systems).

Furthermore, how would this system handle major projects that are not strictly speaking tied to consumer demand - new dams, new nuclear power plants, new Orion-drive spaceships, whatever? No one comes into a store and buys a dam. I hope.


Im not averse to some forms of pro-active interventions to determine more precisely what people are wanting - such as consumer surveys - to supplement the data provided by a self regulating system of stock control but thats an entirely different matter. What you are proposing is something monumentally daunting and by that token incredibly rigid and inflexible. By the time you have consulted all 7 billion people and worked out what they wanted, it is quite likely that that their needs will have changed significantly - or do you intend to insist that they should not alter what they want by one iota for the duration of the next five years? Tough if in the meanwhile you develop a life threatening cancer and the store has not been allocated a big enough supply of the drug to accomodate your need for it.

The stereotypical five-year plan was appropriate, to an extent, for an era of punched card tabulation machines (I think RabKrIn was the biggest consumer of these). With modern technology, year-by-year plans are probably not impossible (and in fact it is advantageous to have the target period as short as possible, as projections tend to go awry if you go far enough into the future). And, again, I would point out the necessity of consistent overproduction, so as to take care of any sudden spikes in demand, whether from cancer, or new children being born etc.


Apart from the word "quota" which is grounded in the ideology of central planning there is nothing much problematic about that. I dont know whether, with today's distributed computer networks, there would be much call for some kind of middleman to liaise between the different factories and distribution store requesting a supply of dildos but thats another matter

Of course there is need for a middleman - first of all because these decisions need to be registered to facilitate social accounting at the end of the period, and second because it is not the job of each individual factory to know about the capacities of other factories. A central office can see that, Factory 108 having tragically blown up, it would be most expedient for Factory 109 to take up 80% of the additional workload, Factory 201 10%, and Factory 203 the rest. Then the central office can check in with the factories in question to see if that's alright - if the workers are willing to work the extra hours - and if not to think of something else.


I am not suggesting that a plan is not a plan if it is not correctible. In capitalism there are millions of interacting plans. Central planning is the proposal to replace these millions of plans by one single plan embracing the entirety of production so that there is no no longer any spontaneous interaction or what you call "anarchy of production". (Marx and Engels argued that anarchy of production would grow under capitalism even as they held that capital would become more and concentrated - which suggests that they had a sonewhat different understanding of the expression "anarchy of production" than you have and that it is not necessarily to do with sheer number of planning units operating in the economy)

I'm not sure that follows. The concentration of capital does not necessarily mean that disparate plans are linked together into one general plan - consider e.g. the pre-war rail cartel, where each national railway pursued its own agenda. Furthermore, as capital becomes concentrated, the complexity of capitalist production increases, the global scope of the market becomes increasingly apparent, and larger and larger strata of the ruined petite-bourgeoisie, previously producing essentially for local consumption, are drawn into capitalist production, increasing the anarchy of production.


All planning is by defintion apriori. We conceive of the plan in advance and then implement it in practice. In capitalism that happens all the time and so will it happen in communism. You suggest that there will be no multiple social production plans in a socialist society, becuase that would mean there is no central planning at all and the anarchy of production has not been abolished. So you clearly have in mind society-wide planning involving one single gigantic plan and hence one single planning aiuthority. It is not logically possible in these circumstances to talk of there being several "plans"; there is and can only be one plan otherwise it is not strictly central planning but polycentric planning

Yes, if central planning is in effect it is impossible to talk about more than one social economic plan, but the only time I used the plural "plans" I was talking about all manners of plans, from curricula to timetables.


In the case of a polycentric planning system I am advocating you have multiple plans spantaneously interacting with each other and adjusting towards each other. There is in other words a built in form of correction going on all the time. You correct your plan in the light of other peoples' plans. If a distribution stores orders more of X you increase your planned output of X. Simples. But what of your system of unicentric central planning. How is the Plan to be "corrected"?

You have simply failed to address my central point. Any change that happens to any part of your single society wide Plan means the whole Plan has to be reconfigured from scratch . This is becuase the different parts of the plan necessarily hang togther within the nexus of input output relationships. If the global output of steel unexpectedly declines by 2 % this will adversely affect the output of tractors which in turn will affect the wheat harvest next year and so on and so forth. So the plan will have to be redrawn in its entirety with new production targets being allocated for each of the millions and millions of producer and consumer goods comprising the Plan

To an extent, yes, although probably only one part of the input-output matrix would have to be changed. However, if the initial calculations are not a problem, neither are the new calculations needed to correct the plan, assuming of course there is no need to correct it often, which we can assume would be the case.


The point is that these kind of divergences between the Plan and the reality it seeks to "plan" are occuring, and will occur, at every moment of every day and every time that happens you will have to reconfigure the Plan. Which basically means that you will never ever actually get round to producing such a comprehensive plan in the first place. It will be constantly stuck in the drawing room at the formulation stage, so to speak, with the hardpressed and harrased central planners desparately trying to play catch up with the ever shifting pattern of real world material balances.

For that reason alone, and there are several more, it will be doomed from the get go.

Well, no, assuming the social knowledge of existing production capacities and material resources is adequate - and there is no reason to assume it isn't, there is no need to constantly redraft the plan. You talk about the global output of steel declines - but society would control the output of the steel industry. How would it declines, unless something truly unprecedented were to happen, to the effect of a significant percentage of the steelworks becoming inoperative?

Minor malfunctions will occur constantly, of course, and as I argued in another thread, there is a good way to take that into account: simply assume the production unit will not work with 100% efficiency, but with an efficiency corresponding to the weighted risk that it will become inoperative for X days - i.e. the coefficient would probably be something like:

(1 - (number of days the unit is inoperative/total planning period) * probability of the unit being operative for that number of days.

It's crude, and there's probably a better way to do it, but it's just an example of how these things can be taken into account.

[robbo203]

This misses the point of my question entirely, which is a shame because, even though I don't particularly care for your politics, I think your approach to problems of production and distribution is both more coherent and Marxist than the sort of market "socialism" that is standard on this site.

So, let me rephrase the question: you expect projected shortages to send signals, mostly automated, to production units, where in turn either projected or real shortages would send signals to other production units and so on. In order to avoid delays and shortages, two things are necessary. First, a "buffer" of overproduction that would take care of any momentary shortages, and second, transportation and logistics in general.

Both, it seems to me, require planning in advance, first of all because the size of the buffer needs to be calculated (the socialist society, of course, does not need to worry about capitalist "inefficiency", but there is still something less than socially optimal about an iron smelting operation producing tonnes of unneeded iron to rust, deform, get lost in warehouses etc.

Second, the transportation needs to be planned out in advance as there is a given number of freight ships, trucks etc., and it is preferable to space them so as to avoid congestion. With central planning, this is simply a computational problem that needs to be solved together with the input-output segment etc. But if transport is arranged in an ad hoc basis, well, I am sure we know where that leads.


That, at least, is my take on the problem. The question, then, is how you propose that shortages and transport bottlenecks be prevented without planning in advance.



With all due respect you are completely missing the point. "Planning in advance" is not the issue and in any case planning by definition is apriori. I repeat - capitalism is full of "planning in advance". Any conceivable kind of society involves "planning in advance". Where did you get the impression that I am somehow against it?

The issue is rather central planning - one single society wide plan covering everything - or polycentric planning meaning numerous plans and planning bodies interacting with, and adusting to , each other, their interactions being mediated via a feedback mechanism - a self regulating system of stock control - which by definition cental planning lacks.

Ive explained why this lack of feedback mechanism will effectively stymie any attempt to get a system of society wide planning off the ground - because the very rigidity of the plan (without which it would be rendered incoherent) means that if any part of the plan changes, the whole plan must be redrawn in toto. This is because the parts of the plan all hang together and must do so in order for the plan to be coherent at all.

Ive also expained that even if the proposal of society wide planning could be put into effect the implications of such a proposal are seriously anthithetical to everything that a free comunist society stands for. It will unavoidably concentrate power in the hands of a few who by default will willy nilly have to make most of the decisions. Also, its rigid system of production targets which must all be met across the board if the coherency of the Plan is to be maintained has distinctly authoritariam implications which smack of the militarisation of labour, the very opposite of the communist notion of an association of free producers. Similarly on the demand side of the equation, central planning brooks no departure from the plan for the same reason that any such departure will neciessite the complete reconfiguration of the Plan. Finally there is question of technological innovation which Ive not mentioned before but will also be rendered problematic by the imp[lenation of society wide planning.

Polycentric planning on the other hand is sufficiently adaptable and responsive to overcome each and all of these problems. You mention the problem of shortages and transport bottlenecks. Well , of course it is precisely the fact that supply of a particular good has fallen below the demand for it as indicated by means of a self regulating system of stock control that producers under a polycentric system of planning are able to deal with problem of shortages. By contrast how does a system of society wide planning even recogniseor acknowlege such a shortage exist. The answer is it can't. It falls outside the parameters within which it operates. It has no feedback mechanism whatsoever to enable it to deal with the problem of shortages exzcept to scrap the Plan and start again only to run into the same problem again. Individuals under a centrally planned economy may raise a hue and cry about shortages of certain goods but there is a fundamental disconnect between their voiced complaints and the way in which the the system operates. As I said there is no wayto adjust the plan to overcome these shortages wihtout requiring the whole plan to be reconfigured in toto. So you face a dillema : accept the plan and therefore accept the shortages for the duration of the plan or dont accept the shortages and scrap the plan completely

Regarding transportation needs, yes, of course this requires "advance planning" but once again that does mean it has to be part of a single society wide plan does it? Advance planning does not equall central planning. There will of ocurse be an important element of localised community decision making where issues such as transportation facilities will naturally arise Im am certainly not against this at all and that is why i questioned you earlier on your false dichotomy between consciousness planning and the automaticity of a self-regulating stock control system. These two things complement each other




Two minor point: it seems that in your proposal, production units would work haltingly and sporadically, producing enough for one "order" and then going idle, but this is probably the worst way to operate a factory and similar units. Second, how would the "order" be forwarded to the "correct" factory so as to minimise the delay between an order being made and the final product being received, the usage of certain priority resources etc.?


These two poiints may be connected. A production unit working sporadically and haltingly and hence below capacity is also one that naturally lends itself to being considered an appropriate source of supply - your "correct" factory - if the intention is minimise the delay between the triggering oif an order and reciept of the stock ordered. I am assuming you mean by this that usual supplier is fully stretched and an alternative supplier needs to be sought. On the other hand if you are saying that all the factories producing this particular good are working sporadically and haltingly well then that would suggest there is an oversupply of industrial capacity for producing this particular good. In which case there might be a prima facie for some of these factories to retool and manufacture some other product. A polycentric system of planning is sufficiently flexible to allow this to happen. A centrally planned economy involvng society wide planning is clearly not



But in fact, most people consume only a small subset of those millions of products on a daily basis. I never said that questionnaires would be the only method of assessing demand, or even the primary one (that would be as tedious as ParEcon). I explicitly did not present a finished proposal for how demand would be assessed in a planned economy, as I lack the necessary expertise (I'm a physicist, currently working as a computer monkey), and in the absence of an actual entirely centrally-planned economy, I would be forced to speculate far too much. Perhaps when I'm forty and commissar for the construction of heavy industry or something.

But this is where your proposal falls down ,dont you see? You say people consume only a small subset of those millions of products on a daily basis which is quite true if you are looking only at what they consume in a direct or immediately sensuous sense. I might want a consumable durable such as an IPad or a televisoin set. However these things consume quantities of various resources and energy which brings up the question of opportunty costs. So Im not only "consuming" the televisoion set but also the materials and energy that went into making it. Therefore to follow the logic of this if I am going to be canvassed on what I would like in the way of consumer durables I ought also perhaps to have a say in the allocation of resources that go to make these consumer durables as opposed to some other consumer durables that i may not want

In any case who gets to decide under your arrangewment on what products should be prpduced outside of that small subset you refer to. The producction units themselves? But in saying that you would create a problem for yourself. On what basis would these production units go about deciding what products they want. Well presumably they wouykd want prpducts - producer goods - that enable them to produce the consumer goods that conumers want. In which case why opt for this massively elaborate and roundabout method of issuing consumers with a complicated questionnaire when you have a very direct and straight forward procedure for producers to determine what consumers want - namely a self regulating system of stoick control , Such a procedure which a system of society wide planning rules out is moreover far more responsive to shifts in consumer habits than a cumbersome system of questionnaires which in addition poses all sorts of other problems like what sort of product do you question consumers about and how .do you evaluate their response. Ok I can understand you dont want to place too much empahsis on the proposal of questionaire but realistically what other method have you got under your system other than the planners deciding for people what they want?




Nonetheless, I imagine there are several methods of assessing this demand (and I've said the phrase too many times and now it sounds weird): looking at the consumption in the previous period and extrapolating (preferably using several models and assumptions), questionnaires, having the consumers rank their preference, and so on. Generally, if you think that a decentralised system would be able to assess consumer demands, there is no reason why this data can not be collated and linked together.

In any case, what makes planning democratic is the element of political decision - it should be a democratic decision of society to approve of or reject any plan drawn up by the planning organs. .

Yes of course but there are practical limits to how far you can take this. Democracy depends on informed and meaningful participation in the decisions that affect you. You have already implicitly conceded this point with yout comment that "most people consume only a small subset of those millions of products on a daily basis". The implication of what you are saying is that they cannot really make an informed choice on those products that fall outside of that subset. Nor is it necessary that they should have to. Also, I live in Spain but I frankly dont see why I should feel entitled to have a say in how a local community in Afghanisatan or Upper Volta should organise its sewage system or generate its energy supplies. Simply to put it this way is to show up the utter absurdity of the concept of society wide planning since right way we are conceding not just ghe desirability but the inevitabil;ity of multiplicity of plans operating side by side in society whereas society wide planning can admit of only one single plan and one single planning aithroity






Except, of course, the ruling class is a very specific social group, defined not by its position in the planning process but its relation to the means of production. I'm not sure how to address this, to be honest, as you don't say why planning bodies (which, in socialism, would be elected, recall-able, which would not be composed of "specialists" as there would be no spetsy in socialism etc.) would become a "technocratic elite", whatever that means, "by default".


Sure, I understand very well what a ruling class is and yes I go along with the bit about recallable and electable delegates to the organs of socialist decision makiung. However, what I am doing here is following through with a pure thought experiment - imagining what would happen in the event that you actually had in place a system of society-wide central planning in its classic sense. In that situation, of necessity, decisionmaking would concentrate in the hands of a tiny technocratic elite quite simply becuase it is quite impossible for 7 b illion people to be consulted on each and every decision to do with the milions upon millions of products that comprise the nasic ingredients of your centralised plan. Ipso facto that would have to be decided by a tiny minority. What I am also saying is that the authoritarian subtext of centralised planing which I have spelt oyt earlier would incentivise this technocratic elite to convert power into de facto property in much the same way as the catholic church came to acquite substantial property in Medieval Europe or Soviet apparatchilks came to assert collective minority or class class ownership of the means of production without having to rely on individual legal entitlement to property




Suggest, but the actual situation on the ground might be different. Things like fads, consumer products becoming obsolete and so on, these are all things that a "self-regulating system of stock control" would not be able to predict (of course, strictly speaking it can't predict anything, bless'im, which is why human planners are always preferable to automatic systems).

A self regulating system of stock control does not need to "predict£ in that sense only to respond effectively to changes which the human planners often cannot predict. Prediction is a human enterprise, a human extrapolation of perceived trends which can sometimes prove correct and sometimes turn out to be way off the mark




Furthermore, how would this system handle major projects that are not strictly speaking tied to consumer demand - new dams, new nuclear power plants, new Orion-drive spaceships, whatever? No one comes into a store and buys a dam. I hope..


Here is where you are misunderstanding my postion. I am not sayong there will not be collective decisionmaking and that all there will be is a "self regulating system of stock contro"l. What I am trying to say is that these two things must complement each other and that each are necessary for the functioning and wellbeing of a viable communist economy. A new dam is very clearly a collective enterprise which very definitely requires a collective input unlike a decision about whether you should pick an apple or an orange from your local fruit store. But a collective enterprise is itself a function of scale and while most decisionmaking of the collective kind will likely be locally based in my view some will be regionally based and a few decisions will be of global significance and be taken by the global comunitry via some kind of system of delegation. This kind of nuanced hierarchy of decisionmaking is once again something that cannot be countenanced by the kind of two dimensional model of planning that is society wide planning



The stereotypical five-year plan was appropriate, to an extent, for an era of punched card tabulation machines (I think RabKrIn was the biggest consumer of these). With modern technology, year-by-year plans are probably not impossible (and in fact it is advantageous to have the target period as short as possible, as projections tend to go awry if you go far enough into the future). And, again, I would point out the necessity of consistent overproduction, so as to take care of any sudden spikes in demand, whether from cancer, or new children being born etc.
..

But again unless I know what your year by year plan hopes to encompass I am at a loss to know how to respond. If you are talking abvout centralised society planning covering millions of millions of products than a reduction in your target period would makes things even more problemaic from your point of view. For one thing it would massively increase the already massively largew amount of bureaucratic input required to make the this hypeothetical system work by increasing the frequency with plans are generated anad so exacerbate the waste of resoruces that central planning entails



Of course there is need for a middleman - first of all because these decisions need to be registered to facilitate social accounting at the end of the period, and second because it is not the job of each individual factory to know about the capacities of other factories. A central office can see that, Factory 108 having tragically blown up, it would be most expedient for Factory 109 to take up 80% of the additional workload, Factory 201 10%, and Factory 203 the rest. Then the central office can check in with the factories in question to see if that's alright - if the workers are willing to work the extra hours - and if not to think of something else.


No I dont see the need for any middleman when with the kind of distributed computer networks we have to day it is would be quite possible for a communist production unit or distribution store to acces the data of nearby suppliers (including details of buffer stocks held by them) and approach who they think would be approariate on the basis of their own localised knowlege which is, in any case, likely to be superior what to some remote "central office" might have in their files. I frankly cant see the point of what you suggest. What sort of social accounting is it that needs to be facilitated and to what end?




I'm not sure that follows. The concentration of capital does not necessarily mean that disparate plans are linked together into one general plan - consider e.g. the pre-war rail cartel, where each national railway pursued its own agenda. Furthermore, as capital becomes concentrated, the complexity of capitalist production increases, the global scope of the market becomes increasingly apparent, and larger and larger strata of the ruined petite-bourgeoisie, previously producing essentially for local consumption, are drawn into capitalist production, increasing the anarchy of production.


No the concentration of capital does not necessarily mean that disparate plans are linked together into one general plan but it does mean, if your reading of "anarchy of production" is correct, a gradual reduction in this anarchy by virtue of a reduction in the number of competing units of capital. Instead what we find Marx and Engels saying is that far from "anarchy of production" diminsihing it increases along with the concentration of capital in capitalism. Whiuch suggest M & E likely meant something quite different to you when they spoke of anarchy of production




Yes, if central planning is in effect it is impossible to talk about more than one social economic plan, but the only time I used the plural "plans" I was talking about all manners of plans, from curricula to timetables.


OK so fruther confirmatiuon that you equate central planning with society wide planning



To an extent, yes, although probably only one part of the input-output matrix would have to be changed. However, if the initial calculations are not a problem, neither are the new calculations needed to correct the plan, assuming of course there is no need to correct it often, which we can assume would be the case.


You cannot assume anything of the sort anymore than you can assume that you would need only to alter one part of the input-output matrix and not some other part. That is not how an input output matrix operates. As I said before everything hangs together so the ratios in their entirety will have to be reconfigured., Moreover each discrepency between the Plan and what happens in the ground is additive or incremental and can mushroom into major shortfalls or alternatively embarrassing large surpluses for specifc lines of production with consequences that will ramify right through out the economy



Well, no, assuming the social knowledge of existing production capacities and material resources is adequate - and there is no reason to assume it isn't, there is no need to constantly redraft the plan. You talk about the global output of steel declines - but society would control the output of the steel industry. How would it declines, unless something truly unprecedented were to happen, to the effect of a significant percentage of the steelworks becoming inoperative?

Minor malfunctions will occur constantly, of course, and as I argued in another thread, there is a good way to take that into account: simply assume the production unit will not work with 100% efficiency, but with an efficiency corresponding to the weighted risk that it will become inoperative for X days - i.e. the coefficient would probably be something like:

(1 - (number of days the unit is inoperative/total planning period) * probability of the unit being operative for that number of days.

It's crude, and there's probably a better way to do it, but it's just an example of how these things can be taken into account.

Well I dont agree for the reasons stated. Even minor malfunctions which you agree will ocur, constantly have the capacity to magnify into major distortions when they accumulate incrementally and so render the whole Plan absolutely worthless. Its "chaos theory" Im referring to here basically. But that aside. even if for the sake of argument you were correct in assuming this, a polycentric system of planning involving a self regulating system of stock control would still be clearly superior to what you advocate on every conceivable ground that one can think of. And that is what truly puzzles me - why advocate something that really has nothing to recopmmend itself amd for which a much better alternative exists?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The quote function seems to be having a fit, again, and in any case I think that replying paragraph-by-paragraph would lead to a lot of repetition. Now, concerning buffers, you don't seem to have understood my question. So, allow me to repeat myself: how would the production units know how much of the buffer products to produce? Obviously different products require different quantities of buffer stock, e.g. a sufficient buffer of high-end workstations might be in the hundreds, whereas a sufficient buffer of bananas might be in the thousands. And equally obviously, even when considering one product, buffers of different sizes are necessary in different regions, at different points in time and so on (the buffer of Satsuma oranges in Japan, in winter, would need to be significantly higher than the buffer of the same fruit in Japan in summer, or in Croatia throughout the year).

So, the production units would need to assess the demand for their products (and the supply of products they need, as this also affects their ability to produce), and they would need to assess it at a global, society-wide scale. Even in the capitalist mode of production, a factory does not produce only for its immediate area, but for the world market. In socialism, of course, there would be no market, but there would still be a global circulation of products (of course, there are people who profess to be socialists, who think it is possible or desirable to return to the stage of local autarchy, but these are simply politically confused people).

The same goes for transportation - do you seriously propose it is possible for transportation of goods across the globe to be solved by "localised community decisions" (and why this fetish for localisation?). I don't think that is the case at all. How would the transport of copper from Bolivia to a factory in France (for example) be arranged in this manner?

The notion that there would be no feedback mechanisms in a centrally-planned economy is, quite frankly, bizarre. In fact I do not know if an economic arrangement that does not have a feedback mechanism is even possible. In fact the centrally-planned economy will most likely have extensive feedback mechanisms, with partial cybernetic control (similar in a way to the planned COMECON reforms of the sixties) and so on. I assume that what you wanted to say is that, in a planned economy, feedback mechanisms do not result in an automatic change in production quotas and schedules etc.

Well, yes. That, however, is the true strength of central planning. As I said, human planners are able to understand things that an automatic system would miss. They are able to look at the big picture, so to speak, to use their experience and insight to predict certain trends and so on. Any automatic system that would be able to do so - and I am quite sure these will be possible eventually - would be an artificial intelligence in its own right.

Consider, for example, two products. One is salt, the other a new action figure. Now, let us suppose that, if we plotted the consumption of these two products, the graphs would look similar - an almost constant rate of consumption with few fluctuations, and a short downward trend at the end of the period.

Human planners would immediately recognise that the consumption of salt in the new period will most likely remain similar to the constant rate of the previous period, and that the downward trend was most likely a fluke. Whereas the action figure is probably going out of fashion. An automated system couldn't pick up on this - it would have to use some model to predict future demand that would treat the two products as the same. Or it could treat them differently, but the distinction would have to be programmed in by human planners.

As for correcting the plan, it simply is not the case that minor adjustments to the plan are impossible. The important thing is that the Leontiev matrix is not nonzero everywhere - in fact in realistic situations it is sparse. Wheat is not an immediate input for the production of germanium, neither is whiskey, and so on. Even major industrial products, that require hundreds of kinds of components, will result in a small subset of the matrix being nonzero. If there is a sudden spike in the demand for, for example, soap, that the buffer stock can't take care of, it should be possible to work with a significantly smaller subset of the full input-output matrix to calculate the additional workload for soap-producing units, and units that produce the predecessor products.

"Chaos theory" is the popular name for a very well-defined set of mathematical concepts and methods, and there is no real proof that economic systems are chaotic in this sense (and, of course, "chaotic" does not mean "intractable").

Sometimes, of course, no adjustment to the plan will be necessary, as we've seen in the case of the tragically exploded Dildo Factory 108 (I hope everyone made it out before the hypothetical explosion). Concerning that example, by the way, you asked what social accounting would be useful for. Well, among other things, for constructing the input-output matrix - society needs to know the quantities of input that are requires for a given amount of output. This involves monitoring the workload, materials assigned to each factory, the output, the manufacturing inefficiency, the availability of labour and so on, and so on. This is not something "local knowledge" can cover (and again, why the emphasis on local knowledge? local knowledge is potential centralised knowledge that is not available to most of society, which makes it much less useful than something that is available to any member of society), as I imagine most factory workers do not know the capacities of other factories (most of which would probably be distant).

In fact, that is the thing that bothers me about this proposal the most, that, like the market, it's essentially a faith-based endeavour. Signals are being exchanged, and economic units interact, and we're supposed to take it on faith that this will somehow produce an optimal result - as opposed to consciously making sure that it does.

I think that, contrary to your claim, reducing the target period helps keep planning manageable, assuming there is enough processing power to pull it off (and there is), as any prediction will go berserk after some time (not just the economic prediction, but also the weather predictions that are necessary for agriculture etc.).

As for the supposed authoritarianism of central planning, you do realise that vague impressions do not add up to a cogent argument? And, to be honest, I find the notion of authoritarianism that the SPGB/WSM members of this site advance to be alternately infuriating and hilarious. The SPGB itself is on record dismissing genuine authoritarianism and oppression. But asking people to follow a democratic decision? Oh the horror.

I mean, what do you expect? Members of society reach an agreement on how to operate the means of production in one period, and then one lone rebel without a cause tries to spoil all of that. Well, no. If you can't play nice with people, people won't play with you.

Concerning sewage systems in Afghanistan, or Upper Volta, which I suspect is actually Burkina Faso, or the Netherlands, or whatever, of course I suspect most city plans will be approved by the central democratic bodies almost by default. But if the Burkinabe raion wishes to pollute the Volta river, or if the Amsterdam soviet wishes to block an important port, to be blunt, why should society allow them to? Because they own "their" area? This sort of sectoral particularism is inimical to socialism.

Finally, again I would like to reiterate that questionnaires were merely one possible data-gathering mechanism. I suspect the most important data will be collected by following the flow of products through distribution centres and taking into account things like the profile of the average consumer, the changes in the demographics etc. In-store interviews (which is horrible manager-speak for the workers in the distribution centres asking people about their preferences) are another possibility.

I don't think the fact that most people only consume a limited amount of products on a daily basis means that they are not capable of deciding about the allocation of other products. In fact the other products only exist to enable the production of consumer goods, and certain other products such as scientific equipment, material for the construction of new buildings etc. The plan is chiefly to be assessed on its capability to provide consumer goods.

I think I have written enough, although the formatting might have been better.

[ckaihatsu]

I'll jump in here to suggest that perhaps, in many minds, the post-capitalist 'political' and 'economic' get too tangled-up and interwoven, with messy conceptions of both, as a result.

While discussions can continue over how rigid-to-flexible central planning should be, I'll point out that anything involving an overall social *direction* -- in the sense of what civilization is *for* -- should be considered 'political', while all else -- the nitty-gritty -- is *economic*, and should be addressed in mostly *logistical* terms.

I have no doubt that a post-revolution communistic gift economy would be mostly sufficient everywhere, with enough liberated-labor and mutual coordination to effect the main point of bringing humaneness to humanity for the first time in human history.

It's *beyond* the basics where matters of complex production and supply-chain linkages come to the fore -- my own concern would be with the supply of liberated labor for all of the distributional logistics being discussed here.

Unfortunately, this particular thread's topic may not be very motivating for most, either now or in a future reality, and people might wonder to what they should reasonably give their labor for, if one can more-easily enjoy a more-modest, reliable existence *without* such complicated and dubious considerations, and the exertions of one's more-discretionary efforts.

Regarding the role of liberated labor within the context of a centralized political economy (read: mass political involvement and common-direction-planning), here's a summation / treatment from another thread:





[If] simple basics like ham and yogurt couldn't be readily produced by the communistic gift economy, and were 'scarce' in relation to actual mass demand, they *would* be considered 'luxury goods' in economic terms, and would be *discretionary* in terms of public consumption.

Such a situation would *encourage* liberated-labor -- such as it would be -- to 'step up' to supply its labor for the production of ham and yogurt, because the scarcity and mass demand would encourage others to put in their own labor to earn labor credits, to provide increasing rates of labor credits to those who would be able to produce the much-demanded ham and yogurt. (Note that the ham and yogurt goods themselves would never be 'bought' or 'sold', because the labor credits are only used in regard to labor-*hours* worked, and *not* for exchangeability with any goods, because that would be commodity production.)

This kind of liberated-production assumes that the means of production have been *liberated* and collectivized, so there wouldn't be any need for any kind of finance or capital-based 'ownership' there.


---


And:





My framework [...] addresses the *outer reaches* of what a strictly moneyless communistic 'gift economy' could conceivably cover. Some on the revolutionary left have suggested that perhaps a *remnant* of the former markets could exist within a post-capitalist social order, to cover luxury / specialty production, since such might be *unaddressed* by the more mass-oriented mainstream gift economy.




However, a regular market-based approach to luxury / specialty production could very well be more cumbersome than it's worth -- it would be tolerating a kind of exchange-values-based 'black market' within an otherwise free-access social paradigm.

My 'labor credits' is meant to acknowledge a post-capitalist liberated-labor on its own terms, without resorting to backsliding to any system of exchange values.




A post-capitalist political economy using labor credits

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?bt=14673

[robbo203]

The quote function seems to be having a fit, again, and in any case I think that replying paragraph-by-paragraph would lead to a lot of repetition. Now, concerning buffers, you don't seem to have understood my question. So, allow me to repeat myself: how would the production units know how much of the buffer products to produce? Obviously different products require different quantities of buffer stock, e.g. a sufficient buffer of high-end workstations might be in the hundreds, whereas a sufficient buffer of bananas might be in the thousands. And equally obviously, even when considering one product, buffers of different sizes are necessary in different regions, at different points in time and so on (the buffer of Satsuma oranges in Japan, in winter, would need to be significantly higher than the buffer of the same fruit in Japan in summer, or in Croatia throughout the year).



Obviously the size of the buffer would depend on a number of things:

- nature of the product itself, its durabilty and lifespan
- elasticity of demand for the product in question
- seasonal factors
- technological factors e.g. Toyota style "lean" prpduction v Fordist mass production

So its difficult to generalise on this subject. All the more reason for a flexible approach which is precisely what a self regulating system of stock control offers




So, the production units would need to assess the demand for their products (and the supply of products they need, as this also affects their ability to produce), and they would need to assess it at a global, society-wide scale. Even in the capitalist mode of production, a factory does not produce only for its immediate area, but for the world market. In socialism, of course, there would be no market, but there would still be a global circulation of products (of course, there are people who profess to be socialists, who think it is possible or desirable to return to the stage of local autarchy, but these are simply politically confused people).



I wouldnt disagreee with the claim that there would still be a "global circulation of products" in socialism. Its a matter of emphasis though and I would certainly hope there would be a significantly stronger emphasis on localised production in socialism for all sorts of reasons not just reduced transportation costs. It is the capitalist principle of comparative advantage a la Ricardo that leads to a reduction of local diversity and the absurdity of "coals to newcastle" type phenomena. For example, the idea of flying in fresh vegetables from sub Saharan African countries to Europe on quite a large scale strikes me as ridiculous and is only possible because of the dirt cheap wages paid to African workers (the same applies to the flow of Europes toxic waste products in the other direction). I also happen to think that much of the global circulation of products today consists in tacky crap which will either not be wanted in a socialist society or will be made much more durable when producers no longer need to build in planner obsolence into their products to ensure quicker turnovers. In short we need to be thinking more in terms of sustainable production in a socialist society and a big part of that is the shift towards more localised production.




The same goes for transportation - do you seriously propose it is possible for transportation of goods across the globe to be solved by "localised community decisions" (and why this fetish for localisation?). I don't think that is the case at all. How would the transport of copper from Bolivia to a factory in France (for example) be arranged in this manner?

But I am not denying there will be long distance interactions of this nature. I dont even rule out, for instance, the idea of global agencies coordinating maritime transport which suppliers of copper could approach in response to the demand for copper from France. My position is more nuanced than you seem to imagine. Im not an advocate of "local autarky" even though I consider a shift towards more localised production would be a good thing. I see planning in socialism in terms of a polycentric planning system operating at different levels - local , regional and global - with the bulk of it being done locally, significantly more so than is the case today.




The notion that there would be no feedback mechanisms in a centrally-planned economy is, quite frankly, bizarre. In fact I do not know if an economic arrangement that does not have a feedback mechanism is even possible. In fact the centrally-planned economy will most likely have extensive feedback mechanisms, with partial cybernetic control (similar in a way to the planned COMECON reforms of the sixties) and so on. I assume that what you wanted to say is that, in a planned economy, feedback mechanisms do not result in an automatic change in production quotas and schedules etc.

With respect, you dont understand what a centrally planned economy is - at least in its classic sense of a single society wide plan - if you think it is "bizarre" that it should have no feedback mechanism. If it has a feed back mechanism then by definition it is no longer classic central planning. The total pattern of production is no longer planned, only the parts of that global pattern, so that what you call the global pattern is something that is merely revealed or picked up via a complicated and comprhensive monitoring process rather than planned in advance, In other wordsm, that global pattern is the emergent property of multiple interacting plans. Monitoring the global pattern of economic interactions is not the same thing as planning them in an a priori sense and I think this is where you get confused. A feedback mechanism means the intrusion of other plans impacting on the existing plan (or plans) and so is by definition polycentric not unicentric. Thus the refrigerator producing sector of the economy encounters a spike in demand for refrigerators which translates into an increased demand for raw materials from its suppliers. The plan for "more refrigerators", in other words, emanates from that sector which then impacts on other sectors and modifies the latters' own output plans




Well, yes. That, however, is the true strength of central planning. As I said, human planners are able to understand things that an automatic system would miss. They are able to look at the big picture, so to speak, to use their experience and insight to predict certain trends and so on. Any automatic system that would be able to do so - and I am quite sure these will be possible eventually - would be an artificial intelligence in its own right.


But again I feel you are not really understanding the argument. You seem to making a completely false dichotomy between a self regulating system of stock control - the automatic feedback mechanism I talked of - and planning. Its as if you think the one precludes the other which is just not the case




Consider, for example, two products. One is salt, the other a new action figure. Now, let us suppose that, if we plotted the consumption of these two products, the graphs would look similar - an almost constant rate of consumption with few fluctuations, and a short downward trend at the end of the period.

Human planners would immediately recognise that the consumption of salt in the new period will most likely remain similar to the constant rate of the previous period, and that the downward trend was most likely a fluke. Whereas the action figure is probably going out of fashion. An automated system couldn't pick up on this - it would have to use some model to predict future demand that would treat the two products as the same. Or it could treat them differently, but the distinction would have to be programmed in by human planners.


Yes of course human planners using their judgement have a very important role to play in socialist production, operating along side the automatic mechanism we have spoken of. For instance, we talked earlier of the size of buffer stocks which would vary according to the product in question. It would be those individuals operating the production units and distributions stores in a socialist society - the "planners" in that sense - who would make judgements of this nature based on their own experiences, intuitions and so on.




As for correcting the plan, it simply is not the case that minor adjustments to the plan are impossible. The important thing is that the Leontiev matrix is not nonzero everywhere - in fact in realistic situations it is sparse. Wheat is not an immediate input for the production of germanium, neither is whiskey, and so on. Even major industrial products, that require hundreds of kinds of components, will result in a small subset of the matrix being nonzero. If there is a sudden spike in the demand for, for example, soap, that the buffer stock can't take care of, it should be possible to work with a significantly smaller subset of the full input-output matrix to calculate the additional workload for soap-producing units, and units that produce the predecessor products.


Again you are still not understanding the issue. Far from saying that it is the case that minor adjustments to the plan are impossible, I am saying instead that it is absolutely INEVITABLE that minor adjustments to the plan will occur which will then overwhelm the Plan and render it totally impotent and useless. It will no longer be a single society wide plan but will succumb to polycentric planning precisely by virtue of those numerous minor adjustments which I repeat will have an accumulative or incremental impact on global pattern of output.

In my profession as a landscape gardener I sometime do a fair bit of stone wall building. Have you ever built a wall on uneven terrain? Sometimes you just have to use your eye. But what I find not infrequently is that small errors made at the start of a wall can magnify into very noticeable differences at the end as you struggle to maintain a level top. Its a good analogy for how minor adjustments to the plan - and there will be countless numbers of such minor adjustments needed every moment of every single day globally - can accumulate to throw the Plan completely out of kilter with reality. You will no longer have a Plan as such to guide the overall pattern of production by . The overall pattern of production will simply become the reflective by-product of multiple plans interacting with each other as multiple players in the economy strive to adjust their plans in the light of the changing plans/demands of others...



"Chaos theory" is the popular name for a very well-defined set of mathematical concepts and methods, and there is no real proof that economic systems are chaotic in this sense (and, of course, "chaotic" does not mean "intractable")..

No? I suggest you read Marx on the subject of "fictitious capital" and asset bubbles



Sometimes, of course, no adjustment to the plan will be necessary, as we've seen in the case of the tragically exploded Dildo Factory 108 (I hope everyone made it out before the hypothetical explosion). Concerning that example, by the way, you asked what social accounting would be useful for. Well, among other things, for constructing the input-output matrix - society needs to know the quantities of input that are requires for a given amount of output. This involves monitoring the workload, materials assigned to each factory, the output, the manufacturing inefficiency, the availability of labour and so on, and so on. This is not something "local knowledge" can cover (and again, why the emphasis on local knowledge? local knowledge is potential centralised knowledge that is not available to most of society, which makes it much less useful than something that is available to any member of society), as I imagine most factory workers do not know the capacities of other factories (most of which would probably be distant).


But again you are reading this all wrong. The "tragically exploded Dildo Factory 108" is yet another instance of why we have to build into production system a degree of institutional flexibility which is simply not available with a system of society wide planning. The more I read what you say, the more convinced am I - with all due respect - that you dont understand the issue at stake here. Hypothetically , were a system of society-wide planning to be in place then the explosion at Dildo factory 108 would mean a loss of output which would have to be accommodated somehow through a process of materials re-balancing which means reconfiguring all those carefully worked out input-output ratios all along the line and the reassignment of production targets accordingly . But there will probably be thousands of equivalents of exploding Dildo factory 108 happening every day across the world - not necessarily in the sense of exploding factories but in the sense of disrupted production. Transportation delays - perhaps a lorry containing crucial high value equipment which jack-knifes on the highway causing the complete loss of all its contents - can have the same disruptive effect on the pattern of output. This is to say nothing of large scale or widespread shifts in the demand for various products which the Plan had sought to base its output targets upon and which it would need to stick to for the Plan to maintain any semblance of coherency

On the subject of local knowlege, well again I assume you would accept that a local body such as a production unit would better know the state of affairs on the ground locally than might some remote central office. I mean, that almost goes without saying. A local factory would for example be better acqainted with the dispostion of stock within its four walls. Years ago back in South Africa I remember briefly working in metals factory cum foundry as a teenager just out of school and having to traipse around differents parts of the factory to confer with the foremen on the spot about the number of metal plates or rods or whatever so as to get a composite picture of daily output, which figures would be recorded back in the Admin dept. No doubt these days its all computerised but the same principle applies. Almost by definition local knowlege is bound to be superior to centralised knowlege in respect of the local set up and since the world consists of millions of localities it would be madness to dispense with the accumulated body of such local knowlege. Centralised knowlege actually depends on it. And while it is true that "most factory workers do not know the capacities of other factories" they do know the capacity of their own factory better than some central office. This is a matter of simple commonsense and logic

However, and this is the point, they dont need to go via some cumbersome central office to get some idea of the capacity of other factories (albeit inferior to the idea that workers at the latter have about their own factory's capacity). This is where you approach smacks of a kind of outdated, old fashioned way of doing things, harking back to the days of GOSPLAN. There is such a things as "distributed computer networks" these days that allows you to bypass such unwieldy middlemen. What can a central office tell you that you cannot already know by such means. You have accused me of making a fetish out of localised production but I would say on the contrary that you are making a fetish out of centralised decision making and information when things have moved on a long way since GOSPLAN. Look at the internet!

GOSPLAN's plans were incidentally a complete farce. Not a single plan was ever carried out to the letter. The plans were constantly adjusted, as they has to be and as I have been telling you constantl,y in response to changing economic realities. The plan was only "met" by virtue of the planners moving the goal posts - routinely and repeatedly changing the output targets - to make it appear that the Plan had been met. In reality Soviet central planning, so called, was little more than a wishlist invented by the planners for propaganda purposes. Little wonder the whole system collapsed under the weight of its own ineptitude.




In fact, that is the thing that bothers me about this proposal the most, that, like the market, it's essentially a faith-based endeavour. Signals are being exchanged, and economic units interact, and we're supposed to take it on faith that this will somehow produce an optimal result - as opposed to consciously making sure that it does.


I dont understand what you are saying here at all. There is nothing "faith-based" about a self regulating system of stock control. It is the most accurate indicator available to us of the actual take-up rate of stock upon which we can make informed decision about future output. Without that, what else is available to us? You have suggested sending out questionaires to the public although I appreciate that you do not wish to attach too much importance to this suggestion. But there are millions and million of products of all kinds in a modern economy. Is the public going to have to wade through a circular the size of a hefty tome once every five years or whatever to indicate what it wants produced so that the central planners can put this all together in the form of a vast input output matrix? I think not




I think that, contrary to your claim, reducing the target period helps keep planning manageable, assuming there is enough processing power to pull it off (and there is), as any prediction will go berserk after some time (not just the economic prediction, but also the weather predictions that are necessary for agriculture etc.).


No, I disagree. Reducing the target period doesnt make planninmg more "manageable" but even less manageable. For one thing you have to repeat the whole cumbersome process of consulting the public, going through the process of materials re=balancing etc etc once a year as opposed to once every 5 years. That means even more pointless bureaucracy. Also, again, I repeat its not a question of whether or not there is another processing or computational power to "pull it off". The intractable problem with central planning lies not with inadequate computing power but in the very nature of what it seeks to "plan". The Plan will have to be constantly modified to keep up with changing condistions to that in effect there never will be a Plan to implement in the first place. It will never ever become available in a usable form. It will be reduced to nothing more than a rather pathetic catch up attempt to monitor the flow of products and resoruces through the production system rather than actually plan for that flow in an apriori sense (the only meaningful definition of "planning", incidentally)



As for the supposed authoritarianism of central planning, you do realise that vague impressions do not add up to a cogent argument? And, to be honest, I find the notion of authoritarianism that the SPGB/WSM members of this site advance to be alternately infuriating and hilarious. The SPGB itself is on record dismissing genuine authoritarianism and oppression. But asking people to follow a democratic decision? Oh the horror.

I mean, what do you expect? Members of society reach an agreement on how to operate the means of production in one period, and then one lone rebel without a cause tries to spoil all of that. Well, no. If you can't play nice with people, people won't play with you.


Im not quite sure what you are saying here. Of course democracy has an important role to play in a socialist society and this means individuals abiding by democratic decisions. Ive already outlined my view of how democratic collective decisionmaking bodies can coexist at different levels - local regional and global - alongside, as well as interacting with, a self regulating system of stock control which at least as far as most consumer products are concerned is a matter of individual decisonmaking rather than collective decisionmaking. There is a balance here between individual and collective decisions that is being posited which is more realistic than what you offer.

Community and large scale projects are a very good instance of where democratic collective decision-making is clearly required. Deciding whether to take an apple or an orange from your local store is not and should not be a matter of democratic decision - it would be daft even to attempt that - but of the individual herself making a decision.

The problem is that you seem to want to present the process of decisionmaking in its entirety - including whether or not one should be able to take an apple or an orange from your local store - as something which ought to be subject to democratic sanction. Ironically what you are suggesting will end up as the most undemocratic and the most authoritarianm outcome conceivable . Not only will individuals necessarily be subjected to the will of the larger society in respect of their detailed consumption via a rigorous system of rationing (with all the opportunities for corruption this presents) but the very process of meeting the very detailed production targets of million of products as specified in the Plan will entail almost inevitably some kind of system of compulsory labour. You have already hinted at this yourself in your earlier statement as follows

"A central office can see that, Factory 108 having tragically blown up, it would be most expedient for Factory 109 to take up 80% of the additional workload, Factory 201 10%, and Factory 203 the rest. Then the central office can check in with the factories in question to see if that's alright - if the workers are willing to work the extra hours - and if not to think of something else"

So what of the workers for factory 109 dont comply with this "request" from above - for whatever reason. (And what incidentally about the division of labour in your scheme of things? Are workers not to be allowed to chose when and where and at what they work as Marx suggested? How then do toy force Factory 109 to take up 80% of the slack?) The point is that for the Plan to work on its own terms the destruction of Factory 108 will mean workers at some other factory have to comply. If they dont the Plan has to be redrawn in toto. So by a reductio ad absurdum argument for the Plan to work on its own terms compliance is necessary and this, Im afraid, entails compulsion, Under the alternative proposal I have suggested - a self regulating system of stock - the failure in the output of dildos to meet the demand for dildos will of course be picked but it will not be fatal to the system as it would be in the case of society wide planning. There will simply be a shortage of dildos but a system of self regulating stock control will continue



Concerning sewage systems in Afghanistan, or Upper Volta, which I suspect is actually Burkina Faso, or the Netherlands, or whatever, of course I suspect most city plans will be approved by the central democratic bodies almost by default. But if the Burkinabe raion wishes to pollute the Volta river, or if the Amsterdam soviet wishes to block an important port, to be blunt, why should society allow them to? Because they own "their" area? This sort of sectoral particularism is inimical to socialism.

Well you see, once again, you seem to suggesting here a postion that is at variance with your stated support for the idea of one single society-wide plan. You admit of the possibility of multiple plans - "I suspect most city plans will be approved by the central democratic bodies almost by default" - just as your# earlier talked of the possibility of the Plan being adjusted without grasping how this strikes at the very coherency and integrity of the whole concept itself . In short, you dont seem to really understand what is theoretically at a stake here. Which is why I have always suspected that what you are advocating is not classic central planning as such but merely a greater degree of centralised planning in what amounts to essentially a polycentric planning system. In other words you advocate what is really at most "indicative planning" though you dont seem to recognise this.

Of course if the citizens of Burkino Faso wish to pollute the Volta then it is quite approproate that citizens of other parts of a socialist world might wish to intervene and raise objections much as environmental activists do so today. I have no objection that. Its a question of where you draw the line - as it always is! You wouldnt surely want to insist that the city plan for Ouagadougou, the capital, should be opposed by the citizens of Seattle because it recommends the construction of a dildo factory in one city district and not another? What about the principle of subsidiarity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity). Once again, it is a case of respecting localised knwlege rather than arrogantly riding roughshod over it. Ignoring local knowlege is also something "inimical to socialism" I would suggest...




Finally, again I would like to reiterate that questionnaires were merely one possible data-gathering mechanism. I suspect the most important data will be collected by following the flow of products through distribution centres and taking into account things like the profile of the average consumer, the changes in the demographics etc. In-store interviews (which is horrible manager-speak for the workers in the distribution centres asking people about their preferences) are another possibility..

Again I dont wish to pooh pooh your various suggestions here. All of them, I am sure, have a place - even the idea of consumer questionnaires. But, still, I come back again and again to the central point - why ignore the vital and massively important data that a self regulating system of stock control furnishes production units in a socialist society. What better presents a picure of the actual pattern of consumer preferances and the shifts in this pattern than this? That is my challenge to you and anyone else who rejects this proposition - show me a better alternative



I don't think the fact that most people only consume a limited amount of products on a daily basis means that they are not capable of deciding about the allocation of other products. In fact the other products only exist to enable the production of consumer goods, and certain other products such as scientific equipment, material for the construction of new buildings etc. The plan is chiefly to be assessed on its capability to provide consumer goods

Actually I would challenge the claim that "most people only consume a limited amount of products on a daily basis means that they are not capable of deciding about the allocation of other products". To make an informed decision on the allocation of "other products" means an intimate acquaitance with the entire structure of modern production consisting of millions of different kinds of prpducts and even more in the speficiations and varieties of these prpducts when, to be frank i dont think such an acquaintance is proctical available to any of us as individuals. The production system is just to vast for any one of us to comprehend in detail, Im no expert on the manufacture of dildos and to be frank I am quite happy to let those familiar with this process decide for themselves what inputs they need for the purpose of producing such things. I think you will find probably most people will think the same. But in no way does that detract from the practicality of establishing a socialist system of society

[robbo203]

The quote function seems to be having a fit, again, and in any case I think that replying paragraph-by-paragraph would lead to a lot of repetition. Now, concerning buffers, you don't seem to have understood my question. So, allow me to repeat myself: how would the production units know how much of the buffer products to produce? Obviously different products require different quantities of buffer stock, e.g. a sufficient buffer of high-end workstations might be in the hundreds, whereas a sufficient buffer of bananas might be in the thousands. And equally obviously, even when considering one product, buffers of different sizes are necessary in different regions, at different points in time and so on (the buffer of Satsuma oranges in Japan, in winter, would need to be significantly higher than the buffer of the same fruit in Japan in summer, or in Croatia throughout the year).



Obviously the size of the buffer would depend on a number of things:

- nature of the product itself, its durabilty and lifespan
- elasticity of demand for the product in question
- seasonal factors
- technological factors e.g. Toyota style "lean" production v Fordist mass production

So its difficult to generalise on this subject. All the more reason for a flexible approach which is precisely what a self regulating system of stock control offers




So, the production units would need to assess the demand for their products (and the supply of products they need, as this also affects their ability to produce), and they would need to assess it at a global, society-wide scale. Even in the capitalist mode of production, a factory does not produce only for its immediate area, but for the world market. In socialism, of course, there would be no market, but there would still be a global circulation of products (of course, there are people who profess to be socialists, who think it is possible or desirable to return to the stage of local autarchy, but these are simply politically confused people).



I wouldnt disagreee with the claim that there would still be a "global circulation of products" in socialism. Its a matter of emphasis though and I would certainly hope there would be a significantly stronger emphasis on localised production in socialism for all sorts of reasons not just reduced transportation costs. It is the capitalist principle of comparative advantage a la Ricardo that leads to a reduction of local diversity and the absurdity of "coals to newcastle" type phenomena. For example, the idea of flying in fresh vegetables from sub Saharan African countries to Europe on quite a large scale strikes me as ridiculous and is only possible because of the dirt cheap wages paid to African workers (the same applies to the flow of Europes toxic waste products in the other direction). I also happen to think that much of the global circulation of products today consists in tacky crap which will either not be wanted in a socialist society or will be made much more durable when producers no longer need to build in planner obsolence into their products to ensure quicker turnovers. In short we need to be thinking more in terms of sustainable production in a socialist society and a big part of that is the shift towards more localised production.




The same goes for transportation - do you seriously propose it is possible for transportation of goods across the globe to be solved by "localised community decisions" (and why this fetish for localisation?). I don't think that is the case at all. How would the transport of copper from Bolivia to a factory in France (for example) be arranged in this manner?

But I am not denying there will be long distance interactions of this nature. I dont even rule out, for instance, the idea of global agencies coordinating maritime transport which suppliers of copper could approach in response to the demand for copper from France. My position is more nuanced than you seem to imagine. Im not an advocate of "local autarky" even though I consider a shift towards more localised production would be a good thing. I see planning in socialism in terms of a polycentric planning system operating at different levels - local , regional and global - with the bulk of it being done locally, significantly more so than is the case today.




The notion that there would be no feedback mechanisms in a centrally-planned economy is, quite frankly, bizarre. In fact I do not know if an economic arrangement that does not have a feedback mechanism is even possible. In fact the centrally-planned economy will most likely have extensive feedback mechanisms, with partial cybernetic control (similar in a way to the planned COMECON reforms of the sixties) and so on. I assume that what you wanted to say is that, in a planned economy, feedback mechanisms do not result in an automatic change in production quotas and schedules etc.

With respect, you dont understand what a centrally planned economy is - at least in its classic sense of a single society wide plan - if you think it is "bizarre" that it should have no feedback mechanism. If it has a feed back mechanism then by definition it is no longer classic central planning. The total pattern of production is no longer planned, only the parts of that global pattern, so that what you call the global pattern is something that is merely revealed or picked up via a complicated and comprhensive monitoring process rather than planned in advance, In other wordsm, that global pattern is the emergent property of multiple interacting plans. Monitoring the global pattern of economic interactions is not the same thing as planning them in an a priori sense and I think this is where you get confused. A feedback mechanism means the intrusion of other plans impacting on the existing plan (or plans) and so is by definition polycentric not unicentric. Thus the refrigerator producing sector of the economy encounters a spike in demand for refrigerators which translates into an increased demand for raw materials from its suppliers. The plan for "more refrigerators", in other words, emanates from that sector which then impacts on other sectors and modifies the latters' own output plans




Well, yes. That, however, is the true strength of central planning. As I said, human planners are able to understand things that an automatic system would miss. They are able to look at the big picture, so to speak, to use their experience and insight to predict certain trends and so on. Any automatic system that would be able to do so - and I am quite sure these will be possible eventually - would be an artificial intelligence in its own right.


But again I feel you are not really understanding the argument. You seem to making a completely false dichotomy between a self regulating system of stock control - the automatic feedback mechanism I talked of - and planning. Its as if you think the one precludes the other which is just not the case




Consider, for example, two products. One is salt, the other a new action figure. Now, let us suppose that, if we plotted the consumption of these two products, the graphs would look similar - an almost constant rate of consumption with few fluctuations, and a short downward trend at the end of the period.

Human planners would immediately recognise that the consumption of salt in the new period will most likely remain similar to the constant rate of the previous period, and that the downward trend was most likely a fluke. Whereas the action figure is probably going out of fashion. An automated system couldn't pick up on this - it would have to use some model to predict future demand that would treat the two products as the same. Or it could treat them differently, but the distinction would have to be programmed in by human planners.


Yes of course human planners using their judgement have a very important role to play in socialist production, operating along side the automatic mechanism we have spoken of. For instance, we talked earlier of the size of buffer stocks which would vary according to the product in question. It would be those individuals operating the production units and distributions stores in a socialist society - the "planners" in that sense - who would make judgements of this nature based on their own experiences, intuitions and so on.




As for correcting the plan, it simply is not the case that minor adjustments to the plan are impossible. The important thing is that the Leontiev matrix is not nonzero everywhere - in fact in realistic situations it is sparse. Wheat is not an immediate input for the production of germanium, neither is whiskey, and so on. Even major industrial products, that require hundreds of kinds of components, will result in a small subset of the matrix being nonzero. If there is a sudden spike in the demand for, for example, soap, that the buffer stock can't take care of, it should be possible to work with a significantly smaller subset of the full input-output matrix to calculate the additional workload for soap-producing units, and units that produce the predecessor products.


Again you are still not understanding the issue. Far from saying that it is the case that minor adjustments to the plan are impossible, I am saying instead that it is absolutely INEVITABLE that minor adjustments to the plan will occur which will then overwhelm the Plan and render it totally impotent and useless. It will no longer be a single society wide plan but will succumb to polycentric planning precisely by virtue of those numerous minor adjustments which I repeat will have an accumulative or incremental impact on global pattern of output.

In my profession as a landscape gardener I sometime do a fair bit of stone wall building. Have you ever built a wall on uneven terrain? Sometimes you just have to use your eye. But what I find not infrequently is that small errors made at the start of a wall can magnify into very noticeable differences at the end as you struggle to maintain a level top. Its a good analogy for how minor adjustments to the plan - and there will be countless numbers of such minor adjustments needed every moment of every single day globally - can accumulate to throw the Plan completely out of kilter with reality. You will no longer have a Plan as such to guide the overall pattern of production by . The overall pattern of production will simply become the reflective by-product of multiple plans interacting with each other as multiple players in the economy strive to adjust their plans in the light of the changing plans/demands of others...



"Chaos theory" is the popular name for a very well-defined set of mathematical concepts and methods, and there is no real proof that economic systems are chaotic in this sense (and, of course, "chaotic" does not mean "intractable")..

No? I suggest you read Marx on the subject of "fictitious capital" and asset bubbles



Sometimes, of course, no adjustment to the plan will be necessary, as we've seen in the case of the tragically exploded Dildo Factory 108 (I hope everyone made it out before the hypothetical explosion). Concerning that example, by the way, you asked what social accounting would be useful for. Well, among other things, for constructing the input-output matrix - society needs to know the quantities of input that are requires for a given amount of output. This involves monitoring the workload, materials assigned to each factory, the output, the manufacturing inefficiency, the availability of labour and so on, and so on. This is not something "local knowledge" can cover (and again, why the emphasis on local knowledge? local knowledge is potential centralised knowledge that is not available to most of society, which makes it much less useful than something that is available to any member of society), as I imagine most factory workers do not know the capacities of other factories (most of which would probably be distant).


But again you are reading this all wrong. The "tragically exploded Dildo Factory 108" is yet another instance of why we have to build into production system a degree of institutional flexibility which is simply not available with a system of society wide planning. The more I read what you say, the more convinced am I - with all due respect - that you dont understand the issue at stake here. Hypothetically , were a system of society-wide planning to be in place then the explosion at Dildo factory 108 would mean a loss of output which would have to be accommodated somehow through a process of materials re-balancing which means reconfiguring all those carefully worked out input-output ratios all along the line and the reassignment of production targets accordingly . But there will probably be thousands of equivalents of exploding Dildo factory 108 happening every day across the world - not necessarily in the sense of exploding factories but in the sense of disrupted production. Transportation delays - perhaps a lorry containing crucial high value equipment which jack-knifes on the highway causing the complete loss of all its contents - can have the same disruptive effect on the pattern of output. This is to say nothing of large scale or widespread shifts in the demand for various products which the Plan had sought to base its output targets upon and which it would need to stick to for the Plan to maintain any semblance of coherency

On the subject of local knowlege, well again I assume you would accept that a local body such as a production unit would better know the state of affairs on the ground locally than might some remote central office. I mean, that almost goes without saying. A local factory would for example be better acqainted with the dispostion of stock within its four walls. Years ago back in South Africa I remember briefly working in metals factory cum foundry as a teenager just out of school and having to traipse around differents parts of the factory to confer with the foremen on the spot about the number of metal plates or rods or whatever so as to get a composite picture of daily output, which figures would be recorded back in the Admin dept. No doubt these days its all computerised but the same principle applies. Almost by definition local knowlege is bound to be superior to centralised knowlege in respect of the local set up and since the world consists of millions of localities it would be madness to dispense with the accumulated body of such local knowlege. Centralised knowlege actually depends on it. And while it is true that "most factory workers do not know the capacities of other factories" they do know the capacity of their own factory better than some central office. This is a matter of simple commonsense and logic

However, and this is the point, they dont need to go via some cumbersome central office to get some idea of the capacity of other factories (albeit inferior to the idea that workers at the latter have about their own factory's capacity). This is where you approach smacks of a kind of outdated, old fashioned way of doing things, harking back to the days of GOSPLAN. There is such a things as "distributed computer networks" these days that allows you to bypass such unwieldy middlemen. What can a central office tell you that you cannot already know by such means. You have accused me of making a fetish out of localised production but I would say on the contrary that you are making a fetish out of centralised decision making and information when things have moved on a long way since GOSPLAN. Look at the internet!

GOSPLAN's plans were incidentally a complete farce. Not a single plan was ever carried out to the letter. The plans were constantly adjusted, as they has to be and as I have been telling you constantl,y in response to changing economic realities. The plan was only "met" by virtue of the planners moving the goal posts - routinely and repeatedly changing the output targets - to make it appear that the Plan had been met. In reality Soviet central planning, so called, was little more than a wishlist invented by the planners for propaganda purposes. Little wonder the whole system collapsed under the weight of its own ineptitude.




In fact, that is the thing that bothers me about this proposal the most, that, like the market, it's essentially a faith-based endeavour. Signals are being exchanged, and economic units interact, and we're supposed to take it on faith that this will somehow produce an optimal result - as opposed to consciously making sure that it does.


I dont understand what you are saying here at all. There is nothing "faith-based" about a self regulating system of stock control. It is the most accurate indicator available to us of the actual take-up rate of stock upon which we can make informed decision about future output. Without that, what else is available to us? You have suggested sending out questionaires to the public although I appreciate that you do not wish to attach too much importance to this suggestion. But there are millions and million of products of all kinds in a modern economy. Is the public going to have to wade through a circular the size of a hefty tome once every five years or whatever to indicate what it wants produced so that the central planners can put this all together in the form of a vast input output matrix? I think not




I think that, contrary to your claim, reducing the target period helps keep planning manageable, assuming there is enough processing power to pull it off (and there is), as any prediction will go berserk after some time (not just the economic prediction, but also the weather predictions that are necessary for agriculture etc.).


No, I disagree. Reducing the target period doesnt make planninmg more "manageable" but even less manageable. For one thing you have to repeat the whole cumbersome process of consulting the public, going through the process of materials re-balancing etc etc once a year as opposed to once every 5 years. That means even more pointless bureaucracy. Also, again, I repeat its not a question of whether or not there is enough processing or computational power to "pull it off". The intractable problem with central planning lies not with inadequate computing power but in the very nature of what it seeks to "plan". The Plan will have to be constantly modified to keep up with changing condistions to that in effect there never will be a Plan to implement in the first place. It will never ever become available in a usable form. It will be reduced to nothing more than a rather pathetic catch up attempt to monitor the flow of products and resoruces through the production system rather than actually plan for that flow in an apriori sense (the only meaningful definition of "planning", incidentally)



As for the supposed authoritarianism of central planning, you do realise that vague impressions do not add up to a cogent argument? And, to be honest, I find the notion of authoritarianism that the SPGB/WSM members of this site advance to be alternately infuriating and hilarious. The SPGB itself is on record dismissing genuine authoritarianism and oppression. But asking people to follow a democratic decision? Oh the horror.

I mean, what do you expect? Members of society reach an agreement on how to operate the means of production in one period, and then one lone rebel without a cause tries to spoil all of that. Well, no. If you can't play nice with people, people won't play with you.


Im not quite sure what you are saying here. Of course democracy has an important role to play in a socialist society and this means individuals abiding by democratic decisions. Ive already outlined my view of how democratic collective decisionmaking bodies can coexist at different levels - local regional and global - alongside, as well as interacting with, a self regulating system of stock control which at least as far as most consumer products are concerned is a matter of individual decisonmaking rather than collective decisionmaking. There is a balance here between individual and collective decisions that is being posited which is more realistic than what you offer.

Community and large scale projects are a very good instance of where democratic collective decision-making is clearly required. Deciding whether to take an apple or an orange from your local store is not and should not be a matter of democratic decision - it would be daft even to attempt that - but of the individual herself making a decision.

The problem is that you seem to want to present the process of decisionmaking in its entirety - including whether or not one should be able to take an apple or an orange from your local store - as something which ought to be subject to democratic sanction. Ironically what you are suggesting will end up as the most undemocratic and the most authoritarianm outcome conceivable . Not only will individuals necessarily be subjected to the will of the larger society in respect of their detailed consumption via a rigorous system of rationing (with all the opportunities for corruption this presents) but the very process of meeting the very detailed production targets of million of products as specified in the Plan will entail almost inevitably some kind of system of compulsory labour. You have already hinted at this yourself in your earlier statement as follows

"A central office can see that, Factory 108 having tragically blown up, it would be most expedient for Factory 109 to take up 80% of the additional workload, Factory 201 10%, and Factory 203 the rest. Then the central office can check in with the factories in question to see if that's alright - if the workers are willing to work the extra hours - and if not to think of something else"

So what of the workers for factory 109 dont comply with this "request" from above - for whatever reason? (And what incidentally about the division of labour in your scheme of things? Are workers not to be allowed to chose when and where and at what they work as Marx suggested? How then do you force Factory 109 to take up 80% of the slack?) The point is that for the Plan to work on its own terms the destruction of Factory 108 will mean workers at some other factory have to comply (and this imediately inserts insinuates an "us" versus"them" dichotomy into the situation). If they dont the Plan has to be redrawn in toto. So by a reductio ad absurdum argument, for the Plan to work on its own terms compliance is necessary and this, Im afraid, entails compulsion, Under the alternative proposal I have suggested - a self regulating system of stock - the failure in the output of dildos to meet the demand for dildos will of course be picked up automatically but it will not be fatal to the system as it would be in the case of society wide planning. There will simply be a shortage of dildos but a system of self regulating stock control will continue



Concerning sewage systems in Afghanistan, or Upper Volta, which I suspect is actually Burkina Faso, or the Netherlands, or whatever, of course I suspect most city plans will be approved by the central democratic bodies almost by default. But if the Burkinabe raion wishes to pollute the Volta river, or if the Amsterdam soviet wishes to block an important port, to be blunt, why should society allow them to? Because they own "their" area? This sort of sectoral particularism is inimical to socialism.

Well you see, once again, you seem to suggesting here a postion that is at variance with your stated support for the idea of one single society-wide plan. You admit of the possibility of multiple plans - "I suspect most city plans will be approved by the central democratic bodies almost by default" - just as you earlier talked of the possibility of the Plan being easily adjusted without grasping how this strikes at the very coherency and integrity of the whole concept itself. In short, you dont seem to really understand what is theoretically at a stake here. Which is why I have always suspected that what you are advocating is not classic central planning as such but merely a greater degree of "centralised planning" in what amounts to essentially a polycentric planning system. In other words you advocate what is really at most "indicative planning" though you dont seem to recognise this.

Of course if the citizens of Burkino Faso wish to pollute the Volta then it is quite approproate that citizens of other parts of a socialist world might wish to intervene and raise objections much as environmental activists do so today. I have no objection that. Its a question of where you draw the line - as it always is! You wouldnt surely want to insist that the city plan for Ouagadougou, the capital, should be opposed by the citizens of Seattle because it recommends the construction of a dildo factory in one city district and not another? What about the principle of subsidiarity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity). Once again, it is a case of respecting localised knwlege rather than arrogantly riding roughshod over it. Ignoring local knowlege is also something "inimical to socialism" I would suggest...




Finally, again I would like to reiterate that questionnaires were merely one possible data-gathering mechanism. I suspect the most important data will be collected by following the flow of products through distribution centres and taking into account things like the profile of the average consumer, the changes in the demographics etc. In-store interviews (which is horrible manager-speak for the workers in the distribution centres asking people about their preferences) are another possibility..

Again I dont wish to pooh pooh your various suggestions here. All of them, I am sure, have a place - even the idea of consumer questionnaires. But, still, I come back again and again to the central point - why ignore the vital and massively important data that a self regulating system of stock control furnishes production units in a socialist society. What better presents a picure of the actual pattern of consumer preferances and the shifts in this pattern than this? That is my challenge to you and anyone else who rejects this proposition - show me a better alternative



I don't think the fact that most people only consume a limited amount of products on a daily basis means that they are not capable of deciding about the allocation of other products. In fact the other products only exist to enable the production of consumer goods, and certain other products such as scientific equipment, material for the construction of new buildings etc. The plan is chiefly to be assessed on its capability to provide consumer goods

Actually I would challenge the claim that "most people only consume a limited amount of products on a daily basis means that they are not capable of deciding about the allocation of other products". To make an informed decision on the allocation of "other products" means an intimate acquaitance with the entire structure of modern production consisting of millions of different kinds of prpducts and even more in the speficiations and varieties of these products when, to be frank i dont think such an acquaintance is proctical available to any of us as individuals. The production system is just to vast for any one of us to comprehend in detail, Im no expert on the manufacture of dildos and to be frank I am quite happy to let those familiar with this process decide for themselves what inputs they need for the purpose of producing such things. I think you will find probably most people will think the same. But in no way does that detract from the practicality of establishing a socialist system of society

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Obviously the size of the buffer would depend on a number of things:

- nature of the product itself, its durabilty and lifespan
- elasticity of demand for the product in question
- seasonal factors
- technological factors e.g. Toyota style "lean" production v Fordist mass production

So its difficult to generalise on this subject. All the more reason for a flexible approach which is precisely what a self regulating system of stock control offers

Alright, but how would these factors be assessed if there are no predictions about the global demand for goods, and the capacity of other production units? Take, for example, "seasonal factors". Fair enough - more hot beverages are consumed in winter, I imagine, than in summer. But how much is "more", quantitatively? It is not enough to simply say "well, since it's winter, we'll produce more of the Hot Cocoa Mix Number 7", there need to be quantitative estimates. Even things like the durability of products depend on conditions in the storage facilities, and these are global.


I wouldnt disagreee with the claim that there would still be a "global circulation of products" in socialism. Its a matter of emphasis though and I would certainly hope there would be a significantly stronger emphasis on localised production in socialism for all sorts of reasons not just reduced transportation costs. It is the capitalist principle of comparative advantage a la Ricardo that leads to a reduction of local diversity and the absurdity of "coals to newcastle" type phenomena. For example, the idea of flying in fresh vegetables from sub Saharan African countries to Europe on quite a large scale strikes me as ridiculous and is only possible because of the dirt cheap wages paid to African workers (the same applies to the flow of Europes toxic waste products in the other direction). I also happen to think that much of the global circulation of products today consists in tacky crap which will either not be wanted in a socialist society or will be made much more durable when producers no longer need to build in planner obsolence into their products to ensure quicker turnovers. In short we need to be thinking more in terms of sustainable production in a socialist society and a big part of that is the shift towards more localised production.

I don't think "sustainable production" is as important as some people claim - particularly in the transitional period we will probably have to "sacrifice" some part of the biosphere in order to raise the standard of living in former regions of belated capitalist development. Be that as it may, I would think that it is more sustainable to extract copper, for example, in few large-scale operations from significant deposits, than to do so in a large number of small-scale operations.

Furthermore, I think you are massively underestimating the extent of the global circulation of products. In a socialist society, of course, there would be no need for cheap manufactured products from China, for example, but there would still be a need for the rare metals from former China, and in the global division of industry, that territory would certainly contain key industries. Or do you think that it is not wasteful and quite frankly surreal for every petty territory to have "its own" factory for every imaginable consumer and industrial product?


But I am not denying there will be long distance interactions of this nature. I dont even rule out, for instance, the idea of global agencies coordinating maritime transport which suppliers of copper could approach in response to the demand for copper from France. My position is more nuanced than you seem to imagine. Im not an advocate of "local autarky" even though I consider a shift towards more localised production would be a good thing. I see planning in socialism in terms of a polycentric planning system operating at different levels - local , regional and global - with the bulk of it being done locally, significantly more so than is the case today.

It's not a matter of "not even" (!) "ruling out" such agencies, they are absolutely indispensable unless you want cargo ships stalling in ports, making transoceanic voyages half-empty and so on. But for such an agency to draw up detailed timetables for cargo transport, it needs to predict the demand for goods to be transported, as well as the availability of goods for transport.


With respect, you dont understand what a centrally planned economy is - at least in its classic sense of a single society wide plan - if you think it is "bizarre" that it should have no feedback mechanism. If it has a feed back mechanism then by definition it is no longer classic central planning. The total pattern of production is no longer planned, only the parts of that global pattern, so that what you call the global pattern is something that is merely revealed or picked up via a complicated and comprhensive monitoring process rather than planned in advance, In other wordsm, that global pattern is the emergent property of multiple interacting plans. Monitoring the global pattern of economic interactions is not the same thing as planning them in an a priori sense and I think this is where you get confused. A feedback mechanism means the intrusion of other plans impacting on the existing plan (or plans) and so is by definition polycentric not unicentric. Thus the refrigerator producing sector of the economy encounters a spike in demand for refrigerators which translates into an increased demand for raw materials from its suppliers. The plan for "more refrigerators", in other words, emanates from that sector which then impacts on other sectors and modifies the latters' own output plans

No, to honest I think the confusion is entirely on your part, as despite your earlier protestations about conscious choice being compatible with "a self-regulating system of stock control", you obviously take into account only those feedback mechanisms where the component of conscious choice is entirely excluded, where simple feedback loops change production quotas (or however you want to call quotas) automatically. This might be a good way to think about, for example, hormone secretion, but it fails when applied to any system of production (and, indeed, you yourself admit that various conscious decisions about production will have to be made even in the sort of economic arrangement you propose). Planned economies, just like all economies, possess feedback mechanisms that provide return information about the performance of various economic units to the decision-makers, whether the bourgeoisie, the feudal lord or guildmaster, or the entire society in the case of socialism. Some of these feedback mechanisms are better, some are worse. Capitalism relies on price signals from the market, with all that entails. Socialism will have different mechanisms.


Yes of course human planners using their judgement have a very important role to play in socialist production, operating along side the automatic mechanism we have spoken of. For instance, we talked earlier of the size of buffer stocks which would vary according to the product in question. It would be those individuals operating the production units and distributions stores in a socialist society - the "planners" in that sense - who would make judgements of this nature based on their own experiences, intuitions and so on.

But these do not have all of the relevant information - in fact only society as one unit possesses that sort of information. These "planners" (they are planners in the same sense in which the boards of directors are planners, which is to say not at all) would be forced to rely on incomplete information, and the reason I called your proposal "faith based" is that it requires us to assume that some invisible hand will collate all of these partial plans, made with incomplete information, into something resembling an effective production plan.


Again you are still not understanding the issue. Far from saying that it is the case that minor adjustments to the plan are impossible, I am saying instead that it is absolutely INEVITABLE that minor adjustments to the plan will occur which will then overwhelm the Plan and render it totally impotent and useless. It will no longer be a single society wide plan but will succumb to polycentric planning precisely by virtue of those numerous minor adjustments which I repeat will have an accumulative or incremental impact on global pattern of output.

And here I have to protest that you're once again relying on vague impressions rather than any sort of argument. The Plan is rigid, therefore if minor corrections are made the Plan is no longer a plan. Well, no, that's not at all convincing. Particularly since I gave an argument for why this would not be the case.


In my profession as a landscape gardener I sometime do a fair bit of stone wall building. Have you ever built a wall on uneven terrain? Sometimes you just have to use your eye. But what I find not infrequently is that small errors made at the start of a wall can magnify into very noticeable differences at the end as you struggle to maintain a level top. Its a good analogy for how minor adjustments to the plan - and there will be countless numbers of such minor adjustments needed every moment of every single day globally - can accumulate to throw the Plan completely out of kilter with reality. You will no longer have a Plan as such to guide the overall pattern of production by . The overall pattern of production will simply become the reflective by-product of multiple plans interacting with each other as multiple players in the economy strive to adjust their plans in the light of the changing plans/demands of others...

This would only be the case, perhaps, if the plan was constructed in such an immensely stupid way that it made no allowances for changing circumstances, i.e. if it had no provisions for buffer stock, if it assumed every factory would operate at 100% efficiency throughout the period and so on. In fact, this is not the only point where you allow yourself recourse to buffer stock but conveniently forget that this buffer is possible in a planned economy as well.


No? I suggest you read Marx on the subject of "fictitious capital" and asset bubbles

Marx proved that economic systems exhibited topological mixing and had a dense set of period orbits? What a clever man he was, proving all of this before the theory was developed. And, of course, one would imagine that there would be quite a difference between capitalism and socialism in this regard.


But again you are reading this all wrong. The "tragically exploded Dildo Factory 108" is yet another instance of why we have to build into production system a degree of institutional flexibility which is simply not available with a system of society wide planning. The more I read what you say, the more convinced am I - with all due respect - that you dont understand the issue at stake here. Hypothetically , were a system of society-wide planning to be in place then the explosion at Dildo factory 108 would mean a loss of output[...]

No, not necessarily. That was precisely my point - the output quote assigned to Factory 108 can be divided among the remaining factories. This means the input-output part of the problem does need to be calculated again (although the transport part would need to be).


[...]which would have to be accommodated somehow through a process of materials re-balancing which means reconfiguring all those carefully worked out input-output ratios all along the line and the reassignment of production targets accordingly . But there will probably be thousands of equivalents of exploding Dildo factory 108 happening every day across the world - not necessarily in the sense of exploding factories but in the sense of disrupted production.

Hence my point about it being rank stupidity to assume that production units will operate at full capacity throughout the entire period.


On the subject of local knowlege, well again I assume you would accept that a local body such as a production unit would better know the state of affairs on the ground locally than might some remote central office. I mean, that almost goes without saying. A local factory would for example be better acqainted with the dispostion of stock within its four walls. Years ago back in South Africa I remember briefly working in metals factory cum foundry as a teenager just out of school and having to traipse around differents parts of the factory to confer with the foremen on the spot about the number of metal plates or rods or whatever so as to get a composite picture of daily output, which figures would be recorded back in the Admin dept. No doubt these days its all computerised but the same principle applies. Almost by definition local knowlege is bound to be superior to centralised knowlege in respect of the local set up and since the world consists of millions of localities it would be madness to dispense with the accumulated body of such local knowlege. Centralised knowlege actually depends on it. And while it is true that "most factory workers do not know the capacities of other factories" they do know the capacity of their own factory better than some central office. This is a matter of simple commonsense and logic

Not really, this is a matter of social control and inspection. Your own reliance on telecommunications technology and so on sort of works against you in this regard - collecting all of this local knowledge at the central level becomes a matter of workers in the various production units punching in a few numbers at the end of a shift, and occasionally sending a representative of the central organs to verify the numbers.


No, I disagree. Reducing the target period doesnt make planninmg more "manageable" but even less manageable. For one thing you have to repeat the whole cumbersome process of consulting the public, going through the process of materials re-balancing etc etc once a year as opposed to once every 5 years. That means even more pointless bureaucracy. Also, again, I repeat its not a question of whether or not there is enough processing or computational power to "pull it off". The intractable problem with central planning lies not with inadequate computing power but in the very nature of what it seeks to "plan". The Plan will have to be constantly modified to keep up with changing condistions to that in effect there never will be a Plan to implement in the first place. It will never ever become available in a usable form. It will be reduced to nothing more than a rather pathetic catch up attempt to monitor the flow of products and resoruces through the production system rather than actually plan for that flow in an apriori sense (the only meaningful definition of "planning", incidentally)

This is becoming tedious, as you simply assert the same things over and over again.


Im not quite sure what you are saying here. Of course democracy has an important role to play in a socialist society and this means individuals abiding by democratic decisions. Ive already outlined my view of how democratic collective decisionmaking bodies can coexist at different levels - local regional and global - alongside, as well as interacting with, a self regulating system of stock control which at least as far as most consumer products are concerned is a matter of individual decisonmaking rather than collective decisionmaking. There is a balance here between individual and collective decisions that is being posited which is more realistic than what you offer.

I am referring to the valiant crusade of several SPGB members and sympathisers for such "rights" as the right of a branch of an organisation to not follow the democratically agreed-upon course of cation, the right of the individual member to not carry out decisions he does not agree with (while remaining a member, of course) and so on. In fact, since your own post is full of "smacking" - this smacks of this, that smacks of that - I can say that the attitude of the SPGB/WSM members on this site to matters of democracy, discipline and "rights" (and planning, of course!) reminds me of nothing more than that of the petty shopkeeper, who is completely blind when it comes to genuine oppression and authoritarianism, but who will shriek if someone so much as suggests that he should do something.


Community and large scale projects are a very good instance of where democratic collective decision-making is clearly required. Deciding whether to take an apple or an orange from your local store is not and should not be a matter of democratic decision - it would be daft even to attempt that - but of the individual herself making a decision.

The problem is that you seem to want to present the process of decisionmaking in its entirety - including whether or not one should be able to take an apple or an orange from your local store - as something which ought to be subject to democratic sanction.

Then surely you can point out where I have said or hinted at anything even remotely similar.


Ironically what you are suggesting will end up as the most undemocratic and the most authoritarianm outcome conceivable . Not only will individuals necessarily be subjected to the will of the larger society in respect of their detailed consumption via a rigorous system of rationing (with all the opportunities for corruption this presents) but the very process of meeting the very detailed production targets of million of products as specified in the Plan will entail almost inevitably some kind of system of compulsory labour. You have already hinted at this yourself in your earlier statement as follows

"A central office can see that, Factory 108 having tragically blown up, it would be most expedient for Factory 109 to take up 80% of the additional workload, Factory 201 10%, and Factory 203 the rest. Then the central office can check in with the factories in question to see if that's alright - if the workers are willing to work the extra hours - and if not to think of something else"

So what of the workers for factory 109 dont comply with this "request" from above - for whatever reason? (And what incidentally about the division of labour in your scheme of things? Are workers not to be allowed to chose when and where and at what they work as Marx suggested? How then do you force Factory 109 to take up 80% of the slack?) The point is that for the Plan to work on its own terms the destruction of Factory 108 will mean workers at some other factory have to comply (and this imediately inserts insinuates an "us" versus"them" dichotomy into the situation). If they dont the Plan has to be redrawn in toto. So by a reductio ad absurdum argument, for the Plan to work on its own terms compliance is necessary and this, Im afraid, entails compulsion, Under the alternative proposal I have suggested - a self regulating system of stock - the failure in the output of dildos to meet the demand for dildos will of course be picked up automatically but it will not be fatal to the system as it would be in the case of society wide planning. There will simply be a shortage of dildos but a system of self regulating stock control will continue

So, let us summarise. You claim that I advocate rationing despite the fact that I have stated several times that I do not, and that any socialist planned economy would include purposeful overproduction to prevent shortages. (But, as I said, you allow yourself an appeal to buffer stock, but not to anyone else.) You quote an example where I specifically talk about an organ of the central authorities asking the workers whether they were willing to take on additional workload, and then allege that I favour compulsory labour, in clear contradiction to sever threads where I have argued against idiotic "work or starve" "anarchists". Right.

I mean, there really does come a point where I have to ask myself if I'm spending my time productively, and at this point it seems that you're not even reading my responses, or at least not reading them carefully, instead taking them as an opportunity to post the same few vague claims along with the ubiquitous refrain of "system of self regulating stock control".

And yes, in the worst-case scenario the plan would have to be drawn up again. The problem is that you treat this as some sort of tragedy, instead of simply one limitation of living in the real world. Of course you claim similar events will happen constantly, which you don't really have an argument for.



Well you see, once again, you seem to suggesting here a postion that is at variance with your stated support for the idea of one single society-wide plan. You admit of the possibility of multiple plans - "I suspect most city plans will be approved by the central democratic bodies almost by default" - just as you earlier talked of the possibility of the Plan being easily adjusted without grasping how this strikes at the very coherency and integrity of the whole concept itself. In short, you dont seem to really understand what is theoretically at a stake here. Which is why I have always suspected that what you are advocating is not classic central planning as such but merely a greater degree of "centralised planning" in what amounts to essentially a polycentric planning system. In other words you advocate what is really at most "indicative planning" though you dont seem to recognise this.

Oh good grief. Here, again, you rely on impressions. The Plan is one, the Plan is rigid. If anyone mentions other plans they are implicitly repudiating central planning. Except, of course, not every plan is an economic one. City plans do not directly impact the economy (except in extraordinary circumstances, as I mentioned in my previous post). Given modern transportation systems, and the level of automation we can expect in a socialist society, for example, it doesn't really matter where workers' residences are. Production functions the same if you put them in District A or District B. It functions the same if you put up a statue to Yevgeniy Preobrazhensky or Yevgenia Bosh, or if you paint the entire city hot pink and black and repurpose the old disused church as a venue for communal orgies.


Of course if the citizens of Burkino Faso wish to pollute the Volta then it is quite approproate that citizens of other parts of a socialist world might wish to intervene and raise objections much as environmental activists do so today. I have no objection that. Its a question of where you draw the line - as it always is! You wouldnt surely want to insist that the city plan for Ouagadougou, the capital, should be opposed by the citizens of Seattle because it recommends the construction of a dildo factory in one city district and not another? What about the principle of subsidiarity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity). Once again, it is a case of respecting localised knwlege rather than arrogantly riding roughshod over it. Ignoring local knowlege is also something "inimical to socialism" I would suggest...

I am not talking about "raising objections", I am talking about the central democratic bodies returning the plan with a great big "don't be such idiots" stamped all over it. And yes, I do think that society, not the citizens of Ouagadougou or Seattle, should decide on things like city plans and so on (not to mention that it's probably misguided to speak of citizens "of" Ouagadougou or Seattle - or more likely whatever residential and industrial agglomerations replace these cities - as in a socialist society the mobility of the average member will be much higher).

And what about "subsidiarity"? That is definitely not part of socialist politics - in fact it is an idea associated with the corporatist European Union and various Christian-fascist groups!


Again I dont wish to pooh pooh your various suggestions here. All of them, I am sure, have a place - even the idea of consumer questionnaires. But, still, I come back again and again to the central point - why ignore the vital and massively important data that a self regulating system of stock control furnishes production units in a socialist society. What better presents a picure of the actual pattern of consumer preferances and the shifts in this pattern than this? That is my challenge to you and anyone else who rejects this proposition - show me a better alternative

Except, of course, no one said the information contained in the rate of stock depletion would be discarded. That would be extremely stupid. But at the same time this would merely be one of the various kinds of information available to planners, and there would be no automatic quasi-market signals being exchanged between economic units (which in your proposal essentially function as enterprises).


Actually I would challenge the claim that "most people only consume a limited amount of products on a daily basis means that they are not capable of deciding about the allocation of other products". To make an informed decision on the allocation of "other products" means an intimate acquaitance with the entire structure of modern production consisting of millions of different kinds of prpducts and even more in the speficiations and varieties of these products when, to be frank i dont think such an acquaintance is proctical available to any of us as individuals. The production system is just to vast for any one of us to comprehend in detail, Im no expert on the manufacture of dildos and to be frank I am quite happy to let those familiar with this process decide for themselves what inputs they need for the purpose of producing such things. I think you will find probably most people will think the same. But in no way does that detract from the practicality of establishing a socialist system of society

I am not an expert on medicine, but I would say I have a pretty good grasp of how to recognise medical incompetence. There is no need for every member of society to be familiar with the various production processes being employed. What the average member of society is going to take notice of are the quotas for the production of cosumer goods, the predicted workload for various units and branches, things like the special projects being completed, and so on. The assumption, of course, is that the planning bodies know something about the production processes - if it turns out that they don't, of course, they can always be cashiered.

[Ahab Strange]

As fascinating at it is to read, it seems that discussions on planned/command economies ususally end up with a one monotlithic discourse between two people.

In an attempt to answer the OPs question:

There is no hard and fast refutation to the ECA as there is no hard and fast blueprint of a socialist planned economy. For most An-caps, they consider the debate between Von Mises and Lange on the ECA a closed book, even though there has been much more developed thought from the left since then.

Personally I like to think of a planned economy more like a nervous system. It has a central core that makes complex decisions but only in light of information for the periperhy. As has been stated, a brain with no sensory nerves is like a planned economy with no feedback mechanism.

In capitalism, consumer feedback is done through the market. It is possible that a socialist planned economy could utilise some form of market function in order to gauge demand, but with some CRITICAL difference

- Instead of money, labor time is used as a unit of account.
- Consumer goods only are "sold" on the market, not intermediate, production goods
- The "shops" are owned and staffed by the socialist commune itself. They are not private enterprises and are not in competition with each other, merely distribution points
- Consumers "spend" labour vouchers on goods and services of their choice, in exact proportion to what they have worked. These however do not circulate, and are cancelled upon submission. They are merely a symbol of the workers entitlement to consume to due the contribution of his labour.

All of the above essentially means that there would be some manner of pricing system to aid rational calculation, but would essentially be a products labour value plus an adjustment for supply and demand of said product.

Private ownership of the means of production, surplus value exploitation, and competition however would not exist.

[ckaihatsu]

I see planning in socialism in terms of a polycentric planning system operating at different levels - local , regional and global - with the bulk of it being done locally, significantly more so than is the case today.


---





[N]o one said the information contained in the rate of stock depletion would be discarded. That would be extremely stupid. But at the same time this would merely be one of the various kinds of information available to planners, and there would be no automatic quasi-market signals being exchanged between economic units (which in your proposal essentially function as enterprises).


---


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

http://s6.postimg.org/cp6z6ed81/Multi_Tiered_System_of_Productive_and_Consumptiv.j pg (http://postimg.org/image/ccfl07uy5/full/)

[ckaihatsu]

- Instead of money, labor time is used as a unit of account.




- Consumers "spend" labour vouchers on goods and services of their choice, in exact proportion to what they have worked.





My standing critique, though, is that a 'points system' doesn't go far enough because the question of how points are issued in the first place is intractable:




How would points be assigned to individuals in the first place -- ?

If it's on a strictly across-the-board consistent basis -- say 100 points per person per month -- that would be very egalitarian, but it would be an overall (societal) *disincentive* towards new efforts at greater social coordination and experimental / speculative advancements in research and development.

And, conversely, if *increasing* rates of points could be obtained for increased amounts of work effort, *that* would be tantamount to the commodification of labor, since labor would be directly exchangeable for material rewards -- too close to a capitalistic market economy, in other words.

Part of the reason for using revleft so much is precisely for this question of a feasible political-logistical approach to a post-capitalist political economy, and why i've developed my own 'solution' for such, at my blog entry, blah blah blah....


Pies Must Line Up

http://s6.postimg.org/5wpihv9ip/140415_2_Pies_Must_Line_Up_xcf_jpg.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/erqcsdyb1/full/)

[robbo203]

Alright, but how would these factors be assessed if there are no predictions about the global demand for goods, and the capacity of other production units? Take, for example, "seasonal factors". Fair enough - more hot beverages are consumed in winter, I imagine, than in summer. But how much is "more", quantitatively? It is not enough to simply say "well, since it's winter, we'll produce more of the Hot Cocoa Mix Number 7", there need to be quantitative estimates. Even things like the durability of products depend on conditions in the storage facilities, and these are global.
.

I wasn't suggesting prediction or "quantitive estimates" would not be entailed in determining the size of buffer stocks to be held. This would be the case at any level of organisation - local, regional or global - so in a sense your point is irrelevant. However, you might want to explain how you imagine your single global planning authority might be able to more effectively determine the size of the buffer stocks of, say, tins of baked beans that ought to be held at distribution point 902 in the city of Seattle, say, more effectively than the people on the ground ,at the distribution point. in question. Also how are storage facilities "global" if Im reading you correctly and what does this mean? Cant you get local storage facilities or am I missing something?



I don't think "sustainable production" is as important as some people claim - particularly in the transitional period we will probably have to "sacrifice" some part of the biosphere in order to raise the standard of living in former regions of belated capitalist development. Be that as it may, I would think that it is more sustainable to extract copper, for example, in few large-scale operations from significant deposits, than to do so in a large number of small-scale operations.

Furthermore, I think you are massively underestimating the extent of the global circulation of products. In a socialist society, of course, there would be no need for cheap manufactured products from China, for example, but there would still be a need for the rare metals from former China, and in the global division of industry, that territory would certainly contain key industries. Or do you think that it is not wasteful and quite frankly surreal for every petty territory to have "its own" factory for every imaginable consumer and industrial product?.

As I said previously my position is not one of advocating local autarky but rather one which merely supports a greater degree of localisation of production. Its a question of emphasis in other words, not taking a a black or white view of things. I gave my reasons for taking this position in the previous post. I dont know what you have in mind by a "petty territory" - petty can be quite a relative term - but in any event, no, I dont necessarily think every such petty territory should have its own factory for every conceivable kind of product. It depends on the type of product, amongst other things,

For instance, I have an interest in sustainable agriculture which I suggest is a key candidate for a shift towards more localised production for all sorts of reasons. I know you are not much taken with the idea of sustainability but sustainable agriculture ironically can be much productive than unsustainable agriculture There is abundant evidence to show that small scale diversified farming is significantly more efficient and productive in terms of output per hectare than large scale commercial monocultures . See for example the article"Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty", by Miguel A. Altieri in , Monthly Review, July-August 2009, (http://www.monthlyreview.org/090810altieri.php). Indeed, according to Altieri, in the United States the "smallest two-hectare farms produced $15,104 per hectare and netted about $2,902 per hectare. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares, yielded $249 per hectare and netted about $52 per hectare".

The problem is , of course, is that the small farmers can barely survive on such an income whereas the big farmers with so much more land at their disposal can manage to get by with a comparatively much lower output per hectare. You wont have this kind of problem in a non market socialist economy. There is also the point that small farms are much more labour intensive but that is problem in capitalism not socialism, Actually in socialism there will be if any thing an abundance of labour given that most occupations that exist today will simply cease to exist , their whole purpose being functionally tied to the operation of the capitalist money economy. This means the potential labour force for socially useful production will be more or less doubled. The radical modification of the farming sector will be an important priority for socialism, raising output and encouraging more people to work the land helpong to overcome
the division between town and countryside. Small scale farming units are perfect vehicle for this , Being more diversifed (and environmentally sustainable) and that also of course means more food being grown locally for local needs which cuts down transport costs. Central planning on the other hand is likely to see a continuation of existing profit driven capitalist tendencies towards monoculture on the false premiss that big is necessarily better. That aint so

And, no, I dont massively underestimate the extent of the global circulation of products. I very much agree that it is considerable and that is precisely the point - I am trying to argue for is a significant reduction in this extent by a greater emphasis on localised production in socialism. You seem to go along with some of the points I made so and agree that there "would be no need for cheap manufactured products from China", for instance. If anything, you massively underestimate the extent to which we can and should whittle back on the costly business of circulating prpducts at a global level. How much of those precious metals from China that you speak of find their way today into the whole business of armaments production and constitute the raw material of laser guided missiles, I wonder. This is to say nothing that the role of recyling and cutting back on planned obsolesence could play in a socialist economy which would reduce the demand for such metals.



No, to honest I think the confusion is entirely on your part, as despite your earlier protestations about conscious choice being compatible with "a self-regulating system of stock control", you obviously take into account only those feedback mechanisms where the component of conscious choice is entirely excluded, where simple feedback loops change production quotas (or however you want to call quotas) automatically. This might be a good way to think about, for example, hormone secretion, but it fails when applied to any system of production (and, indeed, you yourself admit that various conscious decisions about production will have to be made even in the sort of economic arrangement you propose). Planned economies, just like all economies, possess feedback mechanisms that provide return information about the performance of various economic units to the decision-makers, whether the bourgeoisie, the feudal lord or guildmaster, or the entire society in the case of socialism. Some of these feedback mechanisms are better, some are worse. Capitalism relies on price signals from the market, with all that entails. Socialism will have different mechanisms.
.

Except of course, as I keep on saying, a hypothetical system of society wide planning in which the total pattern of production is planned in advance within one single giant plan cannot by defintion have a "feedback mechanism". Truem there may discontent and complaints that the central planners ensconced in the their global headquarters might get to hear which might prompt them to want to rethink the plan in due course but for the moment will the plan putatively exists there is no leverage anyone exert to modify. Do you serious imaginely that having figured out a gigantic matrix covering every single one of the millions of differnet kinds of products produced in the world, not to mention the potentially numerous variants of each product in terms of their technbical specifications, that having figure the annual output, that the central planners would be inclined to want to go through the whole rebalancing process once again? No, the temptation will be to stick with the plan regardless and ironically you yourself have hinted that this might be the case on the grounds that buffer stocks (more anon) might afford them the breathing space to do just that

So assuming this Plan ever got off the ground then Im sure your agree that at least for the duration of the Plan - say, every 5 years - there can be no modification to the Plan - if the Plan is to stand any chance of delivering what it prpmises, That means in effect that it lacks any kind of feedback mechanism that is brought to bear upon and modifies the behaviour or parameters of the Plan on an ongoing basis, The Plan has to be rigidly applied in that sense or else it breaks down and is rendered internally incoherent. It cannot brook change. But change is precisely what is unavoidablke - on the supplky side , on the demand side and in terms of the development of technology itself which constantly alters the specific make up or configuration of particular bundles of factor inputs that go to proidcue particular products (unless og courrse the central planners are going to ban all technological development for the duration). Becuase it has not got a feedback mechanism, this is what makes society wide planning untenable in modern complex society. Logging up the complaints of consumers to bear in mind for when the plan is next redrafted doies not constitute a feedback mechanism in any meangingful sense of the term. Trying to accommodate changes in the real world means having to redraft the Plan. But since changes are constantly happening all the time (and it would be a strange kind of Marxist who would deny this!) then clearly there will be no possiblity of the Plan ever getting off the ground - because it having to be constantly changed all the time. Unicentric planning is absolutely bound under these circumstances to give way to, or collapses into, polycentric planning - meaning many plans interacting with each other. There is simply no other alternative. Then and then only can an effective feedback mechanism come into play.

You refer to what you call the "planned economies" but , of course, every conceivable kind of economy involves planning. Even the most extreme free market capitalism is full of plans. The issues is not whether there are plans but whether there are many plans or just one plan as I keep on pointing out

The so called planned economies like the state capitalist Soviet Union were not examples of a single gigantic plan being effectively put into operation. Far from it. Since society wide planning is an impossibility that is hardly surprising. As I explained before GOSPLAN's plans were a complete farce but you seem unwilling to learn from the lessons of its abject failure. The Soviet Union was in reality, and perforce, a polycentric system of planning in which state enterprises effectively competed ruthlessly with each other over the allocation of state resources. They miught not have exercised the degree of autonomy that their counterparts in the West have - the corporations - biut they still has considerable scope to make decisions in respect of a whole range of things. It was for purely ideological purposes that Soviet Union maintained the pretence that it was a centrally planned economy. Its was nowhere near being centrally planned in the classic sense of society wide planning and nor could it ever be.




But these do not have all of the relevant information - in fact only society as one unit possesses that sort of information. These "planners" (they are planners in the same sense in which the boards of directors are planners, which is to say not at all) would be forced to rely on incomplete information, and the reason I called your proposal "faith based" is that it requires us to assume that some invisible hand will collate all of these partial plans, made with incomplete information, into something resembling an effective production plan..

Then you have misunderstood what I was saying or I have no explained myself clearly enough. There is nothing faith based about the workings of a self regulating systemn of stock control. The data that arises from such a system which is an empirical representation or expression of actual consumer preferences and so is factually based rather than faith based. Of course it is always possible for predictions or extrapolations inter alia making use of such data to be falsified. Inevitably any kind of planning involves a certain amount of quesswork but dont mistake that for the actual mechanism of a self regulating system of stock control




And here I have to protest that you're once again relying on vague impressions rather than any sort of argument. The Plan is rigid, therefore if minor corrections are made the Plan is no longer a plan. Well, no, that's not at all convincing. Particularly since I gave an argument for why this would not be the case.
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Well you surely agree that the "Plan" would not be the same Plan if it were modifed do you not? It requires just one more step to realise that if the Plan has to be constalrty modifed then it can no longer effectively be a Plan. It will become instead a assemblage of interacting plans. It will become a polycentric system of planning and not a unicentric system This is fairly simple to grasp and I am a little puzzled as to why you fail to grasp the point.







This would only be the case, perhaps, if the plan was constructed in such an immensely stupid way that it made no allowances for changing circumstances, i.e. if it had no provisions for buffer stock, if it assumed every factory would operate at 100% efficiency throughout the period and so on. In fact, this is not the only point where you allow yourself recourse to buffer stock but conveniently forget that this buffer is possible in a planned economy as well.

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Unfortunatley this argument wont wash and, if I might say so, it plays right into the hands of people like the Austrian economists who would argue that it completely ignores the opportunity costs of providing for buffer stocks across the board which stocks will tend to conceal the relative scarcities of different factors of production and consequently will lead to a downward spiral of ineffiency and falling output. This is a complex argument and you I suggest you read the article I linked to above before commenting which shows how in fact a self regulating system of stock control can in fact mobilise the relative scarcities of different factor inputs to overcome the objection raised by the economic calculation argument. Society wide planning on the other hand is simply not able to do this because as I said it lacks an effective feedback mechanism to enable it to identify where factors need to be economised on.

That apart I think your whole argument that society wide planning can rely on the existence of buffer stocks to accommodate changes in the real world and so allow the Plan to continue to exist unscathed, is a specious argument. You forget that the buffer stocks in question are an extrapoloation based on what the central planners themselves consider is the level of demand for a product in question , with a margin of safety built in, based on their interpretation of responses in the form of returned questionnaires and the like. There is no guarantee whatsoever that the figures they come up with will be accurate. If demand is more than they allowed for, what that means is that there might not only be no buffer stock but also there could be chronic shortages foir the duration of the Plan. The only really accurate guage of consumer preferences is that provided by a self regulating system of stock control which is respoinsive to the actual take up rate of consumer products in the stores and immediately transmits this data directly to the producer units themselves. I am baffled as why you imagine your cumbersome unwieldy roundabout method of centralised quotas and targets could possibly be better. Even if society wide planning were feasible and the theoretical and practical evidence conclusively shows it is not, the propoisal I outlined would be vastly superior on any grounds you care to think of. Above all, it alone defeats and overcomes the objections raised by the economic calculation argument; society wide planning has absolutely no way of answering those objections becuase it lacks a self regulating mechanism which is key to the whole argument





No, not necessarily. That was precisely my point - the output quote assigned to Factory 108 can be divided among the remaining factories. This means the input-output part of the problem does need to be calculated again (although the transport part would need to be).
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And labour too I imagine since we cannot suppose that labour is perfectly mobile/elastic and responsive to changing patterns of production in a socialist society. How does the global planning centre based in Gods-knows-what part of the world ensure the availability of a workforce sufficient to met the increase imposed on Factory 108 on the other side of the planet?



Not really, this is a matter of social control and inspection. Your own reliance on telecommunications technology and so on sort of works against you in this regard - collecting all of this local knowledge at the central level becomes a matter of workers in the various production units punching in a few numbers at the end of a shift, and occasionally sending a representative of the central organs to verify the numbers...

But a central organ is a relative thing . central to what? You propose that there should only be one single centre for the entire globe, all 7 billion of us. That's what society wide planning means. But it is quite possible to talk of a central organ in respect of different levels of organisation - local, regional and global. Even at a global level one can have multiple centres differentiated along functional lines like the global matimetime agency we discussed which operates as a separate planning centre alongside other global agencies. In no way woyld the existence of such a global agency signify society wide planning. It is fully compatible with what I am advocating but not with what you are advocating since in your schema you cannot possibly have separate global agencies





This is becoming tedious, as you simply assert the same things over and over again.
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But you dont deal with argument so i am forced to repeat it - hopefully in a slightly different format each time which might finally allow the argument to hit the target at some point



I am referring to the valiant crusade of several SPGB members and sympathisers for such "rights" as the right of a branch of an organisation to not follow the democratically agreed-upon course of cation, the right of the individual member to not carry out decisions he does not agree with (while remaining a member, of course) and so on. In fact, since your own post is full of "smacking" - this smacks of this, that smacks of that - I can say that the attitude of the SPGB/WSM members on this site to matters of democracy, discipline and "rights" (and planning, of course!) reminds me of nothing more than that of the petty shopkeeper, who is completely blind when it comes to genuine oppression and authoritarianism, but who will shriek if someone so much as suggests that he should do something.
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Why are you introducing the subject of the SPGB into the discussion? Im not an SPGB member anyway and am contributing to this discussion solely in a personal capacity




So, let us summarise. You claim that I advocate rationing despite the fact that I have stated several times that I do not, and that any socialist planned economy would include purposeful overproduction to prevent shortages. (But, as I said, you allow yourself an appeal to buffer stock, but not to anyone else.) You quote an example where I specifically talk about an organ of the central authorities asking the workers whether they were willing to take on additional workload, and then allege that I favour compulsory labour, in clear contradiction to sever threads where I have argued against idiotic "work or starve" "anarchists". Right.
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I dont say you advocate rationing. I merely say it follows logically from the position you hold vis a vis central planning. If the output of a product is fixed by the central plan at the outset then clearly if the demand for the product in question increases, so called buffer stocks notwithstanding, it must be ignored - meaning consumption must be restricted to what was originally planned for the sake of the integrity of the Plan. What is to stop copnsumers angaging a mad rush for the limited supply of the prpdiucts in question; you only have the Central authority's word for it that that what if calls a buffer stock represents an additional qnatity over and above what people supposedly want. Ditto in the case of compulsory labour. It may very well not be what you enforse but if the Plan is to be carried through to the letter that is what it will require - compulsory labour. Like your imposition of an increased output target on poor old dildo factory 108. Immediately you create a socially divisive "Us" versus "Them" set up And you misunderstand my point about a buffer stock. It is the ability to maintain a buffer stock that is gauge of the relative scarcity of the good in question. That does not mean for that for every every product a buffer stock will necessarily be in place. This is part of a larger argument against the Austrian economists which we havent really broached here as yet.



I mean, there really does come a point where I have to ask myself if I'm spending my time productively, and at this point it seems that you're not even reading my responses, or at least not reading them carefully, instead taking them as an opportunity to post the same few vague claims along with the ubiquitous refrain of "system of self regulating stock control".
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Actually I have been reading you comments very carefully and disseting them with equal care. Just becuase you dont like what I have to say doesnt mean I havent read your responses carefully. I am allowed to disagree, you know...




And yes, in the worst-case scenario the plan would have to be drawn up again. The problem is that you treat this as some sort of tragedy, instead of simply one limitation of living in the real world. Of course you claim similar events will happen constantly, which you don't really have an argument for...

I have outlined the argument here and in early posts. Its not just a case of the Plan having to be redrawn again, its case of the Plan having to be constantly drawn up again - and in toto - in the absence of a feedback mechanism internal to the central planning system itself. It will be forced to become a polycentric system of planning before it even got off the ground. That is what i am saying. A polycentric system does not face that same kind of threat to its existence precisely becuase it is adaptable in the face of complexity and change. Its not a "worse case" scenario that a single society-wide plan would have to be drawn up again; it is the ONLY scenario available to it and that is the whole problem






Oh good grief. Here, again, you rely on impressions. The Plan is one, the Plan is rigid. If anyone mentions other plans they are implicitly repudiating central planning. Except, of course, not every plan is an economic one. City plans do not directly impact the economy (except in extraordinary circumstances, as I mentioned in my previous post). Given modern transportation systems, and the level of automation we can expect in a socialist society, for example, it doesn't really matter where workers' residences are. Production functions the same if you put them in District A or District B. It functions the same if you put up a statue to Yevgeniy Preobrazhensky or Yevgenia Bosh, or if you paint the entire city hot pink and black and repurpose the old disused church as a venue for communal orgies.
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Do you seriously imagine for one moment that city plans di not have economic impacts, direct or otheriwse. Even to use your own somewhat colourful examples, all of these have opportunity costs and therefore without exception affect the allocation of resources in some way. I could multiply the examples I gave a thousandfold to underline the point that, very definitely, city plans or town plans or even village plans if you like have economic repercussions but the fact that you see such plans operating outside the ambit of the global planning centre based somewhere else in the world suggests to me that your yourself are not quite convinmced by the idea of an all encompassing Godlike Plan that precludes all other plans





And what about "subsidiarity"? That is definitely not part of socialist politics - in fact it is an idea associated with the corporatist European Union and various Christian-fascist groups!.

I could equally retort that society wide planning is an idea associated with a totalitarian state fascist type regime and therefore definitely not part of a "socialist politics" either

Do you know what the principle of subsidiarity is? Here's one explanation:

The principle of subsidiarity is defined in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. It ensures that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made to verify that action at Union level is justified in light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level. Specifically, it is the principle whereby the Union does not take action (except in the areas that fall within its exclusive competence), unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level. It is closely bound up with the principle of proportionality, which requires that any action by the Union should not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Treaties. (http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/glossary/subsidiarity_en.htm)

Agreed it is a principle supposedly employed by the corporatist European Union but that does not means therefore that the principle in itself must be rejected. If you want to repudiate that principle you need to present reasons germane to the argument you want to make, not fall back on that discreditable old tactic of imputing guilt of association




Except, of course, no one said the information contained in the rate of stock depletion would be discarded. That would be extremely stupid. But at the same time this would merely be one of the various kinds of information available to planners, and there would be no automatic quasi-market signals being exchanged between economic units (which in your proposal essentially function as enterprises).
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There are no market signicals whatsoever in my proposal. Market signals presupose exchange relations and the distribution of goods in a socialist society would be effectd not on the basis oif quid pro quo exchange but freely. So I am not quite sure what you are trying to say with your remark that there would be no "automatic quasi-market signals being exchanged between economic units (which in your proposal essentially function as enterprises". If you mean there would be no lateral or horizontal connections between production units in a socialist society then of course you are merely restating your claim that there would only be one single avenue of communcation - between a single world planning authority on the one hand and millions upon millions of production units on the other as well as billions or ordinary citizens who will apparently each be sent a bulky questionnaire to fill out and return - lets hope the postal service is up to the job! - to the global planning centre for its to collate and somehow arrive at some idea of what people want for the next 5 years or whatever

I am not quite sure from your point of view why it would be "extremely stupid" to discard information contained in the rate of stock depletion since presumably the all knowing global central planning authority would have known at the outset what peoples' wants were and devised its millions ipon millions of production targets with precisely that in mind right down to the speficions and colour types of the moped or pop-up toaster its customers/clients asked for in the beginning, Seems a bit redundant to me. But if you have come round to thinking that the rate of stock depletion is so vitally important why not make this information available directly to the produers themselves in defiance of the central planning authority? At least the peole wouldn't have to wait another 5 years before the central planning authority got round to deciding to redraft the Plan

[robbo203]

Alright, but how would these factors be assessed if there are no predictions about the global demand for goods, and the capacity of other production units? Take, for example, "seasonal factors". Fair enough - more hot beverages are consumed in winter, I imagine, than in summer. But how much is "more", quantitatively? It is not enough to simply say "well, since it's winter, we'll produce more of the Hot Cocoa Mix Number 7", there need to be quantitative estimates. Even things like the durability of products depend on conditions in the storage facilities, and these are global.
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I wasn't suggesting prediction or "quantitive estimates" would not be entailed in determining the size of buffer stocks to be held. This would be the case at any level of organisation - local, regional or global - so in a sense your point is irrelevant. However, you might want to explain how you imagine your single global planning authority might be able to more effectively determine the size of the buffer stocks of, say, tins of baked beans that ought to be held at distribution point 902 in the city of Seattle, say, more effectively than the people on the ground ,at the distribution point in question. Also, how are storage facilities "global" if Im reading you correctly and what does this mean? Cant you get local storage facilities or am I missing something?



I don't think "sustainable production" is as important as some people claim - particularly in the transitional period we will probably have to "sacrifice" some part of the biosphere in order to raise the standard of living in former regions of belated capitalist development. Be that as it may, I would think that it is more sustainable to extract copper, for example, in few large-scale operations from significant deposits, than to do so in a large number of small-scale operations.

Furthermore, I think you are massively underestimating the extent of the global circulation of products. In a socialist society, of course, there would be no need for cheap manufactured products from China, for example, but there would still be a need for the rare metals from former China, and in the global division of industry, that territory would certainly contain key industries. Or do you think that it is not wasteful and quite frankly surreal for every petty territory to have "its own" factory for every imaginable consumer and industrial product?.

As I said previously, my position is not one of advocating local autarky but rather one which merely supports a greater degree of localisation of production. Its a question of emphasis in other words, not taking a a black or white view of things. I gave my reasons for taking this position in the previous post. I dont know what you have in mind by a "petty territory" - petty can be quite a relative term - but in any event, no, I dont necessarily think every such petty territory should have its own factory for every conceivable kind of product. It depends on the type of product, amongst other things,

For instance, I have an interest in sustainable agriculture which I suggest is a key candidate for a shift towards more localised production for all sorts of reasons. I know you are not much taken with the idea of sustainability but sustainable agriculture ironically can be much productive than unsustainable agriculture There is abundant evidence to show that small scale diversified farming is significantly more efficient and productive in terms of output per hectare than large scale commercial monocultures . See for example the article"Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty", by Miguel A. Altieri in , Monthly Review, July-August 2009, (http://www.monthlyreview.org/090810altieri.php). Indeed, according to Altieri, in the United States the "smallest two-hectare farms produced $15,104 per hectare and netted about $2,902 per hectare. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares, yielded $249 per hectare and netted about $52 per hectare".

The problem is , of course, is that the small farmers can barely survive on such an income whereas the big farmers with so much more land at their disposal can manage to get by with a comparatively much lower output per hectare. You wont have this kind of problem in a non market socialist economy. There is also the point that small farms are much more labour intensive but that is problem in capitalism not socialism, Actually in socialism there will be if any thing an abundance of labour given that most occupations that exist today will simply cease to exist , their whole purpose being functionally tied to the operation of the capitalist money economy. This means the potential labour force for socially useful production will be more or less doubled. The radical modification of the farming sector will be an important priority for socialism, raising output and encouraging more people to work the land helping to overcome or mitigate the division between town and countryside. Small scale farming units are a perfect vehicle for this, being more diversifed (and environmentally sustainable) and that also of course means more food being grown locally for local needs which cuts down transport costs. Central planning on the other hand is likely to see a continuation even and excerbation of existing profit driven capitalist tendencies towards disatrous monoculture on the false premiss that big is necessarily better. That aint so

And, no, I dont massively underestimate the extent of the global circulation of products. I very much agree that it is considerable and that is precisely the point - I am trying to argue for is a significant reduction in this extent by a greater emphasis on localised production in socialism. You seem to go along with some of the points I made so and agree that there "would be no need for cheap manufactured products from China", for instance. If anything, you massively underestimate the extent to which we can and should whittle back on the costly business of circulating prpducts at a global level. How much of those precious metals from China that you speak of find their way today into the whole business of armaments production and constitute the raw material of laser guided missiles, I wonder. This is to say nothing that the role of recyling and cutting back on planned obsolesence could play in a socialist economy which would reduce the demand for such metals.



No, to honest I think the confusion is entirely on your part, as despite your earlier protestations about conscious choice being compatible with "a self-regulating system of stock control", you obviously take into account only those feedback mechanisms where the component of conscious choice is entirely excluded, where simple feedback loops change production quotas (or however you want to call quotas) automatically. This might be a good way to think about, for example, hormone secretion, but it fails when applied to any system of production (and, indeed, you yourself admit that various conscious decisions about production will have to be made even in the sort of economic arrangement you propose). Planned economies, just like all economies, possess feedback mechanisms that provide return information about the performance of various economic units to the decision-makers, whether the bourgeoisie, the feudal lord or guildmaster, or the entire society in the case of socialism. Some of these feedback mechanisms are better, some are worse. Capitalism relies on price signals from the market, with all that entails. Socialism will have different mechanisms.
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Except of course, as I keep on saying, a hypothetical system of society wide planning in which the total pattern of production is planned in advance within one single giant plan cannot by definition have a "feedback mechanism". True, there may discontent and complaints that the central planners ensconced in the their comfortable global headquarters might get to hear about which might prompt them to want to rethink the Plan in due course but for the moment while the plan putatively exists, there is no leverage anyone can exert to modify its interlocking components. Do you seriously imagine that having figured out a gigantic matrix covering every single one of the millions of different kinds of products produced in the world, not to mention the potentially numerous variants of each such product in terms of their technical specifications, that the central planners would be inclined to want to go through the whole rebalancing process once again? No, the temptation will be to stick with the plan regardless and ironically you yourself have hinted that this might be the case on the grounds that buffer stocks (more anon) might afford them the breathing space to do just that. What you are saying in effect is that enables them to get round not having a feedback mechanism

So assuming this Plan ever got off the ground then Im sure you would agree that at least for the duration of the Plan - say, every 5 years - there can be no modification to the Plan - if the Plan is to stand any chance of delivering what it promises, That means in effect that it lacks any kind of feedback mechanism that is brought to bear upon and modifies the behaviour or parameters of the Plan on an ongoing basis, The Plan has to be rigidly applied in that sense or else it breaks down and is rendered internally incoherent. It cannot brook change. But change is precisely what is unavoidable - on the supply side , on the demand side and in terms of the development of technology itself which constantly alters the specific make up or configuration of particular bundles of factor inputs that go to produce particular products (unless of courrse the central planners are going to ban all technological development for the duration). Becuase it has not got a feedback mechanism, this is what makes society wide planning untenable in modern complex society. Logging up the complaints of consumers to bear in mind for when the plan is next redrafted does not constitute a feedback mechanism in any meangingful sense of the term. Trying to accommodate changes in the real world means having to redraft the Plan. But since changes are constantly happening all the time (and it would be a strange kind of Marxist who would deny this!) then clearly there will be no possiblity of the Plan ever getting off the ground - because of it having to be constantly changed all the time. It simply wont become available in any usuable form to "guide" the production units Unicentric planning is absolutely bound under these circumstances to give way to, or collapse into, polycentric planning - meaning many plans interacting with each other. There is simply no other alternative. Then and then only can an effective feedback mechanism come into play when you have polycentric planning.

You refer to what you call the "planned economies" but , of course, every conceivable kind of economy involves planning. Even the most extreme free market version of capitalism is full of plans. The issue is not whether there are plans but whether there are many plans or just one plan as I keep on pointing out

The so called planned economies like the state capitalist Soviet Union were not examples of a single gigantic plan being effectively put into operation. Far from it. Since society wide planning is an impossibility that is hardly surprising. As I explained before GOSPLAN's plans were a complete farce but you seem unwilling to learn from the lessons of its abject failure. The Soviet Union was in reality, and perforce, a polycentric system of planning in which state enterprises effectively competed ruthlessly with each other over the allocation of state resources. They might not have exercised the degree of autonomy that their counterparts in the West have - the corporations - but they still had considerable scope to make decisions in respect of a whole range of things. It was for purely ideological purposes that Soviet Union maintained the pretence that it was a centrally planned economy. Its was nowhere near being centrally planned in the classic sense of society wide planning and nor could it ever be.




But these do not have all of the relevant information - in fact only society as one unit possesses that sort of information. These "planners" (they are planners in the same sense in which the boards of directors are planners, which is to say not at all) would be forced to rely on incomplete information, and the reason I called your proposal "faith based" is that it requires us to assume that some invisible hand will collate all of these partial plans, made with incomplete information, into something resembling an effective production plan..

Then you have misunderstood what I was saying or I have no explained myself clearly enough. There is nothing "faith based" about the workings of a self regulating systemn of stock control. The data that arises from such a system which is an empirical representation or expression of actual consumer preferences is factually based rather than faith based. Of course it is always possible for predictions or extrapolations inter alia making use of such data to be falsified. Inevitably any kind of planning involves a certain amount of quesswork but dont mistake that for the actual mechanism of a self regulating system of stock control




And here I have to protest that you're once again relying on vague impressions rather than any sort of argument. The Plan is rigid, therefore if minor corrections are made the Plan is no longer a plan. Well, no, that's not at all convincing. Particularly since I gave an argument for why this would not be the case.
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Well you surely agree that the "Plan" would not be the same Plan if it were modifed do you not? It requires just one more step to realise that if the Plan has to be constantly modifed then it can no longer effectively serve as a Plan (single). It will become instead a assemblage of mutually interacting plans. It will become a polycentric system of planning and no longer a unicentric system This is fairly simple to grasp and I am a little puzzled as to why you fail to grasp the point.







This would only be the case, perhaps, if the plan was constructed in such an immensely stupid way that it made no allowances for changing circumstances, i.e. if it had no provisions for buffer stock, if it assumed every factory would operate at 100% efficiency throughout the period and so on. In fact, this is not the only point where you allow yourself recourse to buffer stock but conveniently forget that this buffer is possible in a planned economy as well.

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Unfortunatley this argument wont wash and, if I might say so, it plays right into the hands of people like the Austrian economists who would argue that it completely ignores the opportunity costs of providing for buffer stocks across the board, which stocks moreover will tend to conceal the relative scarcities of different factors of production and consequently will lead to a downward spiral of inefficiency and falling output. This is a complex argument and you I suggest you read the article I linked to above before commenting, which shows how by contrast a decentralised or spontaneously ordered self regulating system of stock control can in fact mobilise the relative scarcities of different factor inputs to overcome the objection raised by the economic calculation argument. Society wide planning on the other hand is simply not able to do this because as I said it lacks an effective feedback mechanism to enable it to identify where factors need to be most economised on. Its use of so called buffer stocks impede rational allocation

That apart I think your whole argument that society wide planning can rely on the existence of buffer stocks to accommodate changes in the real world and so allow the Plan to continue to exist unscathed, is a specious argument. You forget that the buffer stocks in question are somply extrapoloation based on what the central planners themselves perceive or consider to be the level of demand for a product in question , with a margin of safety built in, based on their pwn interpretation of responses in the form of returned questionnaires and the like. There is no guarantee whatsoever that the figures they come up with will be accurate. If demand is more than they allowed for, what that means is that there might not only be no buffer stock to hand but also there could be chronic shortages foir the duration of the Plan. The only really accurate guage of consumer preferences is that provided by a self regulating system of stock control which is responsive to the actual take up rate of consumer products in the stores and immediately transmits this data directly to the producer units themselves. I am baffled as why you imagine your cumbersome unwieldy roundabout top heavy and utterly bureaucratic method of centralised quotas and targets could possibly be better. Even if society wide planning were feasible, and the theoretical and practical evidence conclusively shows it is not, the proposal I outlined would be vastly superior on any grounds you care to think of. Above all, it alone defeats and overcomes the objections raised by the economic calculation argument; society wide planning by contrast has absolutely no way of answering those objections becuase it lacks a self regulating mechanism which is key to the whole argument





No, not necessarily. That was precisely my point - the output quote assigned to Factory 108 can be divided among the remaining factories. This means the input-output part of the problem does need to be calculated again (although the transport part would need to be).
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And labour too I imagine since we cannot suppose that labour is perfectly mobile/elastic and responsive to changing patterns of production in a socialist society. How does the global planning centre based in Gods-knows-what part of the world ensure the availability of a workforce sufficient to met the increase imposed on Factory 108 on the other side of the planet?



Not really, this is a matter of social control and inspection. Your own reliance on telecommunications technology and so on sort of works against you in this regard - collecting all of this local knowledge at the central level becomes a matter of workers in the various production units punching in a few numbers at the end of a shift, and occasionally sending a representative of the central organs to verify the numbers...

But a central organ is a relative thing . central to what? You propose that there should only be one single centre for the entire globe, all 7 billion of us. That's what society wide planning means. But it is quite possible to talk of a central organ in respect of different levels of organisation - local, regional and global. Even at a global level one can have multiple centres differentiated along functional lines like the global maritime agency we discussed earlier which operates as a separate planning centre alongside other global agencies. In no way would the existence of such a global agency signify society wide planning. It is fully compatible with what I am advocating but not with what you are advocating since in your schema you cannot possibly have separate global agencies. There can only logically be one centre to dea with everything or else its is not society wide planning





This is becoming tedious, as you simply assert the same things over and over again.
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But you dont deal with argument so i am forced to repeat it - hopefully in a slightly different format each time which might finally allow the argument to hit the target at some point



I am referring to the valiant crusade of several SPGB members and sympathisers for such "rights" as the right of a branch of an organisation to not follow the democratically agreed-upon course of cation, the right of the individual member to not carry out decisions he does not agree with (while remaining a member, of course) and so on. In fact, since your own post is full of "smacking" - this smacks of this, that smacks of that - I can say that the attitude of the SPGB/WSM members on this site to matters of democracy, discipline and "rights" (and planning, of course!) reminds me of nothing more than that of the petty shopkeeper, who is completely blind when it comes to genuine oppression and authoritarianism, but who will shriek if someone so much as suggests that he should do something.
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Why are you introducing the subject of the SPGB into the discussion? Im not an SPGB member anyway and am contributing to this discussion solely in a personal capacity




So, let us summarise. You claim that I advocate rationing despite the fact that I have stated several times that I do not, and that any socialist planned economy would include purposeful overproduction to prevent shortages. (But, as I said, you allow yourself an appeal to buffer stock, but not to anyone else.) You quote an example where I specifically talk about an organ of the central authorities asking the workers whether they were willing to take on additional workload, and then allege that I favour compulsory labour, in clear contradiction to sever threads where I have argued against idiotic "work or starve" "anarchists". Right.
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I dont say you advocate rationing. I merely say it follows logically from the position you hold vis a vis central planning. If the output of a product is fixed by the central plan at the outset then clearly if the demand for the product in question increases, so called buffer stocks notwithstanding, it must be ignored - meaning consumption must be restricted to what was originally planned for the sake of the integrity of the Plan. What is to stop copnsumers angaging a mad rush for the limited supply of the prpdiucts in question; you only have the Central authority's word for it that that what if calls a buffer stock represents an additional qnatity over and above what people supposedly want. Ditto in the case of compulsory labour. It may very well not be what you enforse but if the Plan is to be carried through to the letter that is what it will require - compulsory labour. Like your imposition of an increased output target on poor old dildo factory 108. Immediately you create a socially divisive "Us" versus "Them" set up And you misunderstand my point about a buffer stock. It is the ability to maintain a buffer stock that is gauge of the relative scarcity of the good in question. That does not mean for that for every every product a buffer stock will necessarily be in place. This is part of a larger argument against the Austrian economists which we havent really broached here as yet.



I mean, there really does come a point where I have to ask myself if I'm spending my time productively, and at this point it seems that you're not even reading my responses, or at least not reading them carefully, instead taking them as an opportunity to post the same few vague claims along with the ubiquitous refrain of "system of self regulating stock control".
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Actually I have been reading you comments very carefully and disseting them with equal care. Just becuase you dont like what I have to say doesnt mean I havent read your responses carefully. I am allowed to disagree, you know...




And yes, in the worst-case scenario the plan would have to be drawn up again. The problem is that you treat this as some sort of tragedy, instead of simply one limitation of living in the real world. Of course you claim similar events will happen constantly, which you don't really have an argument for...

I have outlined the argument here and in early posts. Its not just a case of the Plan having to be redrawn again, its case of the Plan having to be constantly drawn up again - and in toto - in the absence of a feedback mechanism internal to the central planning system itself. It will be forced to become a polycentric system of planning before it even got off the ground. That is what i am saying. A polycentric system does not face that same kind of threat to its existence precisely becuase it is adaptable in the face of complexity and change. Its not a "worse case" scenario that a single society-wide plan would have to be drawn up again; it is the ONLY scenario available to it and that is the whole problem






Oh good grief. Here, again, you rely on impressions. The Plan is one, the Plan is rigid. If anyone mentions other plans they are implicitly repudiating central planning. Except, of course, not every plan is an economic one. City plans do not directly impact the economy (except in extraordinary circumstances, as I mentioned in my previous post). Given modern transportation systems, and the level of automation we can expect in a socialist society, for example, it doesn't really matter where workers' residences are. Production functions the same if you put them in District A or District B. It functions the same if you put up a statue to Yevgeniy Preobrazhensky or Yevgenia Bosh, or if you paint the entire city hot pink and black and repurpose the old disused church as a venue for communal orgies.
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Do you seriously imagine for one moment that city plans di not have economic impacts, direct or otheriwse. Even to use your own somewhat colourful examples, all of these have opportunity costs and therefore without exception affect the allocation of resources in some way. I could multiply the examples I gave a thousandfold to underline the point that, very definitely, city plans or town plans or even village plans if you like have economic repercussions but the fact that you see such plans operating outside the ambit of the global planning centre based somewhere else in the world suggests to me that your yourself are not quite convinmced by the idea of an all encompassing Godlike Plan that precludes all other plans





And what about "subsidiarity"? That is definitely not part of socialist politics - in fact it is an idea associated with the corporatist European Union and various Christian-fascist groups!.

I could equally retort that society wide planning is an idea associated with a totalitarian state fascist type regime and therefore definitely not part of a "socialist politics" either

Do you know what the principle of subsidiarity is? Here's one explanation:

The principle of subsidiarity is defined in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. It ensures that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made to verify that action at Union level is justified in light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level. Specifically, it is the principle whereby the Union does not take action (except in the areas that fall within its exclusive competence), unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level. It is closely bound up with the principle of proportionality, which requires that any action by the Union should not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Treaties. (http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/glossary/subsidiarity_en.htm)

Agreed it is a principle supposedly employed by the corporatist European Union but that does not means therefore that the principle in itself must be rejected. If you want to repudiate that principle you need to present reasons germane to the argument you want to make, not fall back on that discreditable old tactic of imputing guilt of association




Except, of course, no one said the information contained in the rate of stock depletion would be discarded. That would be extremely stupid. But at the same time this would merely be one of the various kinds of information available to planners, and there would be no automatic quasi-market signals being exchanged between economic units (which in your proposal essentially function as enterprises).
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There are no market signicals whatsoever in my proposal. Market signals presupose exchange relations and the distribution of goods in a socialist society would be effectd not on the basis oif quid pro quo exchange but freely. So I am not quite sure what you are trying to say with your remark that there would be no "automatic quasi-market signals being exchanged between economic units (which in your proposal essentially function as enterprises". If you mean there would be no lateral or horizontal connections between production units in a socialist society then of course you are merely restating your claim that there would only be one single avenue of communcation - between a single world planning authority on the one hand and millions upon millions of production units on the other as well as billions or ordinary citizens who will apparently each be sent a bulky questionnaire to fill out and return - lets hope the postal service is up to the job! - to the global planning centre for its to collate and somehow arrive at some idea of what people want for the next 5 years or whatever

I am not quite sure from your point of view why it would be "extremely stupid" to discard information contained in the rate of stock depletion since presumably the all knowing global central planning authority would have known at the outset what peoples' wants were and devised its millions ipon millions of production targets with precisely that in mind right down to the speficions and colour types of the moped or pop-up toaster its customers/clients asked for in the beginning, Seems a bit redundant to me. But if you have come round to thinking that the rate of stock depletion is so vitally important why not make this information available directly to the produers themselves in defiance of the central planning authority? At least the peole wouldn't have to wait another 5 years before the central planning authority got round to deciding to redraft the Plan

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I wasn't suggesting prediction or "quantitive estimates" would not be entailed in determining the size of buffer stocks to be held. This would be the case at any level of organisation - local, regional or global - so in a sense your point is irrelevant.

This, once again, misses the point. These estimates would necessarily be global, as the notion that any region of the planet might operate as an autarkic unit in an era of socialised production is a reactionary pipe dream (something we are in notional agreement on).


However, you might want to explain how you imagine your single global planning authority might be able to more effectively determine the size of the buffer stocks of, say, tins of baked beans that ought to be held at distribution point 902 in the city of Seattle, say, more effectively than the people on the ground ,at the distribution point in question.

Presumably it would be able to determine the size of the buffer stock just as effectively as "the people on the ground". It would also have access to data about the buffer stock produced in the previous planning period. The point was, however, that it would also be able to determine the size of buffer stock at Distribution Point 903 and 1014 and 1984 and so on. And it would be able to use this information effectively.

Now, let's suppose that Distribution Point (I would've said centre) 902 has run out of Comrade Trotsky action figures (I use what you call colourful examples because writing walls of text gets tedious, so I might as well try to break the tedium with horribly lame jokes). So the workers of DP902 call up DP1014 and ask them about their buffer stock. Let's assume they have a lot, so DP902 asks them to send some of that stock over (since that would mean the consumers don't have to wait while the order for new action figures is processed).

But wait, in the meantime DP1984 has also run out of Comrade Trotsky action figures, and as far as DP1984 workers know, DP902 is the only distribution point that has any significant quantities of buffer stock remaining. So, what do they do? Act on a first-come-first-serve basis, ignoring how many consumers use DP902 and DP1984? Cancel the first order, creating problems for DP902?

In the mean time, as the Comrade Trotsky action figure has proven a massive flop in areas of former Turkey, Distribution Point 8191 in Ankara had an immense stock of the action figures, that isn't going anywhere, but as the workers of Distribution Points 902, 1014 and 1984 don't concern themselves with the stock of toys in Ankara, they aren't aware of this. But it would solve their problems.


Also, how are storage facilities "global" if Im reading you correctly and what does this mean? Cant you get local storage facilities or am I missing something?

Of course you can get local storage facilities, that is, storage facilities that only store what is produced and needed locally, but that isn't the most effective use of space, surely. Bananas produced in former Ecuador will not necessarily be stored in former Ecuador (in fact they might end up stored in some blasted wasteland like former Croatia), in any realistic model.


As I said previously, my position is not one of advocating local autarky but rather one which merely supports a greater degree of localisation of production. Its a question of emphasis in other words, not taking a a black or white view of things. I gave my reasons for taking this position in the previous post. I dont know what you have in mind by a "petty territory" - petty can be quite a relative term - but in any event, no, I dont necessarily think every such petty territory should have its own factory for every conceivable kind of product. It depends on the type of product, amongst other things,

I never said you advocated autarky. If I thought you did, we wouldn't be having this discussion, not because autarky is somehow repugnant, but because we would be talking past each other (in fact I suspect that might be happening anyway).


For instance, I have an interest in sustainable agriculture which I suggest is a key candidate for a shift towards more localised production for all sorts of reasons. I know you are not much taken with the idea of sustainability but sustainable agriculture ironically can be much productive than unsustainable agriculture There is abundant evidence to show that small scale diversified farming is significantly more efficient and productive in terms of output per hectare than large scale commercial monocultures . See for example the article"Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty", by Miguel A. Altieri in , Monthly Review, July-August 2009, (http://www.monthlyreview.org/090810altieri.php). Indeed, according to Altieri, in the United States the "smallest two-hectare farms produced $15,104 per hectare and netted about $2,902 per hectare. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares, yielded $249 per hectare and netted about $52 per hectare".

I would question the relevance of the article. Although I am sure it is interesting to you, I do not think that "food sovereignty", the often hysterical reaction to GMO crops, and the plight of the petite bourgeoisie are socialist concerns. As for the quantitative data, first of all the article does not show that small farms are more efficient in terms of physical output - in fact the author admits that "an important part of the higher per hectare income of small farms in the United States is that they tend to by-pass middlemen and sell directly to the public, restaurants, or markets. They also tend to receive a premium for their local, and frequently organic, products."

As opposed to the inorganic corn most of us consume, surely.

Furthermore, when talking about the yields of poly- and mono-cultures, it isn't clear what is being quantified - the number of products? The mass? Volume? I would have to check the sources, and I regret to say, I don't have the time. And it's tangential to the main point in any case.


The problem is , of course, is that the small farmers can barely survive on such an income whereas the big farmers with so much more land at their disposal can manage to get by with a comparatively much lower output per hectare. You wont have this kind of problem in a non market socialist economy. There is also the point that small farms are much more labour intensive but that is problem in capitalism not socialism, Actually in socialism there will be if any thing an abundance of labour given that most occupations that exist today will simply cease to exist , their whole purpose being functionally tied to the operation of the capitalist money economy. This means the potential labour force for socially useful production will be more or less doubled. The radical modification of the farming sector will be an important priority for socialism, raising output and encouraging more people to work the land helping to overcome or mitigate the division between town and countryside. Small scale farming units are a perfect vehicle for this, being more diversifed (and environmentally sustainable) and that also of course means more food being grown locally for local needs which cuts down transport costs. Central planning on the other hand is likely to see a continuation even and excerbation of existing profit driven capitalist tendencies towards disatrous monoculture on the false premiss that big is necessarily better. That aint so

Of course, there will be an abundance of labour in socialism, not simply because financial consultants, marketing experts and priests would no longer exist, but due to automation and so on. This does not, however, make labour-intensive work unproblematic. You're missing the point of Marx's criticism of the division between the city and the countryside - what Marx calls the cretinism of rural life. Redirecting people to intensive labour in the countryside would simply exacerbate this.


And, no, I dont massively underestimate the extent of the global circulation of products. I very much agree that it is considerable and that is precisely the point - I am trying to argue for is a significant reduction in this extent by a greater emphasis on localised production in socialism. You seem to go along with some of the points I made so and agree that there "would be no need for cheap manufactured products from China", for instance. If anything, you massively underestimate the extent to which we can and should whittle back on the costly business of circulating prpducts at a global level. How much of those precious metals from China that you speak of find their way today into the whole business of armaments production and constitute the raw material of laser guided missiles, I wonder. This is to say nothing that the role of recyling and cutting back on planned obsolesence could play in a socialist economy which would reduce the demand for such metals.

Rare metals, not previous metals - and I imagine quite a few of them end up in guided missiles. But (non-military uses of missile technology aside), most of them end up in consumer electronics, a sector we have no reason to believe will shrink (and why should it?). They also end up in pacemakers, in scientific equipment and so on - all things that would be needed in a socialist society.


Except of course, as I keep on saying, a hypothetical system of society wide planning in which the total pattern of production is planned in advance within one single giant plan cannot by definition have a "feedback mechanism". True, there may discontent and complaints that the central planners ensconced in the their comfortable global headquarters might get to hear about which might prompt them to want to rethink the Plan in due course but for the moment while the plan putatively exists, there is no leverage anyone can exert to modify its interlocking components. Do you seriously imagine that having figured out a gigantic matrix covering every single one of the millions of different kinds of products produced in the world, not to mention the potentially numerous variants of each such product in terms of their technical specifications, that the central planners would be inclined to want to go through the whole rebalancing process once again? No, the temptation will be to stick with the plan regardless and ironically you yourself have hinted that this might be the case on the grounds that buffer stocks (more anon) might afford them the breathing space to do just that. What you are saying in effect is that enables them to get round not having a feedback mechanism

Again, the above paragraph only makes sense if you conceive of feedback mechanisms as automatic, with no conscious input. But that is not how that term is generally used - in psychology, for example, feedback mechanisms include conscious decisions as a crucial element.

And of course there would be a "temptation" to stick with the current plan or to modify it in only one sector (and you still haven't given us a reason to suppose that problems in germanium smelting would impact the production of whiskey, for example). But obviously there would be a level when the members of society would say "enough, back to the drawing board".



So assuming this Plan ever got off the ground then Im sure you would agree that at least for the duration of the Plan - say, every 5 years - there can be no modification to the Plan - if the Plan is to stand any chance of delivering what it promises, That means in effect that it lacks any kind of feedback mechanism that is brought to bear upon and modifies the behaviour or parameters of the Plan on an ongoing basis, The Plan has to be rigidly applied in that sense or else it breaks down and is rendered internally incoherent. It cannot brook change. But change is precisely what is unavoidable - on the supply side , on the demand side and in terms of the development of technology itself which constantly alters the specific make up or configuration of particular bundles of factor inputs that go to produce particular products (unless of courrse the central planners are going to ban all technological development for the duration). Becuase it has not got a feedback mechanism, this is what makes society wide planning untenable in modern complex society. Logging up the complaints of consumers to bear in mind for when the plan is next redrafted does not constitute a feedback mechanism in any meangingful sense of the term. Trying to accommodate changes in the real world means having to redraft the Plan. But since changes are constantly happening all the time (and it would be a strange kind of Marxist who would deny this!) then clearly there will be no possiblity of the Plan ever getting off the ground - because of it having to be constantly changed all the time. It simply wont become available in any usuable form to "guide" the production units Unicentric planning is absolutely bound under these circumstances to give way to, or collapse into, polycentric planning - meaning many plans interacting with each other. There is simply no other alternative. Then and then only can an effective feedback mechanism come into play when you have polycentric planning.

Except, of course, in socialism society itself controls the supply, and it controls the technological advances (of course technological changes happen under a planned economy, but they can be introduced into the production process in a controlled, planned manner, in contrast to the chaotic and haphazard manner in which they are introduced in market and quasi-market economies). Change happens - of course - but it is not the result of blind market forces, but the conscious decisions of member of society.


You refer to what you call the "planned economies" but , of course, every conceivable kind of economy involves planning. Even the most extreme free market version of capitalism is full of plans. The issue is not whether there are plans but whether there are many plans or just one plan as I keep on pointing out

And only the latter sort of economy is properly called a planned one. The notion that, since there are plans, the economy is planned, is an outright bizarre one, and it would mean that all economic forms, from the palace economies of the Bronze Age to capitalism, are planned economies. In other words - the term loses any meaning it might have had.


Then you have misunderstood what I was saying or I have no explained myself clearly enough. There is nothing "faith based" about the workings of a self regulating systemn of stock control. The data that arises from such a system which is an empirical representation or expression of actual consumer preferences is factually based rather than faith based. Of course it is always possible for predictions or extrapolations inter alia making use of such data to be falsified. Inevitably any kind of planning involves a certain amount of quesswork but dont mistake that for the actual mechanism of a self regulating system of stock control

The data itself is not "faith based", what is faith based is the assumption that autonomous units with limited knowledge exchanging signals and goods will somehow produce a more positive result than conscious central planning - which is equivalent to the assumption that throwing LEGO bricks in a big pile will somehow produce something better than consciously putting them together. This, of course, is the same assumption that market fetishists make.


Well you surely agree that the "Plan" would not be the same Plan if it were modifed do you not? It requires just one more step to realise that if the Plan has to be constantly modifed then it can no longer effectively serve as a Plan (single). It will become instead a assemblage of mutually interacting plans. It will become a polycentric system of planning and no longer a unicentric system This is fairly simple to grasp and I am a little puzzled as to why you fail to grasp the point.

Because you haven't demonstrated that the general production plan will have to be constantly modified. In fact you have repeatedly stated that it will, with no real argument for why this should be the case, apart from vague statements about change and chaos theory.


Unfortunatley this argument wont wash and, if I might say so, it plays right into the hands of people like the Austrian economists who would argue that it completely ignores the opportunity costs of providing for buffer stocks across the board, which stocks moreover will tend to conceal the relative scarcities of different factors of production and consequently will lead to a downward spiral of inefficiency and falling output. This is a complex argument and you I suggest you read the article I linked to above before commenting, which shows how by contrast a decentralised or spontaneously ordered self regulating system of stock control can in fact mobilise the relative scarcities of different factor inputs to overcome the objection raised by the economic calculation argument. Society wide planning on the other hand is simply not able to do this because as I said it lacks an effective feedback mechanism to enable it to identify where factors need to be most economised on. Its use of so called buffer stocks impede rational allocation

Rational allocation in the sense of capitalist "efficiency"? Yes, I think that is the case, and it's a good thing. From the standpoint of profit, it is not a good idea to keep buffer stock. But the socialist society is not concerned with profit but fulfilling consumer demands. From that standpoint, buffer stock, overproduction, and so on, are all excellent ideas. Furthermore, one really can't speak of opportunity costs in this sense in a post-scarcity society, except perhaps for certain very rare materials.

Furthermore, it is bizarre to say that the central planning organs can not recognise inefficiency (or rather, differing levels of efficiency), when that is one of the main things that need to be assessed to construct an input-output matrix.


That apart I think your whole argument that society wide planning can rely on the existence of buffer stocks to accommodate changes in the real world and so allow the Plan to continue to exist unscathed, is a specious argument. You forget that the buffer stocks in question are somply extrapoloation based on what the central planners themselves perceive or consider to be the level of demand for a product in question , with a margin of safety built in, based on their pwn interpretation of responses in the form of returned questionnaires and the like.

The questionnaire was just an example.

The questionnaire was just an example.

The questionnaire was just an example.

In fact I specifically mentioned other sources of data - consumer profiles coupled with demographic data, monitoring the rate of stock depletion, and so on. It is, of course, possible that the predicted maximum demand + predicted buffer stock + an additional margin will not be enough. In that case the plan will have to be redrawn. The point is that only a working group that knows all the relevant data, globally, can predict demand for the next period with any chance of success.


And labour too I imagine since we cannot suppose that labour is perfectly mobile/elastic and responsive to changing patterns of production in a socialist society. How does the global planning centre based in Gods-knows-what part of the world ensure the availability of a workforce sufficient to met the increase imposed on Factory 108 on the other side of the planet?

It doesn't. It might have an estimate of the number of people available, but obviously in a socialist society, after government over men has become nothing more than a relic of a barbaric past, it can't force anyone to work. It can ask, however, and find people that are willing to fill in - presumably in a socialist society such people would exist (and of course, in a socialist society only a tiny minority of the population would have to work).


But a central organ is a relative thing . central to what? You propose that there should only be one single centre for the entire globe, all 7 billion of us. That's what society wide planning means. But it is quite possible to talk of a central organ in respect of different levels of organisation - local, regional and global. Even at a global level one can have multiple centres differentiated along functional lines like the global maritime agency we discussed earlier which operates as a separate planning centre alongside other global agencies. In no way would the existence of such a global agency signify society wide planning. It is fully compatible with what I am advocating but not with what you are advocating since in your schema you cannot possibly have separate global agencies. There can only logically be one centre to dea with everything or else its is not society wide planning

The point of the global maritime agency example was to demonstrate the need for global planning in one sector.

But, of course, transoceanic ships don't appear out of the thin air and they don't exist in a vacuum. That global maritime agency would have to coordinate with the global port authority and the global heavy industrial trust and... in fact it would have to coordinate with all other branches of the economy, simultaneously, leaving us with central planning.


But you dont deal with argument so i am forced to repeat it - hopefully in a slightly different format each time which might finally allow the argument to hit the target at some point

The thing is, you haven't given an argument, you have simply asserted the same claim several times.


Why are you introducing the subject of the SPGB into the discussion? Im not an SPGB member anyway and am contributing to this discussion solely in a personal capacity

Nonetheless, you apparently share some of the, let's put it politely, quirks of the SPGB/WSM members and sympathisers on this site, which includes a very bizarre notion of authoritarianism. These arguments don't take place in a vacuum, and I don't think what I said is any less relevant to the discussion than your complaints that production quotas "sound" authoritarian (which is particularly ridiculous as you've lived in South Africa, probably for more than the few months I've lived there, and so you've probably seen genuine authoritarianism and oppression yourself).


I dont say you advocate rationing. I merely say it follows logically from the position you hold vis a vis central planning. If the output of a product is fixed by the central plan at the outset then clearly if the demand for the product in question increases, so called buffer stocks notwithstanding, it must be ignored - meaning consumption must be restricted to what was originally planned for the sake of the integrity of the Plan. What is to stop copnsumers angaging a mad rush for the limited supply of the prpdiucts in question; you only have the Central authority's word for it that that what if calls a buffer stock represents an additional qnatity over and above what people supposedly want. Ditto in the case of compulsory labour. It may very well not be what you enforse but if the Plan is to be carried through to the letter that is what it will require - compulsory labour. Like your imposition of an increased output target on poor old dildo factory 108. Immediately you create a socially divisive "Us" versus "Them" set up And you misunderstand my point about a buffer stock. It is the ability to maintain a buffer stock that is gauge of the relative scarcity of the good in question. That does not mean for that for every every product a buffer stock will necessarily be in place. This is part of a larger argument against the Austrian economists which we havent really broached here as yet.

Yes, if we ignore certain things, then my proposal would lead to rationing and forced labour. Marvelous. As for the "argument" against the Austrians, I am sure it is entirely pointless. Arguments, again, don't happen in a vacuum, and since the Austrians aren't going to accept our assumptions, you can either accept theirs, or simply ignore them. It's not as if a handful of Internet warriors is a major problem to us.


Actually I have been reading you comments very carefully and disseting them with equal care. Just becuase you dont like what I have to say doesnt mean I havent read your responses carefully. I am allowed to disagree, you know...

I don't dislike what you have to say - I don't think it is even a threat to central planning as it does not correspond to the interest of any class or post-class group, and so on. But I get the impression you aren't reading my posts or, more likely, you're reading your own impressions into them. For example the thing with chaos theory and so on.


Do you seriously imagine for one moment that city plans di not have economic impacts, direct or otheriwse. Even to use your own somewhat colourful examples, all of these have opportunity costs and therefore without exception affect the allocation of resources in some way. I could multiply the examples I gave a thousandfold to underline the point that, very definitely, city plans or town plans or even village plans if you like have economic repercussions but the fact that you see such plans operating outside the ambit of the global planning centre based somewhere else in the world suggests to me that your yourself are not quite convinmced by the idea of an all encompassing Godlike Plan that precludes all other plans

I don't think there would be towns or villages in socialism.

But the chief problem is, you're talking about opportunity costs on the consumption side here, which is precisely the logic of capitalism - consumption after all wastes money that, to the capitalist, could drive the M-C-M' cycle. Hence the insistence of the Austrians on this sort of opportunity costs (from my experience). In the socialist society, however, consumption is not planned but free. And there is no profit incentive to hold back consumption. Plans are made, ultimately, to ensure the production of consumer goods. How they are consumed - including in city planning etc. - is up to the members of society individually.

Of course, city plans might have an economic impact, which is why I presume they will have to be ratified by society in general.


I could equally retort that society wide planning is an idea associated with a totalitarian state fascist type regime and therefore definitely not part of a "socialist politics" either

You could, but you would be wrong, as no fascist movement advocated central planning.


Do you know what the principle of subsidiarity is? Here's one explanation:

The principle of subsidiarity is defined in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. It ensures that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made to verify that action at Union level is justified in light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level. Specifically, it is the principle whereby the Union does not take action (except in the areas that fall within its exclusive competence), unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level. It is closely bound up with the principle of proportionality, which requires that any action by the Union should not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Treaties. (http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/glossary/subsidiarity_en.htm)

Agreed it is a principle supposedly employed by the corporatist European Union but that does not means therefore that the principle in itself must be rejected. If you want to repudiate that principle you need to present reasons germane to the argument you want to make, not fall back on that discreditable old tactic of imputing guilt of association

Yes, I'm aware of the principle. And you still haven't given me, or any of the people who are reading this, a reason to accept it as a principle. It is not a socialist principle. Why should I care if my proposal goes against subsidiarity?


There are no market signicals whatsoever in my proposal. Market signals presupose exchange relations and the distribution of goods in a socialist society would be effectd not on the basis oif quid pro quo exchange but freely. So I am not quite sure what you are trying to say with your remark that there would be no "automatic quasi-market signals being exchanged between economic units (which in your proposal essentially function as enterprises". If you mean there would be no lateral or horizontal connections between production units in a socialist society then of course you are merely restating your claim that there would only be one single avenue of communcation - between a single world planning authority on the one hand and millions upon millions of production units on the other as well as billions or ordinary citizens who will apparently each be sent a bulky questionnaire to fill out and return - lets hope the postal service is up to the job! - to the global planning centre for its to collate and somehow arrive at some idea of what people want for the next 5 years or whatever

I am not quite sure from your point of view why it would be "extremely stupid" to discard information contained in the rate of stock depletion since presumably the all knowing global central planning authority would have known at the outset what peoples' wants were and devised its millions ipon millions of production targets with precisely that in mind right down to the speficions and colour types of the moped or pop-up toaster its customers/clients asked for in the beginning, Seems a bit redundant to me. But if you have come round to thinking that the rate of stock depletion is so vitally important why not make this information available directly to the produers themselves in defiance of the central planning authority? At least the peole wouldn't have to wait another 5 years before the central planning authority got round to deciding to redraft the Plan

There are no market signals as such, but limited information is still exchanged between autonomous quasi-enterprises, which is why I said that these are "quasi-market" signals. Once again, the questionnaire was only an example, and your constant reference to that example borders on trolling. I have said multiple times that planners would have recourse to several sources of information when predicting demand. Stock depletion (not the rate of stock depletion as such) is of course one of them.

[Dave B]

Re buffers and stock etc 870 asks the wrong question it is not a matter of how would they do it; but how it is done in modern manufacturing and in capitalism.

I work in a place that uses stock control systems producing ‘semi perishable’ staple food products for the supermarkets.

I also incidentally know personally someone who worked for a company in the UK who wrote the first software for these kind of systems.

The buffer or stock, that can be an intermediate raw material or a finished product, is defined as the re-order level.

Once the level of the stock drops below or approaches the re-order level production is planned to raise the stock level.

For ‘us’ as a producer of a finished product for the supermarkets and in the middle between the producers of raw materials and the merchants the details are hammered out more often than not on the basis of practical challenges.

So for us it is inefficient [or involves ‘socially unnecessary labour’] to do a production run for a product of less than say 10-20,000 Kg.

20,000Kg is pretty much the default or standard amount as that is the amount you can get on the back of a one lorry.

We don’t like ‘order picking’ for our customers ie putting 10,000 of A, 5000 of B and 5000 of C on the back of a truck and sending it to one the regional depots of the supermarkets.

The supermarket depots order pick themselves for their own outlets.

As I understand it when our stuff arrives it just gets thrown onto a conveyer belt and is sent into a labyrinthine world were computers read bar codes on the sides of cases and divert them ultimately to a pallet stacking and wagon loading bays and a supermarket lorry.

Which deliver 20 pallets of mixed products to one big outlet or do several runs and pallet drop off’s to their smaller outlets.

Drop off’s are recorded as they happen and tracked as are the delivery trucks themselves by GPS.

It is a massive improvement on the old system of factory warehouse order picking of less than 20 years ago.

I, and I have done it, would have to pick an order and get the fork lift drivers to go and find a pallet (or part pallet) of apple, mango and Rhubarb juice ‘drop it down’ from the racking bring it to the dispatch area.

Take 15 cases or 200Kg of it and stack it onto a pallet, get the fork lift truck driver to take it back and go off to get the 21 cases of strawberry and lemon grass drink.


Until we have 72 cases stacked lego-land on one pallet and we move onto the next one until we had a 20 pallet load.

Of course the reorder level is not just a thing of the air, ignoring order picking, full wagons and transportation costs.

We do not want to hold 500,000 Kg of finished product, or raw material, so our customers can slowly take what they need when they want it.

Even at 20,000 a time.

As that increases the value of constant non -working capital locked up and has a deleterious affect on the rate of profit.

A challenging constraint that would be of less concern in communism.

The whole ‘just in time system’ is predicated directly on minimising ‘c’ and increasing P’.

Although it can also have an addition affect on F(c) or fixed capital re warehouse and particularly shelf-space for the retailers.

[My computer programmer gave me an interesting insight into this as it was factored into the system. More of a problem with small volume stuff and retail outlets in prime and high ground-rent sites- but even high street stores carry some stock ]

They producers and retailers actually negotiate these issues using Marx’s theory, ie a fair spread of constant capital between the two.

We have access to real time sales of our products as they are scanned out at the supermarkets and a forecasting team that looks at long term weather forecasts, bank holidays and football matches etc.

They now know how much we have of everything at anyone point in time.

Apart from ‘phantom stock’ which must be a new concept.

In the past for us in our quiet period they use to run everything out and destock both finished product and raw material just so it was possible to do a manual stock take in order to work out if they were making a profit or not.

It is otherwise hard to do a stock take in a dynamic situation

I actually asked whether these systems would work if all the prices were set to zero she said they would.

The parameters eg re order levels might be determined by capitalist economics and these systems tell you very efficiently if you are making a profit or not; but they are just stock control systems.

[robbo203]

This, once again, misses the point. These estimates would necessarily be global, as the notion that any region of the planet might operate as an autarkic unit in an era of socialised production is a reactionary pipe dream (something we are in notional agreement on)..


This does not follow. There is no "necessarily" about it. It is quite possible for estimates to be sub global - even local -without endorsing local autarky as such. ironically you more or less admit this later on as we shall see




Presumably it would be able to determine the size of the buffer stock just as effectively as "the people on the ground". It would also have access to data about the buffer stock produced in the previous planning period. The point was, however, that it would also be able to determine the size of buffer stock at Distribution Point 903 and 1014 and 1984 and so on. And it would be able to use this information effectively

So lets get this straight. You are saying that your global central planning authority will be able to determine the size of the buffer stock held at a local distribution point "just as effectively" as "the people on the ground operating the diustribution". Why? Because it "would also have access to data about the buffer stock produced in the previous planning period" Where did this data originate? Presumably, at the local level. So the only reason apparently for the existence of your central authority is becuase it also is able to determine the buffer stock at other distribution points besides the one in question and so take a wider, global, perspective, evening out uneveness in the distribution of buffer stocks across the world in an optimum fashion.

There are several things that can be said about this perspective of yours.

Its strike me that that this represents a retreat of sorts from the position of society wide planning. What you seem to be suggesting is a kind of intermediary role for the central planning authority which "reacts" or responds to local variations in buffer stock. This is no longer classic central planning anymore. Think about it. The shortages you imply that have risen in certain distributions points along with excesses in others, would have risen precisely because of the implementation of your society wide plan in the first place and now you presume a role for the central authoity to "correct" these imbalances which is in fact a reactive role. It is the central authority that decides how the surplus should best be distributed to those distribution points in need of it and from an overall society wide perspective

Lets look at this more closely. You dont deny that local distribution centres can make estimates of what they need on the basis of part expereince; in fact you seem to agree that the data that the central authority works with depends on such local estimates . You also dont deny either that distribution centres are fully capable of ascertaining the state of stocks levels at other distribution points via what are called distributed computer networks which can completely bypass the need for any mediating middlemen. All you are seemingly concerned with is the possiblity that one distribution point might send its surplus stock to anothere on a first come first serve basis overlooking the needs of other distribution points and that would be bad

Well, in the first place what we see here is interaction of numerous plans. It is the local distributions centres you refer to that decide they need more stock and their endeavour to act on this constitutes a "plan" - a deliberate conscious decision to do something about their situation - even if they enlist your central planning authority to help them

Secondly, you suggest they should address their concerns to some remote global authority becuase the latter will somehow act on their behalf and ensure in an even-handed manner that their needs will be met. But even if this was possible and the local distribution centre was not waiting months for the global authority to get its act togther and make a decision, why is this better than other distribution centres with a surplus of stock to distribute opting to implement an equitable distribution of stock among competing claims. You dont say. You simply assume that some remote global planning center is somehow better positioned to do it anyway becuase it supposedly has more information at its fingertips. But is it? Unless you propose that a local distributiuon centre should ship its surplus stock of baked beans at enormous expense to some distribution centre halfway round the world which it has never heard of I dont think this follows at all. I think most of the "superior" knowlege of the global planning centre would thus be useless or redundent. And what is it going to do anyway? Order the local distribution point to distribute the stock as it, the global planning centre, dictates. How is it going to enforce that decision? Again you dont say. What if the local distribution centre has friendly relations with another centre 10 miles away and wishes to maintain thoise relations

In any case you seem to overlook what a self regulating system of stock control is about. Dave B has given a concise picture of how it operates and I suggest you read his post . Note his comment here


"The buffer or stock, that can be an intermediate raw material or a finished product, is defined as the re-order level. Once the level of the stock drops below or approaches the re-order level production is planned to raise the stock level. "

Once the re-order level of prpduction is reached this triggers a response in the form of a request to the suppliers of inpouts for more of those inputs. You are essentially talking about the consumers of these inputs, in this case distribution points requesting finished prpducts by contacting each other with a view to transferring surpluses over from those with too much stock to this with too little stoick, With a prolerly functioning self regulating system of stock control this is unlikely to happen; stock levels will automatically adjust to the rate of take up and it will be with the suppliers rather than with fellow distribution centres that such distribution centres will be in communcation with. Only in exceptional circumstances would they call upon other distribution centres e.g. a natural disaster







This does not, however, make labour-intensive work unproblematic. You're missing the point of Marx's criticism of the division between the city and the countryside - what Marx calls the cretinism of rural life. Redirecting people to intensive labour in the countryside would simply exacerbate this.

I am not suggesting redirecting people anywhere. In any case, you cannot direct or redirect people where they ought to work in a socialist society becuase the labour they exercise is under their own control and thus provided on a purely voluntary basis (another reason why your central planning proposal will never work with its rigid system of targets which requires compulsion) Apart from that Im not advocating backbreaking intensive labour in the fields - there is an intermediate position, you know, which involves using what is called appropriate technology. Im not a great fan of highly capital intensive commercial monoculture agricuture as you know . Its inefficient, produces poor returns and is enviromentally destructive to boot

Furthermore, the "cretinism of rural life" you refer to has its mirror image in the sterilty and alienation of urban life. What Marx was actually suggesting was a more balanced and interpenetrative notion of the relationship between town and countryside. So you might want to do a bit of agricultural work on Monday and on Tuesday attend computer classes in your local town hall or do a stint in the local factory or whatever. As a bit of a country boy myself who loves rural life I am fully capable of appreciating the pleasures of the city as well and I have the wonderful historic city of Granada in southern Spain close by which I always enjoy visiting. Your views on the supposed division between the city and the countryside are crude and simplistic.



Again, the above paragraph only makes sense if you conceive of feedback mechanisms as automatic, with no conscious input. But that is not how that term is generally used - in psychology, for example, feedback mechanisms include conscious decisions as a crucial element..

This is nonsense. Feedback mechanism dont have to be conscious. There are many examples I can cite from the environmetnal sciences, for instance , such as the albedo effect to take just one. In economic system conscious input continuously works alongside the feedback mechanism. No one for instance has or can possibly plan the overall pattern of production; it is just far too big and complex for that to happen, That is the emergent outcome of a multiplicity of individuals plans interacting with each other in sometimes quite unpredictable ways. It is the individual plan - millions of them every single day - that is the conscious input into this unplanned outcome



And of course there would be a "temptation" to stick with the current plan or to modify it in only one sector (and you still haven't given us a reason to suppose that problems in germanium smelting would impact the production of whiskey, for example). But obviously there would be a level when the members of society would say "enough, back to the drawing board"...


What do you mean members of society would say "enough, back to the drawing board". How many members of society does it take to say enough for the plan to go back to the drawing board and how do they put this decision of theirs into effect? Are you now going to add regular plebsicites among the global population of 7 billion (to decide when to go back to the drawing board) to the onerous task of distributing bulky questionaires to this poplation listing the millions of products produced by the global economy with a view to ascertaining how much of each we think ought to be produced? Oh ,I know you are embararased at having to defend this proposal of a questionnaire and keep protesting that you have recomended a lot of other things beside questionnaires (which i have incidently acknowleged) but that hardly gets round the crassness of your proposal and its inept inpracticality

As for me not providing you with a reason to "suppose that problems in germanium smelting would impact the production of whiskey" well this is a rather superfical and if I might say so , unmarxist postion to take. A marxist would recognise that the essence of modern production is precisely its socialised interdependent nature. Germanium smelting might not superfially or immeidately impact in a directly visible sense with the production of whiskey but go back far enough along the supply chain and you will soon enough see how they indirectly impact unavoidably on each other. If nothing else , energy is the common currency of all kinds of production and it is the opportunity costs involved in energy supply that such an impact can be clearly observed.




Except, of course, in socialism society itself controls the supply, and it controls the technological advances (of course technological changes happen under a planned economy, but they can be introduced into the production process in a controlled, planned manner, in contrast to the chaotic and haphazard manner in which they are introduced in market and quasi-market economies). Change happens - of course - but it is not the result of blind market forces, but the conscious decisions of member of society."...

What does this actually mean - "in socialism society itself controls the supply" What is "society itself". You are full of contradictions. On the one hand you say individuals are free to consume what they chose in socialism and that the whole point of production in socialism is to supply the needs of these individuals. Yet on the other, this supply is now something that is controlled by society as if society exists in some reified sense as being separate from the individuals who comprise it, which individuals may have different and even conflicting needs. What is the point of democratic decsionmaking if does not implicitly acknowlege and seek to address these different and conflicting needs - even in socialism - which you so evidently wish to sweep under the carpet with your glib phrase "in socialism society itself controls the supply" , After all, what is the point of issuing questionaires to asscertain the views of said individuals if all there is this thing you call society controlling supply. Why bother in that case?



Quote:
Originally Posted by robbo203
You refer to what you call the "planned economies" but , of course, every conceivable kind of economy involves planning. Even the most extreme free market version of capitalism is full of plans. The issue is not whether there are plans but whether there are many plans or just one plan as I keep on pointing out


And only the latter sort of economy is properly called a planned one. The notion that, since there are plans, the economy is planned, is an outright bizarre one, and it would mean that all economic forms, from the palace economies of the Bronze Age to capitalism, are planned economies. In other words - the term loses any meaning it might have had..


But I didnt say an economy is a planned economy because it contains plans. All I said was that all economies contain plans (plural). There is not , never has been and never will be an economy that contains just one single plan, where the total pattern of production is planned in advance (a priori) and realised in practice. That indeed would be a "planned economy" but it could only ever exist in a hypothetical sense. The leftist mantra about the "planned economy" is baloney, indicative of the fact that many leftists have not that about the problem at all






The data itself is not "faith based", what is faith based is the assumption that autonomous units with limited knowledge exchanging signals and goods will somehow produce a more positive result than conscious central planning - which is equivalent to the assumption that throwing LEGO bricks in a big pile will somehow produce something better than consciously putting them together. This, of course, is the same assumption that market fetishists make.


The exact opposite is the case. The absurd idea that one single mind - the global planning centre - can somehow comprehend the totality of production and the needs of billions of people better than themselves, is utterly based on faith. Quite frankly, your idea is equivalent to the religous "argument from design" advanced by people like the natural theologist William Paley back in the 18th centuy before Darwin came along . The sheer complexity of the world or even a human organ such as an eye, presupposes a divine creator, argued Paley just as a watch presupposes a watchmaker. It is simply not possible to imagine how such a thing as en eye could have evolved through natural selection acting on random mutations.. In the same way, for you, it is simply not possible to imagine how autonomous units with "limited knowledge exchanging signals and goods will somehow produce a more positive result than conscious central planning" by a single will and a single mind - that of the global planning centre. It speaks volumes about your grasp of what a self regulating feedback mechanism that you think it is equvalent to throwing LEGO bricks in a big pile and hoping it will somehow produce something better than consciously putting them together




Because you haven't demonstrated that the general production plan will have to be constantly modified. In fact you have repeatedly stated that it will, with no real argument for why this should be the case, apart from vague statements about change and chaos theory.

This is simply not true. I have given you several specific examples of how externally induced changes - such as harvest failures, unpredictable geological events and even just accidents can seriously disrupt supplies of certain goods which will have knock on repercussions for the production of other goods in the economy. The same is true of shifts in the pattern of demand which the central planners have not anticipoated . All you have done is to ignore these points and pretend that I have not really presented an argment for you to deal with



Rational allocation in the sense of capitalist "efficiency"? Yes, I think that is the case, and it's a good thing. From the standpoint of profit, it is not a good idea to keep buffer stock. But the socialist society is not concerned with profit but fulfilling consumer demands. From that standpoint, buffer stock, overproduction, and so on, are all excellent ideas. Furthermore, one really can't speak of opportunity costs in this sense in a post-scarcity society, except perhaps for certain very rare materials.

Furthermore, it is bizarre to say that the central planning organs can not recognise inefficiency (or rather, differing levels of efficiency), when that is one of the main things that need to be assessed to construct an input-output matrix.
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But you are missing the point completely. The argument is not about maintaing a buffer stock per se but ensuring the efficient allocation of resources. How does your remote single global planning centre do that? And, no, I am not talking about "capitalist efficiency"; Im talking about economising most on the use of those factors that are most scarce in reality. Or perhaps you dont think this is necessary. Perhaps you think we should all be able to drive around in diamond encrusted titantium built cars with a built in champagne dispenser, becuase why not if there is a buffer stock of everything conceivable under the sun by virtue of the central planning authority decreeing that such stocks should be held. By definition there can be no such thing as relative scarcity under these hypothetical circumstances or at least it cannot be identified. In fact there is always such a thing. Hard choices cannot be avoided in determing the efficient allocation of resources and you cannot do that by simply decreeing that buffers stocks should be held acorss the board. There are opportunity costs in everything we do and economic choices are thus unavoaidable., Central planning deprives us of the means to make such choices. If we could all drive around in diamond encrusted titanium cars the sheer volume of resources devoted to this would mean there would be precious little else produced to keep body ansd soul togeher. People will soon enough start dying off like flies from famine and a collpsing system of sanitation

The question i was trying to get you to answer was how in the absence of a self regulating system of stock control are you going to ascertain the relative scarcity of different levels of stock? You have ignored the quesion and simply asserted that the central planning authority will impose a level of buffer stock by diktat which is equivalent to saying we should all have a diamond encrusted titanium car regardless. It has absolutely no way of knowing whether the level of buffer stock it has arbitrarily decided to impose on the production units actually reflects the relative scacrity of the good in question . It has no feedback mechanism that would allow it see this and the opportunity costs involved.

A self regulating system of stock control has such a feedback mechanism and moreover does not in any way require a market or market signals to function as a self regulating system. This is the fundamental point you have yet to grasp



The questionnaire was just an example.

The questionnaire was just an example.

The questionnaire was just an example.
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OK so it was just an example. But how would you implement this example, eh? I ask this in all seriousness and your refusal to fill in the nity gritty details suggests to me a dim awareness of the huge folly of what it is that you have proposed and a horror at the thought of having to defend it against ruthless criticism

Recall that the purpose of the exercise is to establish the global demand for each of the probably millions of different products produced in the global economy. Presumably a large proportion of the circulars will never be returned and so the figures will be based largely on quesswork. But even including a product in the questionaire does not tell us how we want this product. Maybe you can rate it from 1 to 10 but that does not tell us whether we prefer or value one product over another because of the incomparability of these ratings. This is important where resoruces allocation decisions have to be made under conditions of relative scarcity . So once again in the absence of a feedback mechanism in the shape of a self regulating system of stock control reflecting the actuall preferences of individuals, we can only guess as to what their preferences are


To make things easier for you, and to indulge you a little, let us suppose we ignore such a secondary features that particular products exhibit as colour, shape, size and texture which in themselves would make the problem of central planning even more massively formidable amd insuropmountable than they already are , So instead of the countless different kinds of shirts that can be produced along these lines, let us suppose your central planners simply work with a single catch all category labelled "shirts" and let us for the sake of argument suppose that individuals are content to see just a single version of shirt, a kind of universal one size (and colour) fits all kind of shirt., so we can all walk around in our little Maoist style uniforms indistinguishabke from each as far as shirts go. At any rate this would certainly makes things a little easier for your central planners. They can simply fomulate an annual target of,say, 14 billion shirts to be distributed between the global producers of shirts and allowing us the consumers of shirts to content oursleves with consuiming, on average 2 shirts per year

Now here's the thing - how would they know 2 shirts per year is what we want? . Ive said something about this already and how nuch it will be based on sheer guesswork but there's more to be said. Presumably we will be asked in the questionnaire something like "how many shirts do you need over the next year" or five years - probably the latter because you surely dont want to go through the whoke staggeringly costly business of despatching a bulky circular every year to all 7 billion citizens and collating the responses received for each of literally millions of different products. So the less frequent the better. But of course the less frequent , the more likely is the information to become outdated in the course of implementing the plan. People's views on what they want change and also there is no guarantee that they will stick to what they say the want. If word gets round that supplies are going to be restictied to only 1.5 shirts per capita per year on average in the next planning cycle they might go out and grab more shirts than they need or what the central planners determine they need, So you would tend to encourage such behaviour simply by making it appear that the decision about how much is to be produced is all in the hands of some remote central planning and not in the hands of individuals themselves as responsible consurs.

Also, presumably the manufactuers would have to be consulted as well and asked what they require in the way of additonal machinery and raw material to meet the specified target for "shirts" . But here is where it gets tricky. I referred earlier earlier to the socialised interdependent nature of modern production. Some raw materials (or machinery) that could be used for the manufactures of shirts might also be used for the manufacure of some other product - let us say upholstery goods. So what if the consumers of the latter - which means us again expressing our views via your questionnaire - came up with a level of demand for that product that meant there was not enough of the raw material or machines in question to meet the global demand for shirts?

No doubt you would respond by saying the central planers would then simply declare that the output of those inputs needed to produce both kinds of consumer goods should be raised apprpriately. But this where you come unstuck becuase the production of these inputs in turn depends on the output of other producer goods further back along the production chain. You cannot escape this dillemma by relying on a process of infinitre regress. Ultimately like the proverbial snake devouring its own tail it will catch up with you and I suggest the availability of energy will likely be the ultimately limiting factor.

What this all means is that inevitably setting targets for some goods like shirts will impact on the producers' ability to meet others targets - like upholstery prpducts. The central planning authority can try all it likes through a resolute process of "materials balancing" to ensure an even a distribution of resources across industry so as to ensure that all its production targets are met. But even on the most generous simplifying terms one can think of this is simply not going to work.

Firstly because in the face of what the public says it wants as revealed via your questionnaire, it is going to have to largely ignore what the "public wants" in respect of some things in order to ensure that enough is produced of other things that the public also supposedly wanrs. Which means the whole exercise of depatching a universal questionaire to everyone will be largely a farce and a complete waste of resoruces

Secondly, because whatoever targets it might have set through a finely honed procedure of "materials balancing" will inevitably fail to be met in some cases if only because of the kind of disruptive effect caused by factors I have mentioned which you have studiously avoided commenting on - things like industrial accidents , bad weather and what not. Since the output of some products (producer goods) are also the inputs of other goods (consumer goods or intermediate goods) this will have kncok on conequences for the latter too, meaning the whole plan will have to be redrawn in toto and all those carefully worked out input oiutput rations reconfigured. This will have to be done continuously becuase these facotrs occur continuously so the lan will never get to come off the drawing board being subject to continuous revision. Which is why central planning is not a realistci proposition

Now it is no good you saying that oh the central planners can get round all this by ensuring that for every single kind of item produced there is an adequate beffer stock which allows for a certain margin of error and so obviates the need to redaft the single society wide plan. Becuase if that is what you are asserting then, of course, you run smack bang into the other problem I spoke of which is how then do you efficiently allocate respources when you canot know the relative scarcity of the products in question. Almost by defintion you are denying yourself access to this vital economic information by concealing it from view on the shape of universally precribed surpluses across the board in your hypotheical Plan. Byt this is a vicious circle. If you cannot effeicnet allocate resources you wont be able to generate enough resoruces to ensure the production of these surpluses of buffer stock. So how pray do you get round that one?





In fact I specifically mentioned other sources of data - consumer profiles coupled with demographic data, monitoring the rate of stock depletion, and so on. It is, of course, possible that the predicted maximum demand + predicted buffer stock + an additional margin will not be enough. In that case the plan will have to be redrawn. The point is that only a working group that knows all the relevant data, globally, can predict demand for the next period with any chance of success.
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I know you suggested "other sources of data"but these too are equally suspect if not more so than your proposed questionnaire. In any case some of them like "monitoring the rate of stock depletion" are inconsistent with your general proposal of society wide planning. Why would you need to "monitor the rate of stock depletion" if your estimates were correct in the first place? The fact you think it might deviate in a way from what your predictions allowed suggests a less than confident attitude on your part about the efficacy of central planning. What would happen, in your view, if you found the rate of stock depletion to be signifiantly less or significantly more than what you anticipated? Once again the logic of your argument suggests you would have to redraft the entire Plan with all that that entials.

In any case you talk about predicting demand but as I have siggested to you the process of materials balancing means in effect that you might well have to ignore what the figures (allegedly) tell you about the public demand for particular products so to ensure that targets across the board are met. This is unavoidable given the opportunity costs involved in resource allocation. So even if your "working group that knows all the relevant data, globally, can predict demand for the next period with any chance of success" that in itself might turn out to be quite irrelevant. Demand might still exceed supply significantly leading to serious prolblems for the planners.

Further the data on which this working group would base its prediction would, as you admit, be drawn from local sources. The only supposed advantage of the "working group" that you make so much of is that it is able to take a wider purview, being a global body, rather than a local view. But I would suggest to you the revolutionary thought that you dont need to take a global view for the purposes of planning in general. Conceivably such global information might be useful from an academic point of view if you you want to comment on, say, global trends but for practiucal planning it is pretty much useless. It is a self regulatinmg system of stock control that provides the actuall data you need for real planning but this presupposes a decentralised of polycentric system of planning without which there can be no feedback mechanism



The point of the global maritime agency example was to demonstrate the need for global planning in one sector.

But, of course, transoceanic ships don't appear out of the thin air and they don't exist in a vacuum. That global maritime agency would have to coordinate with the global port authority and the global heavy industrial trust and... in fact it would have to coordinate with all other branches of the economy, simultaneously, leaving us with central planning..

Not so. Here once again you are tying yourself up in knots and flatly contradicting yourself . It is as I said before as if you dimly apprehend the enormity of the folly of what it is your proposing and are inconsciously manouvering ypourself into a kind of face saving position that clings to the notion of central planning as merely an anodyne form of words. But it wont wash

If you advocate a single society-wide plan emanating from a single global scentre (how else?) then you cannot have something like a global maritime agency taking steps to coordinate its actions with a global port authority . That clearlyy implies independent decisionmaking being exercised by your global maritime agency and therefore presupposes polycentric planning which is completely at odds with what you are proposing



I don't think there would be towns or villages in socialism.
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What? Are you serious? What are you suggesting. That towns and villages be razed to the ground and that we all be herded into the countryside or alternatively into vast sprawling city conurbations in a kind of mirror imagoe of this brutal Khmer Rouge strategy? Never mind the incredible wast involved in scrapping the existing settlement pattern. If there are no towns or voillages involved in your scenario then there nothing in between the country and the city and remote towns and villages that exist today and that cannot be physically absorbed by urban or city sprawl will have to be abandoned? Is this what you are saying?





But the chief problem is, you're talking about opportunity costs on the consumption side here, which is precisely the logic of capitalism - consumption after all wastes money that, to the capitalist, could drive the M-C-M' cycle. Hence the insistence of the Austrians on this sort of opportunity costs (from my experience). In the socialist society, however, consumption is not planned but free. And there is no profit incentive to hold back consumption. Plans are made, ultimately, to ensure the production of consumer goods. How they are consumed - including in city planning etc. - is up to the members of society individually

Of course, city plans might have an economic impact, which is why I presume they will have to be ratified by society in general..

Opportunity costs affect sBOTH production and consumption. City plans will assuredly have an economic impact . It is not a case that they "might" have such an impact - they will! The question is how do you reconcile the idea that such plans (plural) exist in your scheme of things along with with the economic impact they will INEVITABLY have when what you are talking is one single giant plan for the whole of global society? The fact that these city plans will have to be ratified by by "society in general" according to you (How ? By a global plebiscite for each of the the hundreds of thousands of "city plans" presented each year? We will be drowning in bureaucracy rather than producing for our needs if things went your way!) does not alter the fact that the plans originated at a city level and is thus at variance with your idea of a single world planning aithority




There are no market signals as such, but limited information is still exchanged between autonomous quasi-enterprises, which is why I said that these are "quasi-market" signals. Once again, the questionnaire was only an example, and your constant reference to that example borders on trolling. I have said multiple times that planners would have recourse to several sources of information when predicting demand. Stock depletion (not the rate of stock depletion as such) is of course one of them. ..

Another cointradiction. Your ealrier said other sources of data will be used including "consumer profiles coupled with demographic data, monitoring the rate of stock depletion, and so on" . Now "the rate of stock depletion" is precluded as a source of information. I have incidentally, as I said earlier, acknowleged that you do not rely solely on the idea of global questionaire but I question the usefulness of these other sources of information too or their compatibly with the idea you are proposing in general

[robbo203]

This, once again, misses the point. These estimates would necessarily be global, as the notion that any region of the planet might operate as an autarkic unit in an era of socialised production is a reactionary pipe dream (something we are in notional agreement on)..


This does not follow. There is no "necessarily" about it. It is quite possible for estimates to be sub global - even local -without endorsing local autarky as such. ironically you more or less admit this later on as we shall see




Presumably it would be able to determine the size of the buffer stock just as effectively as "the people on the ground". It would also have access to data about the buffer stock produced in the previous planning period. The point was, however, that it would also be able to determine the size of buffer stock at Distribution Point 903 and 1014 and 1984 and so on. And it would be able to use this information effectively

So lets get this straight. You are saying that your global central planning authority will be able to determine the size of the buffer stock held at a local distribution point "just as effectively" as "the people on the ground operating the diustribution". Why? Because it "would also have access to data about the buffer stock produced in the previous planning period" Where did this data originate? Presumably, at the local level. So the only reason apparently for the existence of your central authority is becuase it also is able to determine the buffer stock at other distribution points besides the one in question and so take a wider, global, perspective, evening out uneveness in the distribution of buffer stocks across the world in an optimum fashion.

There are several things that can be said about this perspective of yours.

Its strike me that that this represents a retreat of sorts from the position of society wide planning. What you seem to be suggesting is a kind of intermediary role for the central planning authority which "reacts" or responds to local variations in buffer stock. This is no longer classic central planning anymore. Think about it. The shortages you imply that have risen in certain distributions points along with excesses in others, would have risen precisely because of the implementation of your society wide plan in the first place and now you presume a role for the central authoity to "correct" these imbalances which is in fact a reactive role. It is the central authority that decides how the surplus should best be distributed to those distribution points in need of it and from an overall society wide perspective

Lets look at this more closely. You dont deny that local distribution centres can make estimates of what they need on the basis of part expereince; in fact you seem to agree that the data that the central authority works with depends on such local estimates . You also dont deny either that distribution centres are fully capable of ascertaining the state of stocks levels at other distribution points via what are called distributed computer networks which can completely bypass the need for any mediating middlemen. All you are seemingly concerned with is the possiblity that one distribution point might send its surplus stock to anothere on a first come first serve basis overlooking the needs of other distribution points and that would be bad

Well, in the first place what we see here is interaction of numerous plans. It is the local distributions centres you refer to that decide they need more stock and their endeavour to act on this constitutes a "plan" - a deliberate conscious decision to do something about their situation - even if they enlist your central planning authority to help them

Secondly, you suggest they should address their concerns to some remote global authority becuase the latter will somehow act on their behalf and ensure in an even-handed manner that their needs will be met. But even if this was possible and the local distribution centre was not waiting months for the global authority to get its act togther and make a decision, why is this better than other distribution centres with a surplus of stock to distribute opting to implement an equitable distribution of stock among competing claims. You dont say. You simply assume that some remote global planning center is somehow better positioned to do it anyway becuase it supposedly has more information at its fingertips. But is it? Unless you propose that a local distributiuon centre should ship its surplus stock of baked beans at enormous expense to some distribution centre halfway round the world which it has never heard of I dont think this follows at all. I think most of the "superior" knowlege of the global planning centre would thus be useless or redundent. And what is it going to do anyway? Order the local distribution point to distribute the stock as it, the global planning centre, dictates. How is it going to enforce that decision? Again you dont say. What if the local distribution centre has friendly relations with another centre 10 miles away and wishes to maintain thoise relations

In any case you seem to overlook what a self regulating system of stock control is about. Dave B has given a concise picture of how it operates and I suggest you read his post . Note his comment here


"The buffer or stock, that can be an intermediate raw material or a finished product, is defined as the re-order level. Once the level of the stock drops below or approaches the re-order level production is planned to raise the stock level. "

Once the re-order level of prpduction is reached this triggers a response in the form of a request to the suppliers of inpouts for more of those inputs. You are essentially talking about the consumers of these inputs, in this case distribution points requesting finished prpducts by contacting each other with a view to transferring surpluses over from those with too much stock to this with too little stoick, With a prolerly functioning self regulating system of stock control this is unlikely to happen; stock levels will automatically adjust to the rate of take up and it will be with the suppliers rather than with fellow distribution centres that such distribution centres will be in communcation with. Only in exceptional circumstances would they call upon other distribution centres e.g. a natural disaster







This does not, however, make labour-intensive work unproblematic. You're missing the point of Marx's criticism of the division between the city and the countryside - what Marx calls the cretinism of rural life. Redirecting people to intensive labour in the countryside would simply exacerbate this.

I am not suggesting redirecting people anywhere. In any case, you cannot direct or redirect people where they ought to work in a socialist society becuase the labour they exercise is under their own control and thus provided on a purely voluntary basis (another reason why your central planning proposal will never work with its rigid system of targets which requires compulsion) Apart from that Im not advocating backbreaking intensive labour in the fields - there is an intermediate position, you know, which involves using what is called appropriate technology. Im not a great fan of highly capital intensive commercial monoculture agricuture as you know . Its inefficient, produces poor returns and is enviromentally destructive to boot

Furthermore, the "cretinism of rural life" you refer to has its mirror image in the sterilty and alienation of urban life. What Marx was actually suggesting was a more balanced and interpenetrative notion of the relationship between town and countryside. So you might want to do a bit of agricultural work on Monday and on Tuesday attend computer classes in your local town hall or do a stint in the local factory or whatever. As a bit of a country boy myself who loves rural life I am fully capable of appreciating the pleasures of the city as well and I have the wonderful historic city of Granada in southern Spain close by which I always enjoy visiting. Your views on the supposed division between the city and the countryside are crude and simplistic.



Again, the above paragraph only makes sense if you conceive of feedback mechanisms as automatic, with no conscious input. But that is not how that term is generally used - in psychology, for example, feedback mechanisms include conscious decisions as a crucial element..

This is nonsense. Feedback mechanism dont have to be conscious. There are many examples I can cite from the environmetnal sciences, for instance , such as the albedo effect to take just one. In economic system conscious input continuously works alongside the feedback mechanism. No one for instance has or can possibly plan the overall pattern of production; it is just far too big and complex for that to happen, That is the emergent outcome of a multiplicity of individuals plans interacting with each other in sometimes quite unpredictable ways. It is the individual plan - millions of them every single day - that is the conscious input into this unplanned outcome



And of course there would be a "temptation" to stick with the current plan or to modify it in only one sector (and you still haven't given us a reason to suppose that problems in germanium smelting would impact the production of whiskey, for example). But obviously there would be a level when the members of society would say "enough, back to the drawing board"...


What do you mean members of society would say "enough, back to the drawing board". How many members of society does it take to say enough for the plan to go back to the drawing board and how do they put this decision of theirs into effect? Are you now going to add regular plebsicites among the global population of 7 billion (to decide when to go back to the drawing board) to the onerous task of distributing bulky questionaires to this poplation listing the millions of products produced by the global economy with a view to ascertaining how much of each we think ought to be produced? Oh ,I know you are embararased at having to defend this proposal of a questionnaire and keep protesting that you have recomended a lot of other things beside questionnaires (which i have incidently acknowleged) but that hardly gets round the crassness of your proposal and its inept inpracticality

As for me not providing you with a reason to "suppose that problems in germanium smelting would impact the production of whiskey" well this is a rather superfical and if I might say so , unmarxist postion to take. A marxist would recognise that the essence of modern production is precisely its socialised interdependent nature. Germanium smelting might not superfially or immeidately impact in a directly visible sense with the production of whiskey but go back far enough along the supply chain and you will soon enough see how they indirectly impact unavoidably on each other. If nothing else , energy is the common currency of all kinds of production and it is the opportunity costs involved in energy supply that such an impact can be clearly observed.




Except, of course, in socialism society itself controls the supply, and it controls the technological advances (of course technological changes happen under a planned economy, but they can be introduced into the production process in a controlled, planned manner, in contrast to the chaotic and haphazard manner in which they are introduced in market and quasi-market economies). Change happens - of course - but it is not the result of blind market forces, but the conscious decisions of member of society."...

What does this actually mean - "in socialism society itself controls the supply" What is "society itself". You are full of contradictions. On the one hand you say individuals are free to consume what they chose in socialism and that the whole point of production in socialism is to supply the needs of these individuals. Yet on the other, this supply is now something that is controlled by society as if society exists in some reified sense as being separate from the individuals who comprise it, which individuals may have different and even conflicting needs. What is the point of democratic decsionmaking if does not implicitly acknowlege and seek to address these different and conflicting needs - even in socialism - which you so evidently wish to sweep under the carpet with your glib phrase "in socialism society itself controls the supply" , After all, what is the point of issuing questionaires to asscertain the views of said individuals if all there is this thing you call society controlling supply. Why bother in that case?



Quote:
Originally Posted by robbo203
You refer to what you call the "planned economies" but , of course, every conceivable kind of economy involves planning. Even the most extreme free market version of capitalism is full of plans. The issue is not whether there are plans but whether there are many plans or just one plan as I keep on pointing out


And only the latter sort of economy is properly called a planned one. The notion that, since there are plans, the economy is planned, is an outright bizarre one, and it would mean that all economic forms, from the palace economies of the Bronze Age to capitalism, are planned economies. In other words - the term loses any meaning it might have had..


But I didnt say an economy is a planned economy because it contains plans. All I said was that all economies contain plans (plural). There is not , never has been and never will be an economy that contains just one single plan, where the total pattern of production is planned in advance (a priori) and realised in practice. That indeed would be a "planned economy" but it could only ever exist in a hypothetical sense. The leftist mantra about the "planned economy" is baloney, indicative of the fact that many leftists have not that about the problem at all






The data itself is not "faith based", what is faith based is the assumption that autonomous units with limited knowledge exchanging signals and goods will somehow produce a more positive result than conscious central planning - which is equivalent to the assumption that throwing LEGO bricks in a big pile will somehow produce something better than consciously putting them together. This, of course, is the same assumption that market fetishists make.


The exact opposite is the case. The absurd idea that one single mind - the global planning centre - can somehow comprehend the totality of production and the needs of billions of people better than themselves, is utterly based on faith. Quite frankly, your idea is equivalent to the religous "argument from design" advanced by people like the natural theologist William Paley back in the 18th centuy before Darwin came along . The sheer complexity of the world or even a human organ such as an eye, presupposes a divine creator, argued Paley just as a watch presupposes a watchmaker. It is simply not possible to imagine how such a thing as en eye could have evolved through natural selection acting on random mutations.. In the same way, for you, it is simply not possible to imagine how autonomous units with "limited knowledge exchanging signals and goods will somehow produce a more positive result than conscious central planning" by a single will and a single mind - that of the global planning centre. It speaks volumes about your grasp of what a self regulating feedback mechanism that you think it is equvalent to throwing LEGO bricks in a big pile and hoping it will somehow produce something better than consciously putting them together




Because you haven't demonstrated that the general production plan will have to be constantly modified. In fact you have repeatedly stated that it will, with no real argument for why this should be the case, apart from vague statements about change and chaos theory.

This is simply not true. I have given you several specific examples of how externally induced changes - such as harvest failures, unpredictable geological events and even just accidents can seriously disrupt supplies of certain goods which will have knock on repercussions for the production of other goods in the economy. The same is true of shifts in the pattern of demand which the central planners have not anticipoated . All you have done is to ignore these points and pretend that I have not really presented an argment for you to deal with



Rational allocation in the sense of capitalist "efficiency"? Yes, I think that is the case, and it's a good thing. From the standpoint of profit, it is not a good idea to keep buffer stock. But the socialist society is not concerned with profit but fulfilling consumer demands. From that standpoint, buffer stock, overproduction, and so on, are all excellent ideas. Furthermore, one really can't speak of opportunity costs in this sense in a post-scarcity society, except perhaps for certain very rare materials.

Furthermore, it is bizarre to say that the central planning organs can not recognise inefficiency (or rather, differing levels of efficiency), when that is one of the main things that need to be assessed to construct an input-output matrix.
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But you are missing the point completely. The argument is not about maintaing a buffer stock per se but ensuring the efficient allocation of resources. How does your remote single global planning centre do that? And, no, I am not talking about "capitalist efficiency"; Im talking about economising most on the use of those factors that are most scarce in reality. Or perhaps you dont think this is necessary. Perhaps you think we should all be able to drive around in diamond encrusted titantium built cars with a built in champagne dispenser, becuase why not if there is a buffer stock of everything conceivable under the sun by virtue of the central planning authority decreeing that such stocks should be held. By definition there can be no such thing as relative scarcity under these hypothetical circumstances or at least it cannot be identified. In fact there is always such a thing. Hard choices cannot be avoided in determing the efficient allocation of resources and you cannot do that by simply decreeing that buffers stocks should be held acorss the board. There are opportunity costs in everything we do and economic choices are thus unavoaidable., Central planning deprives us of the means to make such choices. If we could all drive around in diamond encrusted titanium cars the sheer volume of resources devoted to this would mean there would be precious little else produced to keep body ansd soul togeher. People will soon enough start dying off like flies from famine and a collpsing system of sanitation

The question i was trying to get you to answer was how in the absence of a self regulating system of stock control are you going to ascertain the relative scarcity of different levels of stock? You have ignored the quesion and simply asserted that the central planning authority will impose a level of buffer stock by diktat which is equivalent to saying we should all have a diamond encrusted titanium car regardless. It has absolutely no way of knowing whether the level of buffer stock it has arbitrarily decided to impose on the production units actually reflects the relative scacrity of the good in question . It has no feedback mechanism that would allow it see this and the opportunity costs involved.

A self regulating system of stock control has such a feedback mechanism and moreover does not in any way require a market or market signals to function as a self regulating system. This is the fundamental point you have yet to grasp



The questionnaire was just an example.

The questionnaire was just an example.

The questionnaire was just an example.
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OK so it was just an example. But how would you implement this example, eh? I ask this in all seriousness and your refusal to fill in the nity gritty details suggests to me a dim awareness of the huge folly of what it is that you have proposed and a horror at the thought of having to defend it against ruthless criticism

Recall that the purpose of the exercise is to establish the global demand for each of the probably millions of different products produced in the global economy. Presumably a large proportion of the circulars will never be returned and so the figures will be based largely on quesswork. But even including a product in the questionaire does not tell us how we want this product. Maybe you can rate it from 1 to 10 but that does not tell us whether we prefer or value one product over another because of the incomparability of these ratings. This is important where resoruces allocation decisions have to be made under conditions of relative scarcity . So once again in the absence of a feedback mechanism in the shape of a self regulating system of stock control reflecting the actuall preferences of individuals, we can only guess as to what their preferences are


To make things easier for you, and to indulge you a little, let us suppose we ignore such a secondary features that particular products exhibit as colour, shape, size and texture which in themselves would make the problem of central planning even more massively formidable amd insuropmountable than they already are , So instead of the countless different kinds of shirts that can be produced along these lines, let us suppose your central planners simply work with a single catch all category labelled "shirts" and let us for the sake of argument suppose that individuals are content to see just a single version of shirt, a kind of universal one size (and colour) fits all kind of shirt., so we can all walk around in our little Maoist style uniforms indistinguishabke from each as far as shirts go. At any rate this would certainly makes things a little easier for your central planners. They can simply fomulate an annual target of,say, 14 billion shirts to be distributed between the global producers of shirts and allowing us the consumers of shirts to content oursleves with consuiming, on average 2 shirts per year

Now here's the thing - how would they know 2 shirts per year is what we want? . Ive said something about this already and how nuch it will be based on sheer guesswork but there's more to be said. Presumably we will be asked in the questionnaire something like "how many shirts do you need over the next year" or five years - probably the latter because you surely dont want to go through the whoke staggeringly costly business of despatching a bulky circular every year to all 7 billion citizens and collating the responses received for each of literally millions of different products. So the less frequent the better. But of course the less frequent , the more likely is the information to become outdated in the course of implementing the plan. People's views on what they want change and also there is no guarantee that they will stick to what they say the want. If word gets round that supplies are going to be restictied to only 1.5 shirts per capita per year on average in the next planning cycle they might go out and grab more shirts than they need or what the central planners determine they need, So you would tend to encourage such behaviour simply by making it appear that the decision about how much is to be produced is all in the hands of some remote central planning and not in the hands of individuals themselves as responsible consurs.

Also, presumably the manufactuers would have to be consulted as well and asked what they require in the way of additonal machinery and raw material to meet the specified target for "shirts" . But here is where it gets tricky. I referred earlier earlier to the socialised interdependent nature of modern production. Some raw materials (or machinery) that could be used for the manufactures of shirts might also be used for the manufacure of some other product - let us say upholstery goods. So what if the consumers of the latter - which means us again expressing our views via your questionnaire - came up with a level of demand for that product that meant there was not enough of the raw material or machines in question to meet the global demand for shirts?

No doubt you would respond by saying the central planers would then simply declare that the output of those inputs needed to produce both kinds of consumer goods should be raised apprpriately. But this where you come unstuck becuase the production of these inputs in turn depends on the output of other producer goods further back along the production chain. You cannot escape this dillemma by relying on a process of infinitre regress. Ultimately like the proverbial snake devouring its own tail it will catch up with you and I suggest the availability of energy will likely be the ultimately limiting factor.

What this all means is that inevitably setting targets for some goods like shirts will impact on the producers' ability to meet others targets - like upholstery prpducts. The central planning authority can try all it likes through a resolute process of "materials balancing" to ensure an even a distribution of resources across industry so as to ensure that all its production targets are met. But even on the most generous simplifying terms one can think of this is simply not going to work.

Firstly because in the face of what the public says it wants as revealed via your questionnaire, it is going to have to largely ignore what the "public wants" in respect of some things in order to ensure that enough is produced of other things that the public also supposedly wanrs. Which means the whole exercise of depatching a universal questionaire to everyone will be largely a farce and a complete waste of resoruces

Secondly, because whatoever targets it might have set through a finely honed procedure of "materials balancing" will inevitably fail to be met in some cases if only because of the kind of disruptive effect caused by factors I have mentioned which you have studiously avoided commenting on - things like industrial accidents , bad weather and what not. Since the output of some products (producer goods) are also the inputs of other goods (consumer goods or intermediate goods) this will have kncok on conequences for the latter too, meaning the whole plan will have to be redrawn in toto and all those carefully worked out input oiutput rations reconfigured. This will have to be done continuously becuase these facotrs occur continuously so the lan will never get to come off the drawing board being subject to continuous revision. Which is why central planning is not a realistci proposition

Now it is no good you saying that oh the central planners can get round all this by ensuring that for every single kind of item produced there is an adequate beffer stock which allows for a certain margin of error and so obviates the need to redaft the single society wide plan. Becuase if that is what you are asserting then, of course, you run smack bang into the other problem I spoke of which is how then do you efficiently allocate respources when you canot know the relative scarcity of the products in question. Almost by defintion you are denying yourself access to this vital economic information by concealing it from view on the shape of universally precribed surpluses across the board in your hypotheical Plan. Byt this is a vicious circle. If you cannot effeicnet allocate resources you wont be able to generate enough resoruces to ensure the production of these surpluses of buffer stock. So how pray do you get round that one?





In fact I specifically mentioned other sources of data - consumer profiles coupled with demographic data, monitoring the rate of stock depletion, and so on. It is, of course, possible that the predicted maximum demand + predicted buffer stock + an additional margin will not be enough. In that case the plan will have to be redrawn. The point is that only a working group that knows all the relevant data, globally, can predict demand for the next period with any chance of success.
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I know you suggested "other sources of data"but these too are equally suspect if not more so than your proposed questionnaire. In any case some of them like "monitoring the rate of stock depletion" are inconsistent with your general proposal of society wide planning. Why would you need to "monitor the rate of stock depletion" if your estimates were correct in the first place? The fact you think it might deviate in a way from what your predictions allowed suggests a less than confident attitude on your part about the efficacy of central planning. What would happen, in your view, if you found the rate of stock depletion to be signifiantly less or significantly more than what you anticipated? Once again the logic of your argument suggests you would have to redraft the entire Plan with all that that entials.

In any case you talk about predicting demand but as I have siggested to you the process of materials balancing means in effect that you might well have to ignore what the figures (allegedly) tell you about the public demand for particular products so to ensure that targets across the board are met. This is unavoidable given the opportunity costs involved in resource allocation. So even if your "working group that knows all the relevant data, globally, can predict demand for the next period with any chance of success" that in itself might turn out to be quite irrelevant. Demand might still exceed supply significantly leading to serious prolblems for the planners.

Further the data on which this working group would base its prediction would, as you admit, be drawn from local sources. The only supposed advantage of the "working group" that you make so much of is that it is able to take a wider purview, being a global body, rather than a local view. But I would suggest to you the revolutionary thought that you dont need to take a global view for the purposes of planning in general. Conceivably such global information might be useful from an academic point of view if you you want to comment on, say, global trends but for practiucal planning it is pretty much useless. It is a self regulatinmg system of stock control that provides the actuall data you need for real planning but this presupposes a decentralised of polycentric system of planning without which there can be no feedback mechanism



The point of the global maritime agency example was to demonstrate the need for global planning in one sector.

But, of course, transoceanic ships don't appear out of the thin air and they don't exist in a vacuum. That global maritime agency would have to coordinate with the global port authority and the global heavy industrial trust and... in fact it would have to coordinate with all other branches of the economy, simultaneously, leaving us with central planning..

Not so. Here once again you are tying yourself up in knots and flatly contradicting yourself . It is as I said before as if you dimly apprehend the enormity of the folly of what it is your proposing and are inconsciously manouvering ypourself into a kind of face saving position that clings to the notion of central planning as merely an anodyne form of words. But it wont wash

If you advocate a single society-wide plan emanating from a single global scentre (how else?) then you cannot have something like a global maritime agency taking steps to coordinate its actions with a global port authority . That clearlyy implies independent decisionmaking being exercised by your global maritime agency and therefore presupposes polycentric planning which is completely at odds with what you are proposing



I don't think there would be towns or villages in socialism.
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What? Are you serious? What are you suggesting. That towns and villages be razed to the ground and that we all be herded into the countryside or alternatively into vast sprawling city conurbations in a kind of mirror imagoe of this brutal Khmer Rouge strategy? Never mind the incredible wast involved in scrapping the existing settlement pattern. If there are no towns or voillages involved in your scenario then there nothing in between the country and the city and remote towns and villages that exist today and that cannot be physically absorbed by urban or city sprawl will have to be abandoned? Is this what you are saying?





But the chief problem is, you're talking about opportunity costs on the consumption side here, which is precisely the logic of capitalism - consumption after all wastes money that, to the capitalist, could drive the M-C-M' cycle. Hence the insistence of the Austrians on this sort of opportunity costs (from my experience). In the socialist society, however, consumption is not planned but free. And there is no profit incentive to hold back consumption. Plans are made, ultimately, to ensure the production of consumer goods. How they are consumed - including in city planning etc. - is up to the members of society individually

Of course, city plans might have an economic impact, which is why I presume they will have to be ratified by society in general..

Opportunity costs affect sBOTH production and consumption. City plans will assuredly have an economic impact . It is not a case that they "might" have such an impact - they will! The question is how do you reconcile the idea that such plans (plural) exist in your scheme of things along with with the economic impact they will INEVITABLY have when what you are talking is one single giant plan for the whole of global society? The fact that these city plans will have to be ratified by by "society in general" according to you (How ? By a global plebiscite for each of the the hundreds of thousands of "city plans" presented each year? We will be drowning in bureaucracy rather than producing for our needs if things went your way!) does not alter the fact that the plans originated at a city level and is thus at variance with your idea of a single world planning aithority




There are no market signals as such, but limited information is still exchanged between autonomous quasi-enterprises, which is why I said that these are "quasi-market" signals. Once again, the questionnaire was only an example, and your constant reference to that example borders on trolling. I have said multiple times that planners would have recourse to several sources of information when predicting demand. Stock depletion (not the rate of stock depletion as such) is of course one of them. ..

Another cointradiction. Your ealrier said other sources of data will be used including "consumer profiles coupled with demographic data, monitoring the rate of stock depletion, and so on" . Now "the rate of stock depletion" is precluded as a source of information. I have incidentally, as I said earlier, acknowleged that you do not rely solely on the idea of global questionaire but I question the usefulness of these other sources of information too or their compatibility with the idea you are proposing in general

[Righteous Prophet]

Wassily Leontief's matrices solve most of the problems of allocation. He stated that there are technical coefficient of capital (input-output) and current technical coefficients ( machinery).The matrices would just be used in democratic, decentralized planning. In addition the capitalist free market does a dreadful job of allocation.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

This does not follow. There is no "necessarily" about it. It is quite possible for estimates to be sub global - even local -without endorsing local autarky as such. ironically you more or less admit this later on as we shall see

Except, of course, I did not "admit" anything like that - and it's obviously nonsensical. Either the inputs and outputs of production units (by which I mean functional units - collections of material objects that, for the purpose of planning, we can treat as black boxes where inputs go in and outputs come out - and it seems to me that what you're talking about are de facto enterprises) are entirely contained in one region, which is, again, a quasi-Jensenite pipe dream, or inputs originating outside the region and outputs whose final destination is outside the region need to be taken into account.


So lets get this straight. You are saying that your global central planning authority will be able to determine the size of the buffer stock held at a local distribution point "just as effectively" as "the people on the ground operating the diustribution". Why? Because it "would also have access to data about the buffer stock produced in the previous planning period"

No.

It would be able to assess the condition of buffer stock just as effectively as "the people on the ground" as the information about buffer stock - collected by workers, or by automated systems if we want to be needlessly technical (in fact sometimes you seem one step away from suggesting the old "technocrat" idea of "energy accounting") - can be effortlessly forwarded to the central planning authorities.

Of course, at the same time the central authorities would have access to data about the buffer stock produced globally in the previous period. That is an entirely different matter.


Where did this data originate? Presumably, at the local level. So the only reason apparently for the existence of your central authority is becuase it also is able to determine the buffer stock at other distribution points besides the one in question and so take a wider, global, perspective, evening out uneveness in the distribution of buffer stocks across the world in an optimum fashion.

"The only reason" if we ignore such things as planning production, solving the transport problem and so on. Of course, even if we ignore all that and just consider the stock part of the problem, it's not just a matter of "evening out unevenness", but having the entire picture, ensuring that the stock is utilised where it is needed.


There are several things that can be said about this perspective of yours.

Its strike me that that this represents a retreat of sorts from the position of society wide planning. What you seem to be suggesting is a kind of intermediary role for the central planning authority which "reacts" or responds to local variations in buffer stock.

No.

The point of my example was not to sketch out a system of central planning but to point out that, even if we accept your assumptions about production units acting autonomously and exchanging stock between them, in the absence of central coordination there would be massive losses due to the partial nature of information available to each autonomous unit.

The later example with the maritime agency was in the same vein: even if you assume that there would be autonomous branch agencies, they would have to coordinate their efforts to the extent that they would act as one agency.


Lets look at this more closely. You dont deny that local distribution centres can make estimates of what they need on the basis of part expereince; in fact you seem to agree that the data that the central authority works with depends on such local estimates . You also dont deny either that distribution centres are fully capable of ascertaining the state of stocks levels at other distribution points via what are called distributed computer networks which can completely bypass the need for any mediating middlemen. All you are seemingly concerned with is the possiblity that one distribution point might send its surplus stock to anothere on a first come first serve basis overlooking the needs of other distribution points and that would be bad

No, that's barely scratching the surface of the massive problems that non-coordinated stock exchange presents. How extensive would these distributed networks be? How would the transport problem be solved and so on? But yes, one of the problems is that the distribution of stock (and industrial products etc.) would have to be based on either favouritism or first-come-first-serve, and there is no reason to suppose it would lead to the optimal result in terms of consumer products produced (more on that later).


Secondly, you suggest they should address their concerns to some remote global authority becuase the latter will somehow act on their behalf and ensure in an even-handed manner that their needs will be met. But even if this was possible and the local distribution centre was not waiting months for the global authority to get its act togther and make a decision, why is this better than other distribution centres with a surplus of stock to distribute opting to implement an equitable distribution of stock among competing claims. You dont say. You simply assume that some remote global planning center is somehow better positioned to do it anyway becuase it supposedly has more information at its fingertips. But is it? Unless you propose that a local distributiuon centre should ship its surplus stock of baked beans at enormous expense to some distribution centre halfway round the world which it has never heard of I dont think this follows at all. I think most of the "superior" knowlege of the global planning centre would thus be useless or redundent. And what is it going to do anyway? Order the local distribution point to distribute the stock as it, the global planning centre, dictates. How is it going to enforce that decision? Again you dont say. What if the local distribution centre has friendly relations with another centre 10 miles away and wishes to maintain thoise relations

Expense in what sense? Obviously we can't be talking about monetary expense (unless you've become a proponent of labour or energy de-facto money), but how would an autonomous production unit be able to ascertain the expenses in terms of the global expenditure of fuel, materials and so on, that would result from taking one of the presumably several options available?

In any case, remember what I said earlier about us talking past each other? Well it seems to me that this is the case, judging by your statements about various distribution centres having "friendly relations" and maintaining them. That is, you suppose that the workers of these centres will act as their de facto owners - it will not be society that owns and operates the means of production, but each petty group of workers will own "their" means of production. To me, and I am going to be blunt, this has nothing to do with socialism. It's a petit-bourgeois utopia, which is why it was taken up by people like Proudhon, Tito or Pablo. In socialism, there will be no "friendly relations" between centres or production units, as these will not be separate enterprises but simply parts of the vast production machine.


Once the re-order level of prpduction is reached this triggers a response in the form of a request to the suppliers of inpouts for more of those inputs. You are essentially talking about the consumers of these inputs, in this case distribution points requesting finished prpducts by contacting each other with a view to transferring surpluses over from those with too much stock to this with too little stoick, With a prolerly functioning self regulating system of stock control this is unlikely to happen; stock levels will automatically adjust to the rate of take up and it will be with the suppliers rather than with fellow distribution centres that such distribution centres will be in communcation with. Only in exceptional circumstances would they call upon other distribution centres e.g. a natural disaster

That was just an example. The same thing could be said about the producers: how will they decide what centres to send their output to?


I am not suggesting redirecting people anywhere. In any case, you cannot direct or redirect people where they ought to work in a socialist society becuase the labour they exercise is under their own control and thus provided on a purely voluntary basis (another reason why your central planning proposal will never work with its rigid system of targets which requires compulsion) Apart from that Im not advocating backbreaking intensive labour in the fields - there is an intermediate position, you know, which involves using what is called appropriate technology. Im not a great fan of highly capital intensive commercial monoculture agricuture as you know . Its inefficient, produces poor returns and is enviromentally destructive to boot

Except, as I said in an earlier post, the article you claim proves the inefficiency of capital-intensive monoculture proves no such thing. And again, you have an extremely bizarre notion of compulsion. I have already addressed that, though, and I don't feel like repeating myself.


Furthermore, the "cretinism of rural life" you refer to has its mirror image in the sterilty and alienation of urban life.

You're missing the point. "The cretinism of rural life" (I think the term used in German is Idiotismus) does not refer to alleged reduced mental capacities of people who live in the countryside (although Marx does talk about "thousands of years of mental torpidity" in rural areas) but the inability of the peasant to meaningfully participate in public life. By retaining the scattered, haphazard and precarious existence of villages, by rejecting technology-intensive agriculture-as-an-industry in favour of labour-intensive methods, you would simply reinforce this "cretinism".

I don't recall Marx ever talking about sterility, and he certainly never talked about alienation in such a careless, psychological sense. And pray tell, what is wrong with "sterility"? Sterility is the sign of an ordered, mature society free from the destructive idiocy of basing everything on personal ties.


What Marx was actually suggesting was a more balanced and interpenetrative notion of the relationship between town and countryside. So you might want to do a bit of agricultural work on Monday and on Tuesday attend computer classes in your local town hall or do a stint in the local factory or whatever.

Which is precisely something that can't be done in villages. And why "local" factory? Why assume people are going to have fixed residence anyway? It's all a bit odd, to be honest.


This is nonsense. Feedback mechanism dont have to be conscious.

I never said they did. What I said was that they can be conscious, and in matters of production, it is ludicrous to suggest they would not be.


What do you mean members of society would say "enough, back to the drawing board". How many members of society does it take to say enough for the plan to go back to the drawing board and how do they put this decision of theirs into effect? Are you now going to add regular plebsicites among the global population of 7 billion (to decide when to go back to the drawing board) to the onerous task of distributing bulky questionaires to this poplation listing the millions of products produced by the global economy with a view to ascertaining how much of each we think ought to be produced? Oh ,I know you are embararased at having to defend this proposal of a questionnaire and keep protesting that you have recomended a lot of other things beside questionnaires (which i have incidently acknowleged) but that hardly gets round the crassness of your proposal and its inept inpracticality

Again, it would be pretty obvious plan-mongering for me to dictate how the future socialist society will handle decision-making. Perhaps there will be a plebiscite. I doubt it, but there you have it, stranger things have happened. More likely there will be some sort of representative system.

And it amuses me to no end that people take filling out tax forms in stride, but thinking about how many items of clothing you'll want in the next year or so is an unmitigated horror.


As for me not providing you with a reason to "suppose that problems in germanium smelting would impact the production of whiskey" well this is a rather superfical and if I might say so , unmarxist postion to take. A marxist would recognise that the essence of modern production is precisely its socialised interdependent nature. Germanium smelting might not superfially or immeidately impact in a directly visible sense with the production of whiskey but go back far enough along the supply chain and you will soon enough see how they indirectly impact unavoidably on each other. If nothing else , energy is the common currency of all kinds of production and it is the opportunity costs involved in energy supply that such an impact can be clearly observed.

And once again you substitute phrases for an actual argument. Yes, the various parts of the process of production are interdependent. But this interdependence is not unanalysable - and on the level of the input-output matrix, the inputs and outputs for germanium are not connected to the inputs and outputs for whiskey. That means that if one of the output targets for germanium is modified, there is no reason to solve the entire matrix equation again to figure out how much the inputs for germanium need to be changed, only a simpler equation formed by one part of the input-output matrix. The point about energy is specious. Even ignoring the presumed abundance of energy in the socialist society, the supply of energy is not fixed, but determined by society.


What does this actually mean - "in socialism society itself controls the supply" What is "society itself". You are full of contradictions. On the one hand you say individuals are free to consume what they chose in socialism and that the whole point of production in socialism is to supply the needs of these individuals. Yet on the other, this supply is now something that is controlled by society as if society exists in some reified sense as being separate from the individuals who comprise it, which individuals may have different and even conflicting needs. What is the point of democratic decsionmaking if does not implicitly acknowlege and seek to address these different and conflicting needs - even in socialism - which you so evidently wish to sweep under the carpet with your glib phrase "in socialism society itself controls the supply" , After all, what is the point of issuing questionaires to asscertain the views of said individuals if all there is this thing you call society controlling supply. Why bother in that case?

Because the social process of production, in socialism, serves no other purpose but producing items for individual (mostly) consumption? It's not a difficult concept. Not to mention how bizarre it is to see an ostensible Marxist, in fact someone who accused me of not being Marxist enough just a paragraph ago, take up the standpoint of methodological individualism, when methodological individualism is blatantly incompatible with Marxism.

Democracy is simply a convenient decision-making mechanism. Anything else will run into problems due to a lack of information.


The exact opposite is the case. The absurd idea that one single mind - the global planning centre - can somehow comprehend the totality of production and the needs of billions of people better than themselves, is utterly based on faith.

The planning centre is a mind? I see. I'm sure you're aware that the ironic, quasi-mystical way in which you portray central planning (the Plan, one single mind etc.) is not an argument against central planning.


Quite frankly, your idea is equivalent to the religous "argument from design" advanced by people like the natural theologist William Paley back in the 18th centuy before Darwin came along . The sheer complexity of the world or even a human organ such as an eye, presupposes a divine creator, argued Paley just as a watch presupposes a watchmaker. It is simply not possible to imagine how such a thing as en eye could have evolved through natural selection acting on random mutations.. In the same way, for you, it is simply not possible to imagine how autonomous units with "limited knowledge exchanging signals and goods will somehow produce a more positive result than conscious central planning" by a single will and a single mind - that of the global planning centre. It speaks volumes about your grasp of what a self regulating feedback mechanism that you think it is equvalent to throwing LEGO bricks in a big pile and hoping it will somehow produce something better than consciously putting them together

Except, of course, the point was not that the interaction of various plans would not produce some complex result, I'm sure it would, but that there is no reason to suppose this result would be socially optimal. Evolution, after all, does not produce optimal forms (optimal from our perspective), as evidenced, for example, by the fact that humans are born with oversized squishy heads. Generally, there is no reason to suppose that an unconscious process will produce anything in line with our desires and needs. Yet you're asking us to have faith that it will. It's the old fable of the Invisible Hand of the Market, except, of course, the market has a selection mechanism (differential rates of investment due to varying rates of profit) (and of course, that selection mechanism still doesn't produce optimal results for us), whereas the "self-regulating system of stock control" does not.


This is simply not true. I have given you several specific examples of how externally induced changes - such as harvest failures, unpredictable geological events and even just accidents can seriously disrupt supplies of certain goods which will have knock on repercussions for the production of other goods in the economy. The same is true of shifts in the pattern of demand which the central planners have not anticipoated . All you have done is to ignore these points and pretend that I have not really presented an argment for you to deal with

I have addressed all of these, and to be honest I'm in no mood to repeat myself, particularly since these posts are hilariously long to begin with.


But you are missing the point completely. The argument is not about maintaing a buffer stock per se but ensuring the efficient allocation of resources. How does your remote single global planning centre do that? And, no, I am not talking about "capitalist efficiency"; Im talking about economising most on the use of those factors that are most scarce in reality.

If certain materials are scarce, it is a matter of choosing the production process that uses up less of the scarce material for any given consumer product. That is not even at the level of the input-output matrix but at the level of planning the production processes used.


Or perhaps you dont think this is necessary. Perhaps you think we should all be able to drive around in diamond encrusted titantium built cars with a built in champagne dispenser, becuase why not if there is a buffer stock of everything conceivable under the sun by virtue of the central planning authority decreeing that such stocks should be held. By definition there can be no such thing as relative scarcity under these hypothetical circumstances or at least it cannot be identified. In fact there is always such a thing. Hard choices cannot be avoided in determing the efficient allocation of resources and you cannot do that by simply decreeing that buffers stocks should be held acorss the board. There are opportunity costs in everything we do and economic choices are thus unavoaidable., Central planning deprives us of the means to make such choices. If we could all drive around in diamond encrusted titanium cars the sheer volume of resources devoted to this would mean there would be precious little else produced to keep body ansd soul togeher. People will soon enough start dying off like flies from famine and a collpsing system of sanitation

Of course socialism requires the "springs of cooperative wealth to flow more abundantly", as Marx would put it, or rather - socialism is a post-scarcity society. That you immediately start talking about diamond-encrusted titanium cars with champagne dispensers is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that you've spent too much time arguing with various Austrian creatures. Anyway, once again, we seem to be talking past each other.


OK so it was just an example. But how would you implement this example, eh? I ask this in all seriousness and your refusal to fill in the nity gritty details suggests to me a dim awareness of the huge folly of what it is that you have proposed and a horror at the thought of having to defend it against ruthless criticism

It's more the fact that I'm not the commissar for production, that even if I was (because, I don't know, most people were drunk? once can only hazard a guess), I would not be able to draw up a detailed plan of information gathering alone in one sitting. What you're asking me to do is to write science fiction, which is far from my forte.


Recall that the purpose of the exercise is to establish the global demand for each of the probably millions of different products produced in the global economy. Presumably a large proportion of the circulars will never be returned and so the figures will be based largely on quesswork.

Why would they not be returned? I mean, you're projecting the apathetic idiocy of modern life into the socialist society. Presumably anyone who couldn't be bothered stating their preferences has no cause to complain.


But even including a product in the questionaire does not tell us how we want this product. Maybe you can rate it from 1 to 10 but that does not tell us whether we prefer or value one product over another because of the incomparability of these ratings. This is important where resoruces allocation decisions have to be made under conditions of relative scarcity . So once again in the absence of a feedback mechanism in the shape of a self regulating system of stock control reflecting the actuall preferences of individuals, we can only guess as to what their preferences are

Again you act as if the supply of various materials, products needed for the production process and so on, is out of the hands of society. That's completely backwards, in all meanings of that term. Once the demand for certain goods is ascertained, one of the major tasks of the planning authorities is to calculate the needed input - which translates into quotas for production units such as mines, nuclear power plants and so on.


To make things easier for you, and to indulge you a little, let us suppose we ignore such a secondary features that particular products exhibit as colour, shape, size and texture which in themselves would make the problem of central planning even more massively formidable amd insuropmountable than they already are , So instead of the countless different kinds of shirts that can be produced along these lines, let us suppose your central planners simply work with a single catch all category labelled "shirts" and let us for the sake of argument suppose that individuals are content to see just a single version of shirt, a kind of universal one size (and colour) fits all kind of shirt., so we can all walk around in our little Maoist style uniforms indistinguishabke from each as far as shirts go. At any rate this would certainly makes things a little easier for your central planners. They can simply fomulate an annual target of,say, 14 billion shirts to be distributed between the global producers of shirts and allowing us the consumers of shirts to content oursleves with consuiming, on average 2 shirts per year

Now here's the thing - how would they know 2 shirts per year is what we want? . Ive said something about this already and how nuch it will be based on sheer guesswork but there's more to be said. Presumably we will be asked in the questionnaire something like "how many shirts do you need over the next year" or five years - probably the latter because you surely dont want to go through the whoke staggeringly costly business of despatching a bulky circular every year to all 7 billion citizens and collating the responses received for each of literally millions of different products. So the less frequent the better. But of course the less frequent , the more likely is the information to become outdated in the course of implementing the plan. People's views on what they want change and also there is no guarantee that they will stick to what they say the want. If word gets round that supplies are going to be restictied to only 1.5 shirts per capita per year on average in the next planning cycle they might go out and grab more shirts than they need or what the central planners determine they need, So you would tend to encourage such behaviour simply by making it appear that the decision about how much is to be produced is all in the hands of some remote central planning and not in the hands of individuals themselves as responsible consurs.

Except, of course, it is in their hands as they are the ones who ultimately decide which plan is to be adopted - although in their function as members of society, as consumers-producers, not the capitalist construct of "responsible consumers". This is just psychological speculation of the worst sort, and is not backed up by anything. Furthermore, as I already said, in contrast to your claim here, the less time planning cycles take up, the better. Your only counter-argument is "well, it will require work". So what.

How to take into account product variation is a fascinating subject, but it's besides the point now.


Also, presumably the manufactuers would have to be consulted as well and asked what they require in the way of additonal machinery and raw material to meet the specified target for "shirts" . But here is where it gets tricky. I referred earlier earlier to the socialised interdependent nature of modern production. Some raw materials (or machinery) that could be used for the manufactures of shirts might also be used for the manufacure of some other product - let us say upholstery goods. So what if the consumers of the latter - which means us again expressing our views via your questionnaire - came up with a level of demand for that product that meant there was not enough of the raw material or machines in question to meet the global demand for shirts?

No doubt you would respond by saying the central planers would then simply declare that the output of those inputs needed to produce both kinds of consumer goods should be raised apprpriately. But this where you come unstuck becuase the production of these inputs in turn depends on the output of other producer goods further back along the production chain. You cannot escape this dillemma by relying on a process of infinitre regress. Ultimately like the proverbial snake devouring its own tail it will catch up with you and I suggest the availability of energy will likely be the ultimately limiting factor.

Except, of course, it's not a process of infinite regress. You take an input-output matrix, you set the vector corresponding to the projected demand, and solve the matrix equation (or more likely a series of matrix equations) to see what the inputs vector is. I'm baffled by your bafflement at this, to be honest.


Now it is no good you saying that oh the central planners can get round all this by ensuring that for every single kind of item produced there is an adequate beffer stock which allows for a certain margin of error and so obviates the need to redaft the single society wide plan. Becuase if that is what you are asserting then, of course, you run smack bang into the other problem I spoke of which is how then do you efficiently allocate respources when you canot know the relative scarcity of the products in question. Almost by defintion you are denying yourself access to this vital economic information by concealing it from view on the shape of universally precribed surpluses across the board in your hypotheical Plan. Byt this is a vicious circle. If you cannot effeicnet allocate resources you wont be able to generate enough resoruces to ensure the production of these surpluses of buffer stock. So how pray do you get round that one?

But this is ridiculous. Decentralised systems might only be able to ascertain scarcity based on the effects on stock depletion, but a centralised planning authority has access to quantitative information about actual outputs and inputs into any of the production units. They can "see" scarcity directly.


I know you suggested "other sources of data"but these too are equally suspect if not more so than your proposed questionnaire. In any case some of them like "monitoring the rate of stock depletion" are inconsistent with your general proposal of society wide planning. Why would you need to "monitor the rate of stock depletion" if your estimates were correct in the first place? The fact you think it might deviate in a way from what your predictions allowed suggests a less than confident attitude on your part about the efficacy of central planning.

Or perhaps, as anyone who has worked with complex systems will tell you, every prediction has its margin or error, and having redundancies simply strengthens the system.


What would happen, in your view, if you found the rate of stock depletion to be signifiantly less or significantly more than what you anticipated? Once again the logic of your argument suggests you would have to redraft the entire Plan with all that that entials.

We have discussed this.

In several posts.

I am getting tired of repeating myself about how I'm not going to repeat myself.


What? Are you serious? What are you suggesting. That towns and villages be razed to the ground and that we all be herded into the countryside or alternatively into vast sprawling city conurbations in a kind of mirror imagoe of this brutal Khmer Rouge strategy? Never mind the incredible wast involved in scrapping the existing settlement pattern. If there are no towns or voillages involved in your scenario then there nothing in between the country and the city and remote towns and villages that exist today and that cannot be physically absorbed by urban or city sprawl will have to be abandoned? Is this what you are saying?

And, again, whenever someone mentions social change (such as the abolition of the family), you interpret that as the result of coercion. Villages and towns are stupidly wasteful, inefficient and socially problematic ways of storing live humans - therefore it stands to reason that they will be abandoned in socialism.


Opportunity costs affect sBOTH production and consumption. City plans will assuredly have an economic impact . It is not a case that they "might" have such an impact - they will! The question is how do you reconcile the idea that such plans (plural) exist in your scheme of things along with with the economic impact they will INEVITABLY have when what you are talking is one single giant plan for the whole of global society? The fact that these city plans will have to be ratified by by "society in general" according to you (How ? By a global plebiscite for each of the the hundreds of thousands of "city plans" presented each year? We will be drowning in bureaucracy rather than producing for our needs if things went your way!) does not alter the fact that the plans originated at a city level and is thus at variance with your idea of a single world planning aithority

And, as I said, for the third or so time, these are consumption plans, whereas I was talking about a single production plan. The two are not the same, even if following capitalist logic you want to restrict consumption because the items consumed might be used in production.


Another cointradiction. Your ealrier said other sources of data will be used including "consumer profiles coupled with demographic data, monitoring the rate of stock depletion, and so on" . Now "the rate of stock depletion" is precluded as a source of information. I have incidentally, as I said earlier, acknowleged that you do not rely solely on the idea of global questionaire but I question the usefulness of these other sources of information too or their compatibility with the idea you are proposing in general

I misspoke earlier. The rate of stock depletion could also be collected of course - although it doesn't provide much information by itself.

In any case, I think this conversation has run its course, as I literally do not concede that your assumptions - local near-autarky, economic units acting as autonomous enterprises, the continuation of scarcity and so on, are in any way compatible with socialism.

[Ledur]

But this is ridiculous. Decentralised systems might only be able to ascertain scarcity based on the effects on stock depletion, but a centralised planning authority has access to quantitative information about actual outputs and inputs into any of the production units. They can "see" scarcity directly.

You both could agree here. I think in Robbo's solution, everyone could see stocks in any production unit. You actually don't need a central authority to get and publish these numbers. Maybe a central website, but not central planners.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

You both could agree here. I think in Robbo's solution, everyone could see stocks in any production unit. You actually don't need a central authority to get and publish these numbers. Maybe a central website, but not central planners.

Perhaps, but who is to guarantee that the numbers are good? We've already seen that robbo thinks various production and distribution units will try to remain on friendly terms with one another, who's to say they won't fudge the numbers so that their gifts to other units remain undetected? Come to think of it, what would prevent open trading, as robbo assumes conditions of generalised scarcity will obtain?

[Ledur]

Perhaps, but who is to guarantee that the numbers are good? We've already seen that robbo thinks various production and distribution units will try to remain on friendly terms with one another, who's to say they won't fudge the numbers so that their gifts to other units remain undetected? Come to think of it, what would prevent open trading, as robbo assumes conditions of generalised scarcity will obtain?

Well, in central planning the same could happen, right? Black market in USSR is an example (even though that was state capitalism).

In capitalism, what prevents workers from "stealing" the owner of means of production is the legal system and tight control of the owner. In socialism, public legal enforcement and transparency in production/consumption could avoid this. But people in the society we're imagining would have other values. A sense of mutual dependency and a sharing approach of the public means, for example.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, in central planning the same could happen, right? Black market in USSR is an example (even though that was state capitalism).

In capitalism, what prevents workers from "stealing" the owner of means of production is the legal system and tight control of the owner. In socialism, public legal enforcement and transparency in production/consumption could avoid this. But people in the society we're imagining would have other values. A sense of mutual dependency and a sharing approach of the public means, for example.

I never really understood the popularity of the "state capitalist" analysis of the Soviet Union, but that's neither here nor there. Yes, the Soviet Union had a black market - more importantly, it participated in the world market as well. But the Soviet Union was not in the higher phase of the communist society, which is ostensibly what we're talking about.

Now, in socialism, there would be no need for what you term public legal enforcement - and there will be no need to suppress trading as production will no longer be something done by autonomous, antagonistic units. And scarcity will be a thing of the past - but robbo disputes both of these points. So what, does he imagine there will be some sort of "socialist police" that would suppress trading? It's all a bit odd, really.

[Ledur]

Now, in socialism, there would be no need for what you term public legal enforcement - and there will be no need to suppress trading as production will no longer be something done by autonomous, antagonistic units. And scarcity will be a thing of the past - but robbo disputes both of these points. So what, does he imagine there will be some sort of "socialist police" that would suppress trading? It's all a bit odd, really.

I believe that trading AFTER products were taken from distribution centres is ok, but it could lead us back to market (commodity) production, specially if the things publicly produced aren't enough to satisfy us. The only way to prevent this, without "socialist police", is to produce most things we want in these public production centres, in abundance.

I don't buy the Austrian argument that everything is scarce and our wants are endless, but the big question is: could everything be produced in sufficient abundance?

[cyu]

sufficient abundance


This is a key concept I think, and depends a great deal on who controls the media or what messages dominate the media. For example, if the media is funded by consumer advertising, then their audience will tend to want more stuff. The more advertising there is that "you should want more" then the less likely people will believe what they have is sufficient.

Historically, some religions have intentionally "advertised" fasting or asceticism, leading to a different view of what "sufficient" means. Viewed in evolutionary terms, such memes may have helped prevent populations from killing each other over scarce resources during tough times, thus improving the chances of survival for carriers of those religious memes.

Different types of advertising could result in different views of sufficiency. For example, if you had a lot of advertising for people to join the Air Force, but only a limited number of pilot slots available, then you may end up "scarcity" in the number of positions for pilots if everyone is clamoring to become one. Similarly, if you have a lot of successful advertising for a dance club, you may end up with "insufficient" space to serve all the wannabe dancers.

[robbo203]

Except, of course, I did not "admit" anything like that - and it's obviously nonsensical. Either the inputs and outputs of production units (by which I mean functional units - collections of material objects that, for the purpose of planning, we can treat as black boxes where inputs go in and outputs come out - and it seems to me that what you're talking about are de facto enterprises) are entirely contained in one region, which is, again, a quasi-Jensenite pipe dream, or inputs originating outside the region and outputs whose final destination is outside the region need to be taken into account.


No, you're not understanding. The hypothetical global planning centre cannot "plan" on your terms without the data flowing inwards from the periphery to the centre, as it were, on such things as the disposition of stocks, projections of local demand etc etc. This information does not just magically materialise out of nowhere within the confines of your global central planning office, does it now? And once again, no, Im not supposing or advocating a system of localised autarky. As Ive several times said production and planning would be organised on a multi-level basis - local , regional and global. Your frankly ridiculous scenario rules out the first two leaving only global planning. There is only one single global centre from which issues only single giant fantasy plan covering the entirety of inputs and outputs that constitute the entire global economy. I used to think that nobody could be so daft as to literally fall for such a preposterous idea and that it only functioned as a kind of "Weberian type" in discourse on planning. Well, I have been proved wrong on that score at any rate as this discussion clearly shows. But then again you are the only I have ever known to hold such an eccentric view; almost everyone else who advocates "central planning" turns out merely to support a greater degree of centralisation which is not the same thing at all as society wide central planning and is altogether more modest in scope
.



It would be able to assess the condition of buffer stock just as effectively as "the people on the ground" as the information about buffer stock - collected by workers, or by automated systems if we want to be needlessly technical (in fact sometimes you seem one step away from suggesting the old "technocrat" idea of "energy accounting") - can be effortlessly forwarded to the central planning authorities.

Of course, at the same time the central authorities would have access to data about the buffer stock produced globally in the previous period. That is an entirely different matter.


You're rambling now and throwing in completely irrelevant comments to cover your tracks - how is anything I ve said remotely suggestive of the old "technocrat" idea of "energy accounting"? And, again, you make my point for me. You admit that information about buffer stocks can be "effortlessly forwarded to the central planning authorities" from people on the groun , meaning of course that the people on the ground possess precisely this information in the first place but for some reason which we will come to later, you think they need to foward it on to the some remote global planning office, meaning they are incapable of planning their production schedules and contacting the relevant suppliers on their own initative in the light of this information you admit they already possess




"The only reason" if we ignore such things as planning production, solving the transport problem and so on. Of course, even if we ignore all that and just consider the stock part of the problem, it's not just a matter of "evening out unevenness", but having the entire picture, ensuring that the stock is utilised where it is needed.


But where the stock is needed is something that is subject to constant change - something that some inflexible 5 year or 10 year or 20 year plan cannot by its very nature address without completely undermining the very raison d'etre of its existence. The successful implementation of the plan requires that it be inflexibly applied to the letter otherwise the plan has to be redrafted in toto because of its interdependent aspects. Modifying the Plan without redrafting it completely logically means that you have exposed it the influence of other plans from without. What you have is no longer a unicentric planning system but a polycentric planning system, a union of several plans

Further, you dont need to have the "entire picture" in view to ensure that stock is utilised where it is needed. Even assuming you could ever have the entire picture - a pure fantasy - a polycentric socialist planning system like water finding its own level will inexorably deliver stock to where it is needed anyway via the self regulating system of stock control




The point of my example was not to sketch out a system of central planning but to point out that, even if we accept your assumptions about production units acting autonomously and exchanging stock between them, in the absence of central coordination there would be massive losses due to the partial nature of information available to each autonomous unit.


Again this shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of a decentralised self regulating system of production. The partial or limited nature of information held at the level of local production units is neither here nor there (in any case no one can possibly access any more than a tiny fraction of the information embedded in the prodiction system) . What matters is the mutual adaption of local (and regional and global units) to each other in the light of this necessarily partial information. In other words, this leads to a spontaneous coordination of their plans as an outcome of the accommodation of one to the other. You seem to entertain this weird idea that the only form of coordination has to be top down coordination under the auspices of a single global planning centre with a gods eye view of everything. Not so.

So your whole argument is predicated on a peice of nonsense. If there "would be massive losses due to the partial nature of information available to each autonomous unit" then I take it that by that you assume by that the global planning centre posseses the complete picture, information wise. But that's ridiculous. Its simply not possible. Even with the best will in the world, it can work with only highly aggregated data and very rough statistical averages. As my shirt example, there is just no way one single planning entity can hold all the (ever changing) data relating to the global demand for shirts including such aspects as size texture, design and so on and so forth. Such information can only be processed and acted on in a decentralised fashion. Oh I know you naively think everyone in the world - all 7 billion of us - is going to respond to your massive questionnaire listing all the consumer products in the economy and asking our opinions on each of these. But even if that happened people change their opinions all the time and a 5 year or 20 year global plan simply lacks the necessary flexibility to adapt to such change





The later example with the maritime agency was in the same vein: even if you assume that there would be autonomous branch agencies, they would have to coordinate their efforts to the extent that they would act as one agency.


No co-ordination means here that they retain their existence as separate planning entities but mutually adjust their plans to each other. It is through this mutual adjustment process that they come to "act as one" but that does not alter the fact this presupposes an original condition of separate entities formulating their own plans which they then attempt to align or coordinate with others. Coordination in other words implies in a fundamental sense polycentric planning contrary to what you think. So the global martime agency and the Ports authority liaise with each about the most suitable schedule for the transportation of goods from one part of the world to another. They coordinate and compromise but that does not mean they actually constitute one single planning body. They are two but they seek to work together or cooperate in this matter as far as possible to expedite the transportation of said goods






No, that's barely scratching the surface of the massive problems that non-coordinated stock exchange presents. How extensive would these distributed networks be? How would the transport problem be solved and so on? But yes, one of the problems is that the distribution of stock (and industrial products etc.) would have to be based on either favouritism or first-come-first-serve, and there is no reason to suppose it would lead to the optimal result in terms of consumer products produced (more on that later).


No this way off the mark and that is because you have this absurd idea that spontaneous adjustment of a polycentric planning system is not coordinated production. Every conceivalable kind of society and particularly a large scale industrially advanced society of necessity must embrace polycentic planning. Of necessity, unicentric planning - a single society wide plan is simply out of the question. Capitalism too involves polycentric planning. A capitalist supermarket monitors its stock of baked beans. It obseves that this stock has fallen below the re-order level. This automatically triggers an order for fresh stock which is sent to the manufacturers. The manufacturers in turn note that there is a shortage of tinned cans and they then contact the producers of tin cans to ask for more. What we see here is an alignment or meshing of the plans of one entity with those of others. This is what is meant by coordination

How extensive is a distributed computer network system? It can be extensive as you like. It can be global or local or something in between. We do after all possesed the means to communicate anywhere in the world and access data from anywhere in the world. That does not mean a local distribution point would want to get its supply of baked beans from a production unit on the other side of the planet. There are sound practical reaons to do with transport costs, familiarity with suppliers and so on as to why local producers would want to get their supplies from reasonably local sources. So they would adjust their search to a fairly localised spatial field. On the other hand, if they wanted some rare product or material that could only be found on the other side of the globe then clearly the distributed computer network would be widened considerably to incorporate such far flung corners of the world





Expense in what sense? Obviously we can't be talking about monetary expense (unless you've become a proponent of labour or energy de-facto money), but how would an autonomous production unit be able to ascertain the expenses in terms of the global expenditure of fuel, materials and so on, that would result from taking one of the presumably several options available?


I am talking in terms of transport costs chiefly. As a rough rule of thumb the closer the better from the point iof reducing costs. And no Im not talking about costs in a monetary sense but that does not mean "costs" no longer exist. Costs continue to exist as opportunity costs in a socialist society. You simply can't get round that



In any case, remember what I said earlier about us talking past each other? Well it seems to me that this is the case, judging by your statements about various distribution centres having "friendly relations" and maintaining them. That is, you suppose that the workers of these centres will act as their de facto owners - it will not be society that owns and operates the means of production, but each petty group of workers will own "their" means of production. To me, and I am going to be blunt, this has nothing to do with socialism. It's a petit-bourgeois utopia, which is why it was taken up by people like Proudhon, Tito or Pablo. In socialism, there will be no "friendly relations" between centres or production units, as these will not be separate enterprises but simply parts of the vast production machine.


This is silly, frankly. How do you deduce from the fact that one unit might have friendly working relations with another one with which it regularly interacts means that the workers at each unit must be regarded as the de facto owners of the respective units? In any case you would surely agree that there will be millions of distribution and centres and production units in socialism (whether these are called "enterprises" is a question of semantics; personally, I think socialism will be a more "enterprising" society than ever capitalism could be) Are you seriously trying to say that workers in production unit 1204 cannot have amicable relations with production unit 836 becuase this will detract from the fact that we are all parts of some "vast production machine"? Cannot the parts interact amicably? What a depressingly grim totalitarian view of socialism you have in which we are seemingly all goping to be turned into little cogs in your "vast production machine". If thats you view of socialism, you can keep it. It sounds too much like capitalism for my liking





That was just an example. The same thing could be said about the producers: how will they decide what centres to send their output to?


Mostly, I suggest by means of a queuing system on a first come first served basis. This makes a lot of sense. However if it becomes clear that not every distribtion centres requirements are going to be met within a reasonable period of time, other approachs might then be necessary - for example referring them on to other nearby production units or alternatively opting for only a partial fulfillment of each order placed to ensure everyone gets a slice of the cake.




You're missing the point. "The cretinism of rural life" (I think the term used in German is Idiotismus) does not refer to alleged reduced mental capacities of people who live in the countryside (although Marx does talk about "thousands of years of mental torpidity" in rural areas) but the inability of the peasant to meaningfully participate in public life. By retaining the scattered, haphazard and precarious existence of villages, by rejecting technology-intensive agriculture-as-an-industry in favour of labour-intensive methods, you would simply reinforce this "cretinism".

I don't recall Marx ever talking about sterility, and he certainly never talked about alienation in such a careless, psychological sense. And pray tell, what is wrong with "sterility"? Sterility is the sign of an ordered, mature society free from the destructive idiocy of basing everything on personal ties.



Again you misrperesent me. I am not rejecting technology. I made it quite plain that I have a preference for what is called appropriate technology. There is a spectrum between extreme labour intensity and extreme capital intensity. I am simply suggesting that we should somewhat move away from the highly capital monoculture farming typical of modern large scale commercial agricuture - which I repeat again, and all the evidence confirms, is significantly less productive in terms of output per hecture than small scale mixed farming systems which tend also to be more labour intensive or less capital intensive if you prefer. That does not mean the latter work only with simple handtools - hoes, rakes, shovels and the like . It does not mean the abandonment of technology in favour of backbreaking toil. Ive never suggested or recommended such a thing. Im actually taking a middle ground position on the matter

Similarly you misrepresent me on the "The cretinism of rural life". I never suggested this referred to alleged "reduced mental capacities of people who live in the countryside". I am well aware that it refers as you put it to the "inability of the peasant to meaningfully participate in public life" and I am not suggesting that this state of affairs of should somehow be allowed to continue.

But neither do I take the simplistic black or white view of the world you seem to hold. There is nothing wrong with rural life in itself anymore than there is anything wrong with city life in itself. Its the one sided emphasis on the one, or the other, that is the problem in my view and that is the point that Marx was trying to make. Not to glorify city life over the cretinism of rural existence. As for your bizarre coment that "Sterility is the sign of an ordered, mature society free from the destructive idiocy of basing everything on personal ties" well I am not advocating that everything be based on personal ties but nor am I advocating the abandonment of personal ties which is precisely a tendency that Marx identified with encroaching capitalism (see for example his comment in the Manifesto: " The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation)"




Quote:
Originally Posted by robbo203
What Marx was actually suggesting was a more balanced and interpenetrative notion of the relationship between town and countryside. So you might want to do a bit of agricultural work on Monday and on Tuesday attend computer classes in your local town hall or do a stint in the local factory or whatever.
Which is precisely something that can't be done in villages. And why "local" factory? Why assume people are going to have fixed residence anyway? It's all a bit odd, to be honest.

I dont know what part of the world you hail from but some local villages around my neck of the wood have indeed got small local factories. Whats the problem with that and why cant more be built anyway? In any case you can always drive or catch a bus to you nearest local factory in some bigger town if you so wished. As for assuming people are going to have fixed residences, I dont, but neither do I assume a high a degree of mobility either. On balance I think there will be somewaht less spatial mobility in socialism than there is today and that that will be a good thing. It will revive a sense of community lfe decimated by capitalism. High rates of mobiltiy these days are often by capitalist market presusres e.g. the search for emplyment elsewhere or the loss of amenities in local villages




Again, it would be pretty obvious plan-mongering for me to dictate how the future socialist society will handle decision-making. Perhaps there will be a plebiscite. I doubt it, but there you have it, stranger things have happened. More likely there will be some sort of representative system
And it amuses me to no end that people take filling out tax forms in stride, but thinking about how many items of clothing you'll want in the next year or so is an unmitigated horror...

I suggest to you that filling in tax forms will be a complete doddle compared to what you advocate. Even if the questionnaire oncerned itself only "with items of clothing" and nothing else it would simply overwhelm the central planning authorities completely. As I said items of clothing are of many different kinds - from socks to ties, from tousers to T shirts to jackets. Each kind of item can be further differentiated in many different ways - style, design pattern, texture, material, size, colour and so on and so forth. So the current world population of 7 billion people according to you is expected to fill in a questionnaire detailing all their preicse clothing needs for the next year probably amounting to say 50-100 items per person. Even if this were possible and everyone could be persuaded to stick their personal selection over the course of the next year (unlikely), there is the question of how the global planning office is going to process all this vast information , distribute the task of meeting demand among millions of clothing producers across the world and ensure that it targets in respect of each of the nunerous kinds of clothing items are met. And that is just one single category we are talking about - namely "clothing items". In the average household there are thousands of other items to think of.

Seriously I dont think you have even begun to consider the magnitude of what it is you are proposing. You have absolutely no sense of the practicalities involved at all. Central planning is just a holy mantra to be repeatedly uttered as answer to everything much as a good Catholic would say his or her Our Father and Hail Mary every day as good catholics do. Its a meaningless unattainable goal

And you have evaded my question - who would decide - and how often - whether the Plan should go back to the drawing board of it was failing to meet the needs of the people as it purported to do . You suggest vaguely that there might be some sort of representative system and presumably if a majority of the global representatives want to scrap this is what would happen and the whole cumbersome process of printing off 7 billion new questionnaires would begin again. Yes?



And once again you substitute phrases for an actual argument. Yes, the various parts of the process of production are interdependent. But this interdependence is not unanalysable - and on the level of the input-output matrix, the inputs and outputs for germanium are not connected to the inputs and outputs for whiskey. That means that if one of the output targets for germanium is modified, there is no reason to solve the entire matrix equation again to figure out how much the inputs for germanium need to be changed, only a simpler equation formed by one part of the input-output matrix. The point about energy is specious. Even ignoring the presumed abundance of energy in the socialist society, the supply of energy is not fixed, but determined by society.
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No you dont understand what I was saying nor how an input out matrix operates. I agreed that the inputs and outputs for germanium may not be connected to the inputs and outputs for whiskey directly. But the inputs that make the inputs for germanium may well be connected and if you go back far enough along the production chains for both germanium and whiskey you will be bound to encounter some common factor that crops up at some point along both of these chains. That could very well mean that an increase in germanium, say, might entail a small reductiuon in the output of whiskey. The production of whiskey and the production of germanium dont have to be directly linked for this to happen. This is what I mean the interdependent socialised nature of modern prpduction. It seems to me that you want to just stick your head onm the sand and ignore the problem of opportunity costs which will crop up in any society. Even if the supply of energy is not fixed in socialist society (although according to your society wide planning model, energy will certainly have to be fixed in Plan as will everything else as a definite output and inpout otherwise the Plan will be rendered incoherent). Energy still has to be generated and that it involves opportunity costs in terms of the allocation of resources




Because the social process of production, in socialism, serves no other purpose but producing items for individual (mostly) consumption? It's not a difficult concept. Not to mention how bizarre it is to see an ostensible Marxist, in fact someone who accused me of not being Marxist enough just a paragraph ago, take up the standpoint of methodological individualism, when methodological individualism is blatantly incompatible with Marxism.

Democracy is simply a convenient decision-making mechanism. Anything else will run into problems due to a lack of information.

Huh? What are you talking about? How is my position compatible with "methodological individualism"?. Do you even known what that means? I am simply saying that society consists of individuals and it does not exist apart from individuals in some quasi mystical reified sense. That does not mean society consists only of individuals which would be the methodological individualist position or more accurately ontological individualism. Society is also constituted out of the pattern of social relationships between individuals What I was getting at is that you with your comment "in socialism society itself controls the supply" were seemingly hinting at precisely the kind of reified notion of society I referred to above, as something that exists apart from individuals, but I see now that you recommend the democratic mechanism as a means of decision making which in itself suggests that you dont see socviety as some kind of monolithic entity out there but as something in which individuals have conflicting views and interests that need resolving. In other words that you acknowlege the existence of the individuals who constitute society




The planning centre is a mind? I see. I'm sure you're aware that the ironic, quasi-mystical way in which you portray central planning (the Plan, one single mind etc.) is not an argument against central planning.
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It is not me that is protraying central planning in an ironic quasi mystical fashion but rather the advcoates of such a concept itself of which I confess you are the only I have met to date who - astonishingly -has actually bought into the basic idea lock stock and barelkl. You yourself pointed out there can be only one signle plan for the whole of society so what possible objection can you have to my portraying your view as one who endorses the idea of the Plan being predicated on a single mind (a metaphor admittedly) and a single will? That is precisely what it entails




Except, of course, the point was not that the interaction of various plans would not produce some complex result, I'm sure it would, but that there is no reason to suppose this result would be socially optimal. Evolution, after all, does not produce optimal forms (optimal from our perspective), as evidenced, for example, by the fact that humans are born with oversized squishy heads. Generally, there is no reason to suppose that an unconscious process will produce anything in line with our desires and needs. Yet you're asking us to have faith that it will. It's the old fable of the Invisible Hand of the Market, except, of course, the market has a selection mechanism (differential rates of investment due to varying rates of profit) (and of course, that selection mechanism still doesn't produce optimal results for us), whereas the "self-regulating system of stock control" does not.
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No, you're wrong on that count. A self regulating system of stock control certainly does have a selection mechanism that leads to the optimal allocation of resources in the sense that it is able to identify and respond to the relative scarcity of different factors of prpduction. A central planning system simply cannot do this which is precisely why it is guanteed to lead to a very suboptimal outcome - in fact, not even that, since it stands exactly zero chance of ever being put into practice. Ironically your very desire to consciously control the total pattern of production leads the opposite - the complete loss of control and the very negation of all our desires and needs. This is what you have yet to grasp. Calling the process a completely "conscious process" does not at all mean that it will produce an outcome that we will consciosuly want Far from it. That apart ,a polycentic planning system such as I advocate is not a negation of consciousness as such Conscious planning is a feature of any kind of society you can think of including the most extreme free market capitalism imaginable which would still be full of plans which are conscious by defintion. Its is simply that the interactions between the plans cannot be planned but will develop spontaneously in a direction that depends very much on the kind of society we live in. In capitalism for example it leads to disproportional gropwth between different sectors of the economy which has knock on consequences that lead to a generalised recession. In socialism ,where commodity prpduction ceases to exists a different dynamic will apply one in which "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all"





I have addressed all of these, and to be honest I'm in no mood to repeat myself, particularly since these posts are hilariously long to begin with.
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But you have nt addressed at all the question how external factors such as drought, accidents, earthquakes and hundred one other things could profoundly and indeed prgoressively disrupt the whole structure of input output ratios and so render the Plan competely inoperable . All you have done is protest loudly that buffer stocks will allow the central panners room for manuovre and enable them to avoid having to redraft the plan in its entirety. That is just not good enough as an answer


QUOTE=870;2783550]
If certain materials are scarce, it is a matter of choosing the production process that uses up less of the scarce material for any given consumer product. That is not even at the level of the input-output matrix but at the level of planning the production processes used..[/QUOTE]


The input oututt matrix is amongst other things, a function of the technical ratios employed. If it takes 1 unit of X and 2 units of Y to make 1 unit of A and there are only 10 units of X then you can make at most only 10 units of A . You could make even less of A if you only had 14 units of Y - namely 7 units of A. This is an application of the law of the minimum which is discussed oin the artice I linked to.

You say it is a matter of choosing a production process that uses up less of the scarce material for any given consumer product. But cant you see what the problem is ? You run into a fatal contradiction in fact How would you be able to know which materials are scarce without a self regulating system of stock control. This is where your argument blows itself wide apart. Actually you have unwttingly provided the very point that demolishes your whole perspective utterly which is the idea that the central planning authority will impose buffer stocks on the production units. Now obviously a buffer stock is a reserve of stock over and above the current need for it to which is held to ensure against unforeseen events and what not. Artifically propping up such a stock in the case of a particular resouce that actually is scarce does not allow us to apprehend its relative scarcity. We simply have no means of doing so, we have no indicators of relative scarcity in that case.

But the problem is you have to commit yourself to maintaining buffer strocks across the board in order to give the central planners sufficent leeway to avoid having to redraft the entiure plan in response to change. This is the last line of defence available to you as an advocate of central planner., But you cannot seem to see that in asserting this line of defence you are actually depriving yourself of any possible means by which to identify relative scarecities between different factors of production . Where you need to economise most will be completely hidden from view by virtue of of the centrally imposed insititution of buffer srtoicks.

So what does that mean? It means inevitably in the absence of information about relative scacities which you can only get via self regulating system of stock control you will simply be allocating resurces in the dark . Clearly the odds are heavily in favour of you misallocating resoruces which means the system becomes less and less efficient which means in turn that it becomes less and less productive and in the end will be overwhelmed by real absolute scarcities that will break through the facade of central planning and reduce it to rubble
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Of course socialism requires the "springs of cooperative wealth to flow more abundantly", as Marx would put it, or rather - socialism is a post-scarcity society. That you immediately start talking about diamond-encrusted titanium cars with champagne dispensers is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that you've spent too much time arguing with various Austrian creatures. Anyway, once again, we seem to be talking past each other...

Well, try answering the point for change PLease explain how the "springs of cooperative wealth" are going to flow more abundantly if you lack the means to identify relative scarcity and thus to economise most on what is most scarce. The opposite is going to happen; the "springs of cooperative wealth" will rapidly dry up


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Why would they not be returned? I mean, you're projecting the apathetic idiocy of modern life into the socialist society. Presumably anyone who couldn't be bothered stating their preferences has no cause to complain...

Why would some of the batch of 7 billion questionnaires - each the size of a hefty tome - not be returned? Well I can think of umpteen reasons - not the least of which would be complete disillusionment with the capacity of society wide planning to deliver the goods judging by the dismal results of the last 5 year plan, In any case by then central planning would have long been replaced by polycentric planning as communities throughout the globe take matters into their own hand in the face of centralised incompetence and bureaucratic rigidity


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Again you act as if the supply of various materials, products needed for the production process and so on, is out of the hands of society. That's completely backwards, in all meanings of that term. Once the demand for certain goods is ascertained, one of the major tasks of the planning authorities is to calculate the needed input - which translates into quotas for production units such as mines, nuclear power plants and so on....

But once again you ignoring the whole issue of opportunity costs. Producing more of X to meet the demands for X may mean having to scale back on Y in defiance of the demand for Y. How do you choose . Your approach is akin to waving a magic wand and hoping thereby to banish such discomforting thoughts from the mind

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Except, of course, it is in their hands as they are the ones who ultimately decide which plan is to be adopted - although in their function as members of society, as consumers-producers, not the capitalist construct of "responsible consumers". This is just psychological speculation of the worst sort, and is not backed up by anything. Furthermore, as I already said, in contrast to your claim here, the less time planning cycles take up, the better. Your only counter-argument is "well, it will require work". So what.....

This gets worse and worse - how do these consumer producers - all 7 billion of them -decide which plan to adopt. You are now telling me that you propose to have more than one plan on the table which everyone will get to vote on. Each plan, I remind you will consists of literally millions of inputs and outputs which our consumer producers are expected to mull over and chose between, The surreality of it all is just simply staggering. Having you ever seen an input output matrix . Here's a very very simplifed example contained in this interesting article http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Inc-Int/Input-Output-Analysis.html
Note that the most such matrices can achieve is a representation of perhapos a few hundred highly aggregated sets of data when in fact there are millions of differnet kinds of products - and even more product variations - in the economy. Yet you seriously expect our consumer producers (myslef included) to comprehend something of that magnitude and come to an informed decision?
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How to take into account product variation is a fascinating subject, but it's besides the point now.
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No no no - its not besides the point; it very much is the point. If product variation is not going to determined by the society wide plan (becuase its too comlicated and messy to deal with) then this automatically makes polycentric planning and the application of sub global planning initiatives inevitable. You cant just brush this under the carpet, you know

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Except, of course, it's not a process of infinite regress. You take an input-output matrix, you set the vector corresponding to the projected demand, and solve the matrix equation (or more likely a series of matrix equations) to see what the inputs vector is. I'm baffled by your bafflement at this, to be honest.
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We have been here before. Going back far enough along any production chain and you will discover that it will intersect with any other prpduction chain in respect of some shared common factor or input. Thats is becuase of the interdependent nature of modern production and this is what means that a process of infinite regress is not available to you


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But this is ridiculous. Decentralised systems might only be able to ascertain scarcity based on the effects on stock depletion, but a centralised planning authority has access to quantitative information about actual outputs and inputs into any of the production units. They can "see" scarcity directly..
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Come on - how can theypossibly see scarcity directly. You are just not understanding the issue. You are failing to see that scarcity in this sense is a relative thing, How can the planners see scracity when the very existence of a buffer stock you so vehemeny insist upon prevents them from doing that?You cant have you cake and eat it. You have to chose which is more importnt to your whole model of planning - the ability to perceive relative scarcity or the abiklity to maintain buffers. The absence of one or the other is utterly fatal to your whole model albit for different reasons.

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And, again, whenever someone mentions social change (such as the abolition of the family), you interpret that as the result of coercion. Villages and towns are stupidly wasteful, inefficient and socially problematic ways of storing live humans - therefore it stands to reason that they will be abandoned in socialism......


But why are villages and towns " stupidly wasteful, inefficient and socially problematic ways of storing live humans " You dont say. And dont you think it would be EVEN MORE stupidly wasteful, inefficient and socially problematic to just abandon them given the immense amount of embodied labour they present. What are you going to put in their place? Is all that you see on offer is either giant sprawling megacities on the one hand and the countryside on the other consisting of "cretinous" farmers or should that be "large scale monocultural food prodicers"?



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And, as I said, for the third or so time, these are consumption plans, whereas I was talking about a single production plan. The two are not the same, even if following capitalist logic you want to restrict consumption because the items consumed might be used in production......

But "consumption" plans consume resoruces by defintion, resources which have to be produced and so therefore have implications for your single giant production plan. In any case, though city plans may be collective or social consumption plans, in your single production plan you clearly make allowance for individual consumption plans in the form of target outputs for the millions of consumer products. So what's the big difference between them and social consumtion plans. Both consume resoruces that need to be produced and so both should have a bearing pr impact on the production plan, should they not?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

No, you're not understanding. The hypothetical global planning centre cannot "plan" on your terms without the data flowing inwards from the periphery to the centre, as it were, on such things as the disposition of stocks, projections of local demand etc etc. This information does not just magically materialise out of nowhere within the confines of your global central planning office, does it now? And once again, no, Im not supposing or advocating a system of localised autarky. As Ive several times said production and planning would be organised on a multi-level basis - local , regional and global. Your frankly ridiculous scenario rules out the first two leaving only global planning. There is only one single global centre from which issues only single giant fantasy plan covering the entirety of inputs and outputs that constitute the entire global economy. I used to think that nobody could be so daft as to literally fall for such a preposterous idea and that it only functioned as a kind of "Weberian type" in discourse on planning. Well, I have been proved wrong on that score at any rate as this discussion clearly shows. But then again you are the only I have ever known to hold such an eccentric view; almost everyone else who advocates "central planning" turns out merely to support a greater degree of centralisation which is not the same thing at all as society wide central planning and is altogether more modest in scope

That, I suspect, is because you spend your time arguing with Austrians, market "socialists" that have an overwhelming majority on this site, and other SPGB/WSP members/sympathisers. Anyway, as I said, this discussion has run its course, and this will be my final reply, as I do not think that this:


As for your bizarre coment that "Sterility is the sign of an ordered, mature society free from the destructive idiocy of basing everything on personal ties" well I am not advocating that everything be based on personal ties but nor am I advocating the abandonment of personal ties which is precisely a tendency that Marx identified with encroaching capitalism (see for example his comment in the Manifesto: " The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation)"


As for assuming people are going to have fixed residences, I dont, but neither do I assume a high a degree of mobility either. On balance I think there will be somewaht less spatial mobility in socialism than there is today and that that will be a good thing. It will revive a sense of community lfe decimated by capitalism. High rates of mobiltiy these days are often by capitalist market presusres e.g. the search for emplyment elsewhere or the loss of amenities in local villages

has anything to do with socialism. It's petit-bourgeois, "communionist" (to use Draper's term) utopianism of the worst sort. A reactionary "socialism" that wants to return to the social conditions of petty commodity production, thankfully wiped out by capitalism. You cite Marx on the so-called cash nexus. Well, you forget that you're quoting from a panegyric to the accomplishments of the bourgeoisie. Socialism will not be a step backwards into local cretinism and personalisation of purely formal and economic ties, thankfully, but the liberation of humanity.


No this way off the mark and that is because you have this absurd idea that spontaneous adjustment of a polycentric planning system is not coordinated production. Every conceivalable kind of society and particularly a large scale industrially advanced society of necessity must embrace polycentic planning. Of necessity, unicentric planning - a single society wide plan is simply out of the question. Capitalism too involves polycentric planning. A capitalist supermarket monitors its stock of baked beans. It obseves that this stock has fallen below the re-order level. This automatically triggers an order for fresh stock which is sent to the manufacturers. The manufacturers in turn note that there is a shortage of tinned cans and they then contact the producers of tin cans to ask for more. What we see here is an alignment or meshing of the plans of one entity with those of others. This is what is meant by coordination

This is generally the point when alarms should be going off in your head that you're basing your view of what socialist planing will involve on market mechanisms of capitalist society. Should. But don't seem to be.


I am talking in terms of transport costs chiefly. As a rough rule of thumb the closer the better from the point iof reducing costs. And no Im not talking about costs in a monetary sense but that does not mean "costs" no longer exist. Costs continue to exist as opportunity costs in a socialist society. You simply can't get round that

Yet you never tell us how these costs are to be calculated because, of course, you can't. It might turn out that it costs less fuel to ship bananas from former Ecuador (perhaps it wouldn't be former in your little scheme that you call socialism, as after all, you intend for local identity to remain a strong force in an ostensibly liberated society). Who knows.


This is silly, frankly. How do you deduce from the fact that one unit might have friendly working relations with another one with which it regularly interacts means that the workers at each unit must be regarded as the de facto owners of the respective units?

Because they're allowed - they would be, rather, if any of this made sense - to distribute stock according to their personal whims and connections.


In any case you would surely agree that there will be millions of distribution and centres and production units in socialism (whether these are called "enterprises" is a question of semantics; personally, I think socialism will be a more "enterprising" society than ever capitalism could be) Are you seriously trying to say that workers in production unit 1204 cannot have amicable relations with production unit 836 becuase this will detract from the fact that we are all parts of some "vast production machine"? Cannot the parts interact amicably? What a depressingly grim totalitarian view of socialism you have in which we are seemingly all goping to be turned into little cogs in your "vast production machine". If thats you view of socialism, you can keep it. It sounds too much like capitalism for my liking

It is closer to capitalism than your dreamed-of state of generalised petty commodity production, sure, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Socialism is infinitely closer to capitalism than it is to feudalism, petty commodity production or what Marx terms the Asiatic mode of production.


Seriously I dont think you have even begun to consider the magnitude of what it is you are proposing. You have absolutely no sense of the practicalities involved at all. Central planning is just a holy mantra to be repeatedly uttered as answer to everything much as a good Catholic would say his or her Our Father and Hail Mary every day as good catholics do. Its a meaningless unattainable goal

Perhaps, robbo dearest, you shouldn't mention Catholics, as your opinions are infinitely closer to theirs than mine.


And you have evaded my question - who would decide - and how often - whether the Plan should go back to the drawing board of it was failing to meet the needs of the people as it purported to do . You suggest vaguely that there might be some sort of representative system and presumably if a majority of the global representatives want to scrap this is what would happen and the whole cumbersome process of printing off 7 billion new questionnaires would begin again. Yes?

I imagine most of the paperwork would be done electronically, but broadly speaking yes. Presumably you would ask me the exact composition of the Global Senate or whatever and what voting methods would be used. Sorry, I'm not interested in speculation that tenuous.


No you dont understand what I was saying nor how an input out matrix operates. I agreed that the inputs and outputs for germanium may not be connected to the inputs and outputs for whiskey directly. But the inputs that make the inputs for germanium may well be connected and if you go back far enough along the production chains for both germanium and whiskey you will be bound to encounter some common factor that crops up at some point along both of these chains. That could very well mean that an increase in germanium, say, might entail a small reductiuon in the output of whiskey. The production of whiskey and the production of germanium dont have to be directly linked for this to happen. This is what I mean the interdependent socialised nature of modern prpduction. It seems to me that you want to just stick your head onm the sand and ignore the problem of opportunity costs which will crop up in any society. Even if the supply of energy is not fixed in socialist society (although according to your society wide planning model, energy will certainly have to be fixed in Plan as will everything else as a definite output and inpout otherwise the Plan will be rendered incoherent). Energy still has to be generated and that it involves opportunity costs in terms of the allocation of resources

That would only be the case if minor corrections to germanium production meant simply increasing the production of germanium. What would actually happen, of course, is that the production of germanium would be increased along with things like the amount of energy diverted into germanium smelters (and possibly things like uranium, coal etc.). For other products the production chains are more complex, but they do terminate. The production process isn't a snake eating its own tail; the interdependence of the various branches of production is more complex than that.


Huh? What are you talking about? How is my position compatible with "methodological individualism"?. Do you even known what that means? I am simply saying that society consists of individuals and it does not exist apart from individuals in some quasi mystical reified sense. That does not mean society consists only of individuals which would be the methodological individualist position or more accurately ontological individualism.

It means precisely that, that society has no existence apart from being a collection of individuals - that society has no causal impact of its own apart from petty individual decisions. Although I appreciate you would try to dodge the implications of such a blatantly right-wing individualist position.


No, you're wrong on that count. A self regulating system of stock control certainly does have a selection mechanism that leads to the optimal allocation of resources in the sense that it is able to identify and respond to the relative scarcity of different factors of prpduction. A central planning system simply cannot do this which is precisely why it is guanteed to lead to a very suboptimal outcome - in fact, not even that, since it stands exactly zero chance of ever being put into practice. Ironically your very desire to consciously control the total pattern of production leads the opposite - the complete loss of control and the very negation of all our desires and needs. This is what you have yet to grasp. Calling the process a completely "conscious process" does not at all mean that it will produce an outcome that we will consciosuly want Far from it. That apart ,a polycentic planning system such as I advocate is not a negation of consciousness as such Conscious planning is a feature of any kind of society you can think of including the most extreme free market capitalism imaginable which would still be full of plans which are conscious by defintion. Its is simply that the interactions between the plans cannot be planned but will develop spontaneously in a direction that depends very much on the kind of society we live in. In capitalism for example it leads to disproportional gropwth between different sectors of the economy which has knock on consequences that lead to a generalised recession. In socialism ,where commodity prpduction ceases to exists a different dynamic will apply one in which "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all"

And once again, you provide no reason for us to suppose your interacting plans will result in a socially optimal situation, apart from an extremely orthogenetic misreading of natural selection perhaps. So once again we're supposed to have faith in the Invisible Hand of Self-regulating Stock Control.


But you have nt addressed at all the question how external factors such as drought, accidents, earthquakes and hundred one other things could profoundly and indeed prgoressively disrupt the whole structure of input output ratios and so render the Plan competely inoperable .

Yes, I have. See my posts about factoring in the risk, that is, assuming that production units will not operate at full capacity throughout the period.


The input oututt matrix is amongst other things, a function of the technical ratios employed. If it takes 1 unit of X and 2 units of Y to make 1 unit of A and there are only 10 units of X then you can make at most only 10 units of A . You could make even less of A if you only had 14 units of Y - namely 7 units of A. This is an application of the law of the minimum which is discussed oin the artice I linked to.

Alright? The point was that the input-output matrix is constructed on the basis of definite production processes. Changing the production process changes the IOM, but deciding on the production process is a prior step when it comes to planning (asses demand - decide on the production processes - assess stock, risk factors, etc. - solve the input-output matrix equations - solve the transportation problem).


You say it is a matter of choosing a production process that uses up less of the scarce material for any given consumer product. But cant you see what the problem is ? You run into a fatal contradiction in fact How would you be able to know which materials are scarce without a self regulating system of stock control. This is where your argument blows itself wide apart. Actually you have unwttingly provided the very point that demolishes your whole perspective utterly which is the idea that the central planning authority will impose buffer stocks on the production units. Now obviously a buffer stock is a reserve of stock over and above the current need for it to which is held to ensure against unforeseen events and what not. Artifically propping up such a stock in the case of a particular resouce that actually is scarce does not allow us to apprehend its relative scarcity. We simply have no means of doing so, we have no indicators of relative scarcity in that case.

And again, I can only protest that you seem incapable of thinking in anything but market terms. A central planning authority would "see" the inputs into every production unit, the outputs, and it could easily calculate indicators such as the rate of new stock produced to buffer stock. I think this is obvious to anyone who doesn't base their thinking on capitalist supermarkets.


No no no - its not besides the point; it very much is the point. If product variation is not going to determined by the society wide plan (becuase its too comlicated and messy to deal with) then this automatically makes polycentric planning and the application of sub global planning initiatives inevitable. You cant just brush this under the carpet, you know

Again, this assumes that variation would be handled locally, which would be a disaster. Even in capitalism people don't always shop locally. Perhaps it makes sense if you assume that mobility will be less - that we'll be tied to "our" locales (oh joy).


But why are villages and towns " stupidly wasteful, inefficient and socially problematic ways of storing live humans " You dont say. And dont you think it would be EVEN MORE stupidly wasteful, inefficient and socially problematic to just abandon them given the immense amount of embodied labour they present. What are you going to put in their place? Is all that you see on offer is either giant sprawling megacities on the one hand and the countryside on the other consisting of "cretinous" farmers or should that be "large scale monocultural food prodicers"?

Presumably agriculture, just as any other industry, would move to the cities.


But "consumption" plans consume resoruces by defintion, resources which have to be produced and so therefore have implications for your single giant production plan. In any case, though city plans may be collective or social consumption plans, in your single production plan you clearly make allowance for individual consumption plans in the form of target outputs for the millions of consumer products. So what's the big difference between them and social consumtion plans. Both consume resoruces that need to be produced and so both should have a bearing pr impact on the production plan, should they not?

They provide inputs to the production plan. To talk about opportunity costs at the consumption side is to talk about either a strange quasi-Malthusian situation of extremely limited resources, or to simply take up the logic of the M-C-M' cycle as given.

Anyway, like I said, that was my final response. I think I've written enough here for anyone who wants to think about these things in a bit more depth.

[Ledur]

robbo,

I really like the idea of free access. Basic needs, like housing, food, water, clothes, health, education, communication and transport should be produced this way. And even other things, in a post-scarcity society, could be mass-produced and distributed for free.

However, some "wants" are a bottleneck. I don't think that labour vouchers are a precise - or even possible - way of distribution, but some kind of rationing would be needed.

Some itens require too much labour, machines, energy, long-chain processes or rare resources. Your self-regulating stock system can produce some of these "costly" items from time to time, and a lot of people could want them, resulting in empty stocks.

Do you think of a solution for this problem?

[robbo203]

Anyway, like I said, that was my final response. I think I've written enough here for anyone who wants to think about these things in a bit more depth.


Well, 870, it seems like you have run out of useful thoughts to offer in defence of your proposal for society-wide central planning i.e one single giant plan covering the totality of inputs and outputs in the global economy. Thats a pity because it is very rare indeed to come across anyone who actually supports this proposal in a literal sense. Most advocates of central planning only pay lip service to the idea; in reality, all they support is a greater degree of centralisation which is not at all the same thing.

I hope this discussion has given you some food for thought, nevertheless. Frankly I find it quite astonishing that anyone can go along with the idea of a single society wide plan. I am not just attacking the idea for the sake of it. After all, this thread is about the subject of economic calculation and I am trying to show that only effective demolition of the entire economic calculation argument raised by the Austrian school has to be predicated on a model of a non market socialist economy whose core feature is a self regulating system of stock control. The Austrians have absolutely no way of countering this model of socialism. It is no coincidence that they themselves assume a socialist economy would be one regulated by a single giant plan. You conveniently play into their hands.


The case against society wide planning is pretty much overwhelming and nowhere have you effectively dealt with it. In conclusion, I will just list here some of the main arguments that comprise this case which are closely interconnected:

1) The compexity problem. This should be self evident to everyone. There are millions of different kinds of products in a modern economy especially if you take into account also product variations. Look at just the one category example we discussed - clothing. There are all sorts of clothing items one can think of - from T shirts and sock to hats and shoes. Each of these can be subvdivided according to numerous criteria - size, design or style, colour, texture, raw material etc etc. Now the global society wide plan has to do several things if it is to be effective. Firstly, it has to work out in advance the output targets for every single item in its most detailed form e.g. men's toecapped black shoes size 42. Secondly. it then has to liaise with probably hundreds of thousand of shoe manufactrers across the world to distribute the global workload amongst them - let us 387 million pairs per annum. And if that was not enough, it then has, thirdly, to direct each of these individual manufacturers as to where - that is, which distribution points - they ought to depatch their assigned annual output of men's toecapped black shoes size 42. Of course it has also to repeat the whole procedure for those who provide the materials to make men's toecapped black shoes size 42. Absurd? Well of course it is. But this is what follows literally from trying to implement the idea of society wide planning. To leave anything to local intiative, meaning local planning is anathema to the very idea of a single global plan since it implies other plans - polycentric planning

2) The demand problem. In order to work out the outputs of these millions of differet kinds of products in a moden economy the central planners will have to first establish accurately what is the societal demand is for them. If it did not do that you could end up with huge stockpiles of unwanted goods on the one hand and serious shortages in the case of other goods. That would be massively wasteful. So how does the global planning authority work out the global demand for these millions of products, You have come up wth a number of suggestions inbcluding the idea of questionnaires. None of them are credible. To take the case of the questionnaire, the idea that you could ask people's opinions on what ought to be produced in an economy consisting of millions of products would probably mean despatching to each and everyone of us - 7 billion people nearly - a questionnaire about the size of a microwave or a small fridge. Can you imagine the length of time it would take to process the responses? That is, even assuming you would get any kind of significant response rate. In the absence of that the central planners would overwhelmingly have to rely on sheer quesswork which of course opens up the possiblity of a huge margin for error. You have also talked vaguely about central planners basing their figures on the past rates of stock depletion. Now it is true you could in theory do this since you could presumably access data on what consumers consumed in previous years from each of the numerous distribution points accross the world and collate all this data. However, the problem with this idea is that the target has to be fixed in advance of the production process and this target cannot be altered for the duration of the plan be that 5 10 or 20 years. In the meantime peoples' tastes and consumer habits may change radically. Creating a buffer stock as I will show later is no solution to this problem. In any case what if demand for a particular kind of product were to fall? This would only aggravate the problem of wastage since you would end up with a huge stockpile of of the unwanted product in question. Only a self regulating system of stock control can get round this problem by permitting an immediate adjustment of output to shifting patterns of demand

3) The supply problem. The targets for millions of different kinds of products in the global economy depend on there being an adequate supply of inputs in each case. Each kind of consumer product depends on the availability of a particular bundle of such inputs in proportions set by the technical ratios of production. So, for example, a particuler kind of product - lets call it X - might require a certain amount of steel and rubber or whatever. If for some reason the global output of steel fell below its target this would have knock on consequences for meeting the target for X. Perhaps you could still ensure the target for X was met by changing the technical ratios that determine the configuration of the bundle of inputs needed to produce X such that more rubber might be used and less steel. But that would require modifying the global target for rubber production (and in turn all the inputs needed to produce rubber). But you cant just modify one target, or even set of targets, becuase everything is interconnected in the Plan. That is the nature of modern socialised interdependent production. If you try to alter individual targets then the whole Plan has to be literally altered. But the need to change individuals targets is ALWAYS going to arise all the time. Which means, of course there will never be at any time a usuable plan to guide production units. The Plan will be constantly under revision on the drawing board back in global Planning offce In fact, far from shaping economic realities, the Plan will be constantly adjusting to the latter (as was true of the Soviet Union's GOSPLAN plans, for instance). In other words it will no longer be a plan just a rather poor snapshot of what is happening in the economy. The point is that all this is completely inescapable in the real world of production. For numerous reasons, supply patterns will be interrupted all the time and this will have knock on - and, indeed, incremental or progressively worsening - consequences right along the production chain. Industrial accidents, natural catastrophes and so on can all wreak havoc with the carefully worked out calculations embodied in the giant input output matrix. That is why you need a sufficiently flexible system that is able to respond , and adapt immediately to, such real world changes in the pattern of supply

4) The allocation problem . The last line of defence you fall back on is that the central planning authority will be able to accomodate changes in the pattern of supply and demand simply by dictating that for every kind of good in question there should be some form of buffer or surplus stock. Well, to begin with, this as noted can actually make problems worse should demand for a particular product fall. You would end up with much more in the way of unwanted goods in this case which would be wasteful. Also, society wide planning rules out technological innovation in the course of the Plan's implentation since what technological innovations does its to alter the particular configuration of the bundle of inputs that are required to produce a particular good and that would require changing the production targets for each of those inputs. But even if technological innovation were possible in principle, outdated products e.g. cellphones would still have to be produced in accordance with the Plan even though consumers might prefer to get their hands on technically superior versions of the same - that is to say they would become outdated during the course of the Plan implementation but still you would have to stick with them becuase that was dictated by the Plan. More to the point, the level of buffer stocks proposed to allows production units and distribution centres some leeway in dealing with real world fluctuations in demand and supply , would itself be arbitarily fixed by diktat and this would apply right accross the board for every conceivable kind of consumer and proucer good in the global economy. In other words we would have absolutely no idea of the relative scarcity of each of these millions of different kinds of goods since this would in theory be completely hidden by the universality of buffer stocks. So we couldnt discriminate between inputs in terms of their relative scarcity. Which means we would have no way of deciding what particular combination of inputs ought to be used to produce a given output so as to leave as much over as possible for the production of other goods. We would have no way of ensuring that we use less of those inputs which are scarce - i.e. economising on them - and more of those inputs that are abundant since, in theory (on paper), every input would be available to the producers in abundance (which is what a buffer stock would signify) so they could not really discriminate between one input which was scarce in real terms and another which is not. Inevitably as a result of that there will be a tendency to make greater use of relatively scarce inputs than ought to be sensibly the case, leading to increasingly inefficient allocation. Less efficient allocation increases the opportunity costs of production which ultimately leads to a spiralling decline in output. So in fact the very attempt to impose buffer stocks by diktat will result in a situation where those buffer stocks will rapidly erode away as output falls . Generalised scarcity will increasingly assert itself and, with that, the prospect of a return to commodity production

5) The bureaucratic problem. Given a certain supply of, labour the more of this labour that is tied in planning, supervision and so on, the less labour is there available for producing the things we need. The transaction costs of society wide planning in its literal sense would be absolutely staggering. The process of assessing and analysing global demand (think of those bulky questionnaires!), of calculating input requirements for millions of products, of liaising with millions of production units and distributing the workload among them, of monotoring the plan implementation and making adjustments where these were required and so on and so forth, would amount to a a collossal drain on resources to the detriment of production itself. Quite simply the system would become grossly top heavy and to an extent even more than is the case with contemporary capitalism

6) The societal problem. A socialist system of society is characterised by the fact that goods and services are provided on a free access basis - there would be no quid pro quo exchange relation mediating between the consumer and the objects of comsumption - while the labour to produce these things would necessarilu be provided on a purely voluntary basis. That is what "from each according to ability to each according to need" literally means. The problem is that you cannot have such a system in place alongside society wide central planning. For the latter to function effectively on its own terms requires that the output targets of each of the million upon million of prduction units should be religiously adhered to. How are you going to ensure that? You cannot leave this to chance or to the flexible adjustment among production units themselves taking up the slack - not if you want the Plan to work. So in order to ensure that the Plan works on its own terms you have to insist that each prpduction unit without fail produces what the Plan requires of it. The question is how do enforce that in a socialist society? The answer is that you cannot. The natural inclination of a socialist society would be towards flexible adaptation at every level and not just locally which completely rules out central planning. It is the same on the consumption of demand side of things. The rigid specification of fixed targets for consumer goods boils down to a system of centralised rationing , not free access. For the system to work on its own terms, consumers will not be allowed to change their tastes and their preferences since that would upset the detailed calculations behind the plan. In fact what would soon open up, and pretty inevitably, is clear chasm between the interests and outlook of the technocratic elite - an embryonic ruling class in waiting - operating the global planning centre and the rest of the population along with the possiblity of systemic corrpution and widespead cynicism. Perforce the power of decisionmaking will concentrate in the hands of the technocratic elite since there is no way you can democratically decide on the details of sucg a vast global plan. This does not matter in the case of a decentralised or polycentric model of socialism where you have an automatic mechanism at work in the form of a self regulating system of stock control, where the pattern of output is the emrgent product of millions of individual decisions made on a daily basis rather than something that is all planned in advance from a gods eye point of view. You cannot meaningfully plan the total pattern of prpoduction at the outset - it is just far too vast for that to be remotely conceviable - rather that total pattern is, of should be the product of millions of plans spontaneously adjusting towards each other. This is the ONLY way any of us as individuals or as communities can have some kind of democratic input into what goes on in the world around us and that requires a social arrangement that facilitates initartive and local planning rather than surrender these things to what would be a de facto elite which, even if only by default rather design, would have to make the decisions for us


Those then are the main arguments against your proposal for society wide planning. You have not effectively responded to them at all. Instead you have contented yourself with barking up completely the wrong tree. I refer to your comments such as this one

"This is generally the point when alarms should be going off in your head that you're basing your view of what socialist planing will involve on market mechanisms of capitalist society. Should. But don't seem to be."

Actually, no - youve got it all wrong. Let me correct this total misreading of the situation. A self regulating system of stock control is NOT a market mechanism. Do you understand what a market mechanism is? Central to the idea of market mechanism is the quid pro quo exchange of commodities. Smith's invisible hand of the market is an elucidation of that market mechanism but in no way does this correspnd to a self regulating system of stock conmtrol. What you are doing here is completely confusing FORM and SUBSTANCE. In capitalism, the form in which demand expresses itself is effective or market demand. In socialism, that form will be direct or unmediated demand arising from individuals' own perception of what they need. Nevertheless, the way in which demand for goods (however this is expressed) and the supply of goods has to be fundamentally the same in any conceivable kind of society. That is - goods are taken by individuals for their private appropriation and consum,ptiuon, the depletion of stock from the store is somehow monitored and when stock levels fall below a certain level making it difficult to meet the demands of the consumers. fresh stock is ordered from the suppliers (who in turn may order more inputs from others further back along the production line.

That is all that is meant by a "self regulating system of stock control". It exists in capitalism and operates along side a system of market based accounting and it will exist in socialism that will dispense with the latter system of market based accountiing. I can see why you would want to confuse a system, of self regulating stock control with a "market mechanism". It is the last ideolgical bolt hole available you from which you hope somehow to salvage your totally diecredited and discreditable idea of society wide central planning. But this claim of yours wont wash and anyone with the slightest familiarity with the subject will see it for what it is - a desparate attempt to ward off the devastating criticisms that sink your whole argument by resorting to the familiar old tactic of guilt by association. Because capitalism depends on a self regulating system of stock (as would socialism or any other kind of society) therefore what I am advocating is somehow pro capitalist. You might just as well argue that since capitalism has given rise to factory production, the existence of factories in socialism will prove that it is not socialism at all but still capitalism

[robbo203]

robbo,

I really like the idea of free access. Basic needs, like housing, food, water, clothes, health, education, communication and transport should be produced this way. And even other things, in a post-scarcity society, could be mass-produced and distributed for free.

However, some "wants" are a bottleneck. I don't think that labour vouchers are a precise - or even possible - way of distribution, but some kind of rationing would be needed.

Some itens require too much labour, machines, energy, long-chain processes or rare resources. Your self-regulating stock system can produce some of these "costly" items from time to time, and a lot of people could want them, resulting in empty stocks.

Do you think of a solution for this problem?

This problem was sort of touched in the article

http://www.des4rev.org.uk/cv3cox.htm

I think it is best to visualise a (largely) self regulating system of stock control in terms of a set of constraints that would selectively influence the pattern of output. One of these constraints would be what I dub some kind of broad based hierarchy of production goals which would work to skew allocation, in cases where inputs are scarce, away from low priority end uses (e.g. luxury goods) to high priority end uses (e.g. housing, food and other basic needs). This would not rule out the production of luxury goods but rather induce it to embark on technological substitution (making use of more abundant substitutes) which is a sensible approach

I dont think of a hierachy of production goals as some kind of rigidly fixed, let alone detailed, schema as some of my critics have unreasonably suggested. It is more a rough rule of thumb based on intuition, more than anything, and informed by the cultural environment and values of a socialist society. Having said that, specific planned community based projects such as a new school or hospital might well indeed command priority attention in the allocation of resources precisely becuase of the fact that they are explicity community based and carry the weight of community opinion

So it is not necccesary that the end uses of inputs should be somehow ranked along some kind of ordinal scale (which would be absurd anyway) but that, simply speaking , the suppliers of inputs should enabled to discriminate between low and high value end uses in determining the allocation of scrace inputs between these different end uses (or rather the demands of the different production units associuated with these different end uses) . Of course there is a degree of vagueness in the proposal which is perhaps unavoidable but the underlying principle is neverthless a sound one: high priority end uses should be favoured over low priority end uses where an input is not is insufficient to meet all the demands placed on it as the time. So long as the system is oriented roughly in the general direction of such an outcome that is what matter; not that its resoruce allocation decision shpould be 100% perfect every time

This will of course stimulate producers to produce more of the scarce input in question but in the meantime those end uses that will suffer most as a result of this insufficiency in supply will tend to be low priority end uses., like luxury goods The fact that they are in short supply in relation to demand might very well be grounds for rationing them and I have advocated a form of rationing (operating along side free acess) chiefly based on the the assessed quality of housing stock which I have called the compensation model of rationing. That is to say. individuals compelled for the time being to live in relatively poorer quality housing stock as assessed by the community should have priority access to rationed goods. Rationed goods in other words , would coexist along side free access goods where the latter would tend to be precisely the kind of basic goods you refer to .

Ive fleshed out this idea in greater detail elsewhere. Insofar as rationing is required in a socialist society albeit in a restricted form I think this compensation model of rationing is far superior to the so called universal labour vouchers scheme which, to me, is frankly unworkable and more trouble than its worth

[Ledur]

The fact that they are in short supply in relation to demand might very well be grounds for rationing them and I have advocated a form of rationing (operating along side free acess) chiefly based on the the assessed quality of housing stock which I have called the compensation model of rationing. That is to say. individuals compelled for the time being to live in relatively poorer quality housing stock as assessed by the community should have priority access to rationed goods. Rationed goods in other words , would coexist along side free access goods where the latter would tend to be precisely the kind of basic goods you refer to .

I was thinking of another idea of rationing. How about your buffer (stock system) reaching household level?

For example, if the need/want of someone is 5 pairs of shoes (supposing shoes aren't free access for convenience), then when this person gets 5 pairs, his/her buffer is full. This person can't get a 6th pair until one of them is worn out. If it's the case, the person shall use a recycling protocol or dispose the shoes correctly, granting access to a new pair.

I saw once a "smart refrigerator", connected to the Internet. It can automatically order a product if it needs to be replenished. That could be very useful, don't you think? If household "buffers" are known, production could be even more rational, triggering signals in real time.

[ckaihatsu]

This problem was sort of touched in the article

http://www.des4rev.org.uk/cv3cox.htm

I think it is best to visualise a (largely) self regulating system of stock control in terms of a set of constraints that would selectively influence the pattern of output.


Overall I appreciate this 'mechanism' -- if you will -- as part of a larger comprehensive approach to the ongoing question of how to collectively determine use values in a post-capitalist society.





One of these constraints would be what I dub some kind of broad based hierarchy of production goals which would work to skew allocation, in cases where inputs are scarce, away from low priority end uses (e.g. luxury goods) to high priority end uses (e.g. housing, food and other basic needs).


This ethos is appropriate and understandable, but it suffers from what I call the 'rock star' problematic -- what if the general political collectivist ethos only goes so far -- ? It might very well go as far as bringing humaneness to humanity, and fulfill the basics of housing, food, and so on, to 100% of the world's population, but then what happens at *that* point -- ?

Civilization is more complex than just physical sustenance, and there would be the question, then as now, about who gets to partake from currently existing 'luxury goods' (and/or 'luxury services'), *and* who gets to be wantonly individualistic -- the self-declared 'rock stars', and who doesn't.

Certainly the society wouldn't *encourage* decadence if other, more-humane needs were pressing, but the generic issue of 'who gets the good stuff' will never disappear, due to inherently-material differences in the quality of goods and services. If it turned out that those with refined demands happened to be *perfectly* satisfied by available material quantities without too much complication, then great -- the glove fits the hand and everything works out just right. I, obviously, though, don't think society would be so lucky to have such optimal conditions on a strictly emergent basis, and so the issue of social planning, as for the fulfillment of people's real demands, comes to the fore again, not to mention that people's tastes do change (upward) -- and should.





This would not rule out the production of luxury goods but rather induce it to embark on technological substitution (making use of more abundant substitutes) which is a sensible approach


I'll have to 'yes and no' this one -- yes, automation should be favored and actively developed for as much as possible, but it's simply *impossible* for many 'luxury' / specialty goods, simply due to their uniqueness. There's also the category of 'events', which are finite in time and space, and thus are not 'automate-able'.





I dont think of a hierachy of production goals as some kind of rigidly fixed, let alone detailed, schema as some of my critics have unreasonably suggested. It is more a rough rule of thumb based on intuition, more than anything, and informed by the cultural environment and values of a socialist society. Having said that, specific planned community based projects such as a new school or hospital might well indeed command priority attention in the allocation of resources precisely becuase of the fact that they are explicity community based and carry the weight of community opinion




So it is not necccesary that the end uses of inputs should be somehow ranked along some kind of ordinal scale (which would be absurd anyway)


Coincidentally or otherwise I happen to advocate a system that I developed which *uses* an ordinal-type ranking scale, to formalize people's real economic (material) and political demands. There's nothing "absurd" about asking people to prioritize *their own* demands, for the sake of a mass-political / societal prioritization, or grand 'to-do' list.

We can't and shouldn't expect people to all sign-off on the same 'hierarchy of production goals', for the very same reasons you've been giving here regarding a blueprint-type, fixed grand production plan -- either would be too inflexible and constraining, not to mention being logistically infeasible.





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




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




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




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174





but that, simply speaking , the suppliers of inputs should enabled to discriminate between low and high value end uses in determining the allocation of scrace inputs between these different end uses (or rather the demands of the different production units associuated with these different end uses) .


This is apples-and-oranges, unfortunately, since you're referencing both 'scarce inputs' (material supplies) *and* 'the demands of [...] different production units'.

Yes, production units *should* be aware of actual material supplies, and, yes, suppliers of inputs should be mindful of relative potential use values for various potential recipients, but, *no*, there not an automatic correlation between 'demands' and '(scarce) material supplies'. In the case of actual scarcity *everyone's* demands would be outstripping actual material supplies, *by definition*.

So many socialist-minded proposals are well-meaning in their *administrative* approaches, but can't resolve the inevitable discrepancy between self-determining, willful demand, and the collective administration of limited material quantities in relation to that mass demand.

[robbo203]

Overall I appreciate this 'mechanism' -- if you will -- as part of a larger comprehensive approach to the ongoing question of how to collectively determine use values in a post-capitalist society.



Yes. A self regulating system of stock control sits at the very heart of a socialist production system but as Ive constantly said, does not preclude "conscious planning" at different levels - local , regional and even global. These things complement each other




This ethos is appropriate and understandable, but it suffers from what I call the 'rock star' problematic -- what if the general political collectivist ethos only goes so far -- ? It might very well go as far as bringing humaneness to humanity, and fulfill the basics of housing, food, and so on, to 100% of the world's population, but then what happens at *that* point -- ?

Civilization is more complex than just physical sustenance, and there would be the question, then as now, about who gets to partake from currently existing 'luxury goods' (and/or 'luxury services'), *and* who gets to be wantonly individualistic -- the self-declared 'rock stars', and who doesn't.

Certainly the society wouldn't *encourage* decadence if other, more-humane needs were pressing, but the generic issue of 'who gets the good stuff' will never disappear, due to inherently-material differences in the quality of goods and services. If it turned out that those with refined demands happened to be *perfectly* satisfied by available material quantities without too much complication, then great -- the glove fits the hand and everything works out just right. I, obviously, though, don't think society would be so lucky to have such optimal conditions on a strictly emergent basis, and so the issue of social planning, as for the fulfillment of people's real demands, comes to the fore again, not to mention that people's tastes do change (upward) -- and should.


You are probably right but, then again, this is not a prescription for a perfect society since no such thing is available to us. Neverthless I think it is reasonable to assume that the link betweeen social status and material consumption such as is the case today, will be broken in a free access communist society. Rock stars wont be performing on stage in the expectation of getting megabucks and a luxurious lifestyle to boot. They will be doing it for the intrinsic pleasure of doing it. The criterion of status in free access communism will focus on what you give to society not what you take out of it since it would be rather pointless flaunting wealth in the expectation of boosting your status when everyone else has free access to society's wealth too.




I'll have to 'yes and no' this one -- yes, automation should be favored and actively developed for as much as possible, but it's simply *impossible* for many 'luxury' / specialty goods, simply due to their uniqueness. There's also the category of 'events', which are finite in time and space, and thus are not 'automate-able'.



Sure, but the general point still holds - luxury goods will tend to be lower down in the list of priorities while the allocation of scarce resouces will tend to
be skewed in favour of higher priority goods. Thus the production of luxury goods will have to work around this constraint to an extent





Coincidentally or otherwise I happen to advocate a system that I developed which *uses* an ordinal-type ranking scale, to formalize people's real economic (material) and political demands. There's nothing "absurd" about asking people to prioritize *their own* demands, for the sake of a mass-political / societal prioritization, or grand 'to-do' list.

We can't and shouldn't expect people to all sign-off on the same 'hierarchy of production goals', for the very same reasons you've been giving here regarding a blueprint-type, fixed grand production plan -- either would be too inflexible and constraining, not to mention being logistically infeasible.


No I think you might be misunderstanding the point. What I am saying is "absurd" is the notion that you can devise some kind of rigid and extensive ordinal scale representing in detail how society evaluates the myriad end uses of production and where it places each of these within this formalised hierarchy of production goals. Quite apart from anything else the very business of deciding whether one end use (e.g. road construction) should be placed higher or lower than another (e.g. hospital construction) would be ridiculously complicated and pointless. Who gets to vote on the matter - the whole world, the local community, the region? And how much more desirable or valuable are hospitals than roads or vice versa anyway which would presumably be reflected in the allocation of resources?

Frankly you just dont wanna go down this road. I would far prefer suppliers of inputs to just use their own judgement/intuition in deciding which of several
competing claims for the input in question should receive priority and to what extent. Of course, it is a somewhat messy way of proceeding but it is headed in the right direction and that is the point. Production units producing these inputs will be run by people like you and I. We will be part of the community, and consumers too, and our sense of values will be broadly similar to those of others. Free access communism in fact undermines the possiblity of special interests being brought to bear which might distort or conflict
with the broad sense of priorities held by society as a whole (of which we are all a part). In short there would be nothing to be gained by deliberately flouting the wishes of others around us.



This is apples-and-oranges, unfortunately, since you're referencing both 'scarce inputs' (material supplies) *and* 'the demands of [...] different production units'.

Yes, production units *should* be aware of actual material supplies, and, yes, suppliers of inputs should be mindful of relative potential use values for various potential recipients, but, *no*, there not an automatic correlation between 'demands' and '(scarce) material supplies'. In the case of actual scarcity *everyone's* demands would be outstripping actual material supplies, *by definition*.

So many socialist-minded proposals are well-meaning in their *administrative* approaches, but can't resolve the inevitable discrepancy between self-determining, willful demand, and the collective administration of limited material quantities in relation to that mass demand.

I am not quite sure what you are saying here. In my view a distinction ought to be made between individual demands and social demands. The former will be essentially mediated and met via the self regulating system of stock control and won't in that sense be "collectively adminstered" (The exception to this might be in the case of a category of goods that are rationed where collective administration is involved in the process of rationing. But this obviously would not apply to free access goods). Social demands, like the demand for roads or hospitals, on the other hand do clearly involve an element of conscious planning and so will be mediated by a process of democratic decision making in the first place (unlike say your decision as an individual consumer to opt for a bag of apples rather than a bag of oranges when you vist the distribution store). The fact that democratic decision making was involved in the formulation of social demands will, I suggest, give them greater weight in the evaluation of end uses when it comes to allocation of scarce inputs

[robbo203]

I was thinking of another idea of rationing. How about your buffer (stock system) reaching household level?

For example, if the need/want of someone is 5 pairs of shoes (supposing shoes aren't free access for convenience), then when this person gets 5 pairs, his/her buffer is full. This person can't get a 6th pair until one of them is worn out. If it's the case, the person shall use a recycling protocol or dispose the shoes correctly, granting access to a new pair.

I saw once a "smart refrigerator", connected to the Internet. It can automatically order a product if it needs to be replenished. That could be very useful, don't you think? If household "buffers" are known, production could be even more rational, triggering signals in real time.


Hmmm Im not too sure about this one. Whatever system you put in place needs to be as simple and straightforward to operate as you can possibly make it. Building in additional features like the requirement that individuals cannot get a 6th pair of shoes unless one of the other 5 has worn out introduces additional difficulties - like how "worn out" does a shoe need to be before it can be replaced and who is to assess the extent to which it is worn out etc etc

I still think the assessed quality of housing stock, which is the basis of the compensation model of rationing I advocate, is the most useful criterion around which to construct a rationing system. It is not something that we dont already do. In the UK for example houses have been banded by local authorities into several bands for the purpose of local taxes. In communism there wont be taxes anymore but you will still need to assess your housing stock anyway with a view to upgrading stock. Plus , houses are such a key element in the quality of life yet many people for quite a while in communism will still be compelled to live in relatively poorer or substandard housing units. You cannot just wave a magic wand and expect everyone to be housed instantly in a wonderful house with grounds. It takes time.

Hence the idea of "compensating" those living in poorer quality houses by giving them priority access to scarcer luxury goods - precisely the kind of goods that are most likely to be rationed given the way the allocation of scarce inputs is likely to happen in communism.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, 870, it seems like you have run out of useful thoughts to offer in defence of your proposal for society-wide central planning i.e one single giant plan covering the totality of inputs and outputs in the global economy. Thats a pity because it is very rare indeed to come across anyone who actually supports this proposal in a literal sense. Most advocates of central planning only pay lip service to the idea; in reality, all they support is a greater degree of centralisation which is not at all the same thing.

It's not that I have "run out of useful thoughts", but that we're talking past each other. Both of us want something we call "socialism" but the similarities, it seems to me, end there. You assume that in this "socialism" of yours, resources will be scarce, families will continue to exist (which is relevant to your proposals about housing, "household stock" and so on), mobility will be limited, various groups of workers will run "their" production units as autonomous enterprises, there will be a rediscovery of "community values" and so on. Well, to be honest, if that's socialism, you can keep it. As for me, I've had enough "community values" to last me a lifetime, and if more people "rediscover community values", chances are it's going to be a short life to boot. My distaste for what you propose aside, we simply aren't talking about the same thing. I don't assume scarcity. I don't think socialism is compatible with autonomous production units. And so on - in effect, we are talking about two entirely different economic arrangements. And you can't talk about "central planning" in abstract.

Nonetheless, as smashing your face against a metaphoric brick wall is a time-honoured RevLeft tradition, I will respond to some of your claims.


I hope this discussion has given you some food for thought, nevertheless. Frankly I find it quite astonishing that anyone can go along with the idea of a single society wide plan. I am not just attacking the idea for the sake of it. After all, this thread is about the subject of economic calculation and I am trying to show that only effective demolition of the entire economic calculation argument raised by the Austrian school has to be predicated on a model of a non market socialist economy whose core feature is a self regulating system of stock control. The Austrians have absolutely no way of countering this model of socialism. It is no coincidence that they themselves assume a socialist economy would be one regulated by a single giant plan. You conveniently play into their hands.

As I said, I am not surprised that you haven't run into people who take central planning seriously, as you seem to keep fairly, well, peculiar company. As for me, I'm not interested in winning an argument against Austrians, as the Austrians are little more than Internet trolls, not taken seriously even in bourgeois economic departments, and for me to "win" an argument against them I would have to accept so much of their assumptions that I would stop arguing for socialism.


The case against society wide planning is pretty much overwhelming and nowhere have you effectively dealt with it. In conclusion, I will just list here some of the main arguments that comprise this case which are closely interconnected:

1) The compexity problem. This should be self evident to everyone. There are millions of different kinds of products in a modern economy especially if you take into account also product variations. Look at just the one category example we discussed - clothing. There are all sorts of clothing items one can think of - from T shirts and sock to hats and shoes. Each of these can be subvdivided according to numerous criteria - size, design or style, colour, texture, raw material etc etc. Now the global society wide plan has to do several things if it is to be effective. Firstly, it has to work out in advance the output targets for every single item in its most detailed form e.g. men's toecapped black shoes size 42. Secondly. it then has to liaise with probably hundreds of thousand of shoe manufactrers across the world to distribute the global workload amongst them - let us 387 million pairs per annum. And if that was not enough, it then has, thirdly, to direct each of these individual manufacturers as to where - that is, which distribution points - they ought to depatch their assigned annual output of men's toecapped black shoes size 42. Of course it has also to repeat the whole procedure for those who provide the materials to make men's toecapped black shoes size 42. Absurd? Well of course it is. But this is what follows literally from trying to implement the idea of society wide planning. To leave anything to local intiative, meaning local planning is anathema to the very idea of a single global plan since it implies other plans - polycentric planning

This is a blatant appeal to incredulity. In fact many branches already work with models that contain millions of interconnected elements - whether nodes in a simulation network, elements of a matrix or otherwise. And, of course, for every such system, you could find people making the same argument you are making - the system is too complex, there are too many variables and so on.

The question of how "coarse-grained" the central planing should be is a fascinating one - but the implication that any "fine-graining" will be done on a local level (and not as an adjustment within the parameters of the plan, done on a global level) depends crucially on your assumption that mobility will be limited. Which is nonsensical.

To illustrate what I am talking about, let us suppose that go-go boots are produced in three models, A, B, and J. The projected aggregate demand for go-go boots of all types is D. Based on that, the factories that produce the boots are allocated enough material to produce D units of type A or type B or type C. The actual composition will vary - at first the planning authorities might assume that the composition will be similar to that from the previous planning period - a units of type A, b of B etc., with a+b+j=D. Now, it might turn out that, monitoring the demand for the various kinds of go-go boots, type J has fallen out of favour, and the demand has fallen to j'=j/10. Now, it is actually trivial to signal the factories to produce the boots in the new ratios. Transportation to the various distribution centres would not be impacted - instead of a shipment containing a_s units of type A etc. it would contain a'_s units of type A etc.


2) The demand problem. In order to work out the outputs of these millions of differet kinds of products in a moden economy the central planners will have to first establish accurately what is the societal demand is for them. If it did not do that you could end up with huge stockpiles of unwanted goods on the one hand and serious shortages in the case of other goods. That would be massively wasteful. So how does the global planning authority work out the global demand for these millions of products, You have come up wth a number of suggestions inbcluding the idea of questionnaires. None of them are credible. To take the case of the questionnaire, the idea that you could ask people's opinions on what ought to be produced in an economy consisting of millions of products would probably mean despatching to each and everyone of us - 7 billion people nearly - a questionnaire about the size of a microwave or a small fridge. Can you imagine the length of time it would take to process the responses? That is, even assuming you would get any kind of significant response rate. In the absence of that the central planners would overwhelmingly have to rely on sheer quesswork which of course opens up the possiblity of a huge margin for error.

The questionnaires were explicitly only about consumer goods. I don't know how many osmium-iridium spinnerets are necessary to produce one pair of nylon stockings, and I don't think I ought to. We can leave that sector to the planners, unless some of us want these spinnerets for their own private nefarious purposes. The chief input into the model is demand for consumer goods - that having been fixed, the planning authorities can use the information contained in the input-output matrix to see how many industrial goods are necessary to produce the required consumer goods, and ultimately where labour needs to be allocated.


You have also talked vaguely about central planners basing their figures on the past rates of stock depletion. Now it is true you could in theory do this since you could presumably access data on what consumers consumed in previous years from each of the numerous distribution points accross the world and collate all this data. However, the problem with this idea is that the target has to be fixed in advance of the production process and this target cannot be altered for the duration of the plan be that 5 10 or 20 years. In the meantime peoples' tastes and consumer habits may change radically. Creating a buffer stock as I will show later is no solution to this problem. In any case what if demand for a particular kind of product were to fall? This would only aggravate the problem of wastage since you would end up with a huge stockpile of of the unwanted product in question. Only a self regulating system of stock control can get round this problem by permitting an immediate adjustment of output to shifting patterns of demand

Except, as I keep pointing out, there is nothing sacred about the five years from the famous Five Year Plan (the plan, not the regrettably banned user). In fact it would make sense to keep the planning period as short as possible precisely because of things like this - the longer you rely on an extrapolation, the more it diverges from reality. That is a general fact that applies to all complex systems - it's most notable when it comes to weather prognoses.

Your chief objection to this is that it involves administrative work. Who would have thought? The problem, of course, is that to you administrative work equals bureaucracy, on which more below.


3) The supply problem. The targets for millions of different kinds of products in the global economy depend on there being an adequate supply of inputs in each case. Each kind of consumer product depends on the availability of a particular bundle of such inputs in proportions set by the technical ratios of production. So, for example, a particuler kind of product - lets call it X - might require a certain amount of steel and rubber or whatever. If for some reason the global output of steel fell below its target this would have knock on consequences for meeting the target for X. Perhaps you could still ensure the target for X was met by changing the technical ratios that determine the configuration of the bundle of inputs needed to produce X such that more rubber might be used and less steel. But that would require modifying the global target for rubber production (and in turn all the inputs needed to produce rubber). But you cant just modify one target, or even set of targets, becuase everything is interconnected in the Plan. That is the nature of modern socialised interdependent production. If you try to alter individual targets then the whole Plan has to be literally altered. But the need to change individuals targets is ALWAYS going to arise all the time. Which means, of course there will never be at any time a usuable plan to guide production units. The Plan will be constantly under revision on the drawing board back in global Planning offce In fact, far from shaping economic realities, the Plan will be constantly adjusting to the latter (as was true of the Soviet Union's GOSPLAN plans, for instance). In other words it will no longer be a plan just a rather poor snapshot of what is happening in the economy. The point is that all this is completely inescapable in the real world of production. For numerous reasons, supply patterns will be interrupted all the time and this will have knock on - and, indeed, incremental or progressively worsening - consequences right along the production chain. Industrial accidents, natural catastrophes and so on can all wreak havoc with the carefully worked out calculations embodied in the giant input output matrix. That is why you need a sufficiently flexible system that is able to respond , and adapt immediately to, such real world changes in the pattern of supply

But, as I already pointed out, you haven't given us a reason to suppose the supply patterns would be interrupted. Any sane planning authority will factor in the risk of work stoppages - it would take genuine cretinism to assume every production unit will work at full efficiency forever. What might lead to the interruption of supply patterns are catastrophic accidents, but these do not happen constantly.

Now, let us assume the supply pattern has been disrupted. Then, in most situations, only a portion of the full input-output matrix equation would need to be solved. You keep talking about how "everything is interconnected", but input-output matrices cut off long-term correlations.


4) The allocation problem . The last line of defence you fall back on is that the central planning authority will be able to accomodate changes in the pattern of supply and demand simply by dictating that for every kind of good in question there should be some form of buffer or surplus stock. Well, to begin with, this as noted can actually make problems worse should demand for a particular product fall. You would end up with much more in the way of unwanted goods in this case which would be wasteful. Also, society wide planning rules out technological innovation in the course of the Plan's implentation since what technological innovations does its to alter the particular configuration of the bundle of inputs that are required to produce a particular good and that would require changing the production targets for each of those inputs. But even if technological innovation were possible in principle, outdated products e.g. cellphones would still have to be produced in accordance with the Plan even though consumers might prefer to get their hands on technically superior versions of the same - that is to say they would become outdated during the course of the Plan implementation but still you would have to stick with them becuase that was dictated by the Plan. More to the point, the level of buffer stocks proposed to allows production units and distribution centres some leeway in dealing with real world fluctuations in demand and supply , would itself be arbitarily fixed by diktat and this would apply right accross the board for every conceivable kind of consumer and proucer good in the global economy. In other words we would have absolutely no idea of the relative scarcity of each of these millions of different kinds of goods since this would in theory be completely hidden by the universality of buffer stocks. So we couldnt discriminate between inputs in terms of their relative scarcity. Which means we would have no way of deciding what particular combination of inputs ought to be used to produce a given output so as to leave as much over as possible for the production of other goods. We would have no way of ensuring that we use less of those inputs which are scarce - i.e. economising on them - and more of those inputs that are abundant since, in theory (on paper), every input would be available to the producers in abundance (which is what a buffer stock would signify) so they could not really discriminate between one input which was scarce in real terms and another which is not. Inevitably as a result of that there will be a tendency to make greater use of relatively scarce inputs than ought to be sensibly the case, leading to increasingly inefficient allocation. Less efficient allocation increases the opportunity costs of production which ultimately leads to a spiralling decline in output. So in fact the very attempt to impose buffer stocks by diktat will result in a situation where those buffer stocks will rapidly erode away as output falls . Generalised scarcity will increasingly assert itself and, with that, the prospect of a return to commodity production

This is, I think, by far the least coherent of your objections, as you've completely assimilated the market logic of the Austrians you so love to debate. Again, in a planned economy there is no need to guess scarcity on the basis of stock shortages, it is possible to directly see what is being produced, what the demand is and so on. As for waste, who cares. To the Austrians that represents an "opportunity cost" as it could have been used to drive the M-C-M' cycle, but what is important to us is that the consumer demand is fulfilled.


5) The bureaucratic problem. Given a certain supply of, labour the more of this labour that is tied in planning, supervision and so on, the less labour is there available for producing the things we need. The transaction costs of society wide planning in its literal sense would be absolutely staggering. The process of assessing and analysing global demand (think of those bulky questionnaires!), of calculating input requirements for millions of products, of liaising with millions of production units and distributing the workload among them, of monotoring the plan implementation and making adjustments where these were required and so on and so forth, would amount to a a collossal drain on resources to the detriment of production itself. Quite simply the system would become grossly top heavy and to an extent even more than is the case with contemporary capitalism

Because, of course, there is no administrative work to be done in capitalism, the various company administrations apparently don't exist. Of course, these mostly fulfill pointless and parasitic functions, whereas the administration of the socialist society would fulfill a socially-useful one (and, of course, it would not be a "bureaucracy" in the sense of a separate body).


6) The societal problem. A socialist system of society is characterised by the fact that goods and services are provided on a free access basis - there would be no quid pro quo exchange relation mediating between the consumer and the objects of comsumption - while the labour to produce these things would necessarilu be provided on a purely voluntary basis. That is what "from each according to ability to each according to need" literally means. The problem is that you cannot have such a system in place alongside society wide central planning. For the latter to function effectively on its own terms requires that the output targets of each of the million upon million of prduction units should be religiously adhered to. How are you going to ensure that? You cannot leave this to chance or to the flexible adjustment among production units themselves taking up the slack - not if you want the Plan to work. So in order to ensure that the Plan works on its own terms you have to insist that each prpduction unit without fail produces what the Plan requires of it. The question is how do enforce that in a socialist society? The answer is that you cannot. The natural inclination of a socialist society would be towards flexible adaptation at every level and not just locally which completely rules out central planning. It is the same on the consumption of demand side of things. The rigid specification of fixed targets for consumer goods boils down to a system of centralised rationing , not free access. For the system to work on its own terms, consumers will not be allowed to change their tastes and their preferences since that would upset the detailed calculations behind the plan. In fact what would soon open up, and pretty inevitably, is clear chasm between the interests and outlook of the technocratic elite - an embryonic ruling class in waiting - operating the global planning centre and the rest of the population along with the possiblity of systemic corrpution and widespead cynicism. Perforce the power of decisionmaking will concentrate in the hands of the technocratic elite since there is no way you can democratically decide on the details of sucg a vast global plan. This does not matter in the case of a decentralised or polycentric model of socialism where you have an automatic mechanism at work in the form of a self regulating system of stock control, where the pattern of output is the emrgent product of millions of individual decisions made on a daily basis rather than something that is all planned in advance from a gods eye point of view. You cannot meaningfully plan the total pattern of prpoduction at the outset - it is just far too vast for that to be remotely conceviable - rather that total pattern is, of should be the product of millions of plans spontaneously adjusting towards each other. This is the ONLY way any of us as individuals or as communities can have some kind of democratic input into what goes on in the world around us and that requires a social arrangement that facilitates initartive and local planning rather than surrender these things to what would be a de facto elite which, even if only by default rather design, would have to make the decisions for us

This is ridiculous. First of all, it is good that you insist on free access - but in fact you can't have free access in your model, as you assume scarcity across the board. So your "genuine free-access communism" is reduced to free access to "necessary" goods and bizarre rationing schemes for the rest. Whether that is "genuine" is left to the reader as an exercise.

Now, this objection fails principally because it treats the labour force as something external to the society that, ultimately, plans production. In a socialist society, planning is a matter of members of society - who are at the same time consumers and producers - deciding on what they are going to do together. It stands to reason that they will not vote for plans they are unwilling to put into effect. Of course, if that happens, such is life. That is one of the hazards of free labour - and it would happen in your little scheme as well, unless you're trying to say you would put some sort of pressure on members of society to induce them to work.

Of course, it is probably the case that in the socialist society, only a very small amount of socially-useful labour time will have to be expended in order to fulfill the targets - if anything finding a job for people might be more of a problem than no one working (labour becoming the prime want of man and all that).

[ckaihatsu]

Yes. A self regulating system of stock control sits at the very heart of a socialist production system but as Ive constantly said, does not preclude "conscious planning" at different levels - local , regional and even global. These things complement each other


I wouldn't say 'heart of', but rather that it has to do with matters of regular, routine inventory going-forward. That's why I call it a 'mechanism', while the larger picture -- the political economy -- would have to deal in a hands-on way with matters of supplies, prioritizations, social considerations, liberated labor, work roles, work hours, mass demands, centralization, administration / coordination, policies, protocols, procedures, supply chains, assets and resources, and consumption.

Here's a bird's-eye view:


140509 communist economy diagram UPDATE

http://s6.postimg.org/ezkgvo6wh/140509_communist_economy_diagram_UPDATE_xcf.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/3n7vdvy7h/full/)





You are probably right but, then again, this is not a prescription for a perfect society since no such thing is available to us. Neverthless I think it is reasonable to assume that the link betweeen social status and material consumption such as is the case today, will be broken in a free access communist society. Rock stars wont be performing on stage in the expectation of getting megabucks and a luxurious lifestyle to boot. They will be doing it for the intrinsic pleasure of doing it. The criterion of status in free access communism will focus on what you give to society not what you take out of it since it would be rather pointless flaunting wealth in the expectation of boosting your status when everyone else has free access to society's wealth too.


I think you're misunderstanding -- while I don't dispute what you're saying, I mean to focus-in on the gray-area between rampant individualism (a hyper-self-determination, let's say), and more-*collective*-minded needs / responsibilities.

Here, for the sake of argument, is the opening of Oscar Wilde's 'The Soul of Man under Socialism':





The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.




http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/


The 'rock star' problematic would be the *flipside* of this, a world where everyone is a self-proclaimed "revolutionary" in order to be a self-absorbed "rock star", regardless of any and all knock-on social consequences, as for the revolution in general.





Sure, but the general point still holds - luxury goods will tend to be lower down in the list of priorities while the allocation of scarce resouces will tend to
be skewed in favour of higher priority goods. Thus the production of luxury goods will have to work around this constraint to an extent


I do agree, and my 'cred' is here:




[10] Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy

http://s6.postimg.org/q2scney29/10_Supply_prioritization_in_a_socialist_transi.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/9rs8r3lkd/full/)


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My framework [...] addresses the *outer reaches* of what a strictly moneyless communistic 'gift economy' could conceivably cover. Some on the revolutionary left have suggested that perhaps a *remnant* of the former markets could exist within a post-capitalist social order, to cover luxury / specialty production, since such might be *unaddressed* by the more mass-oriented mainstream gift economy.




However, a regular market-based approach to luxury / specialty production could very well be more cumbersome than it's worth -- it would be tolerating a kind of exchange-values-based 'black market' within an otherwise free-access social paradigm.

My 'labor credits' is meant to acknowledge a post-capitalist liberated-labor on its own terms, without resorting to backsliding to any system of exchange values.




A post-capitalist political economy using labor credits




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?bt=14673


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No I think you might be misunderstanding the point. What I am saying is "absurd" is the notion that you can devise some kind of rigid and extensive ordinal scale representing in detail how society evaluates the myriad end uses of production and where it places each of these within this formalised hierarchy of production goals. Quite apart from anything else the very business of deciding whether one end use (e.g. road construction) should be placed higher or lower than another (e.g. hospital construction) would be ridiculously complicated and pointless. Who gets to vote on the matter - the whole world, the local community, the region? And how much more desirable or valuable are hospitals than roads or vice versa anyway which would presumably be reflected in the allocation of resources?


This line of yours here *contradicts* your overall proposal of using a 'broad based hierarchy of production goals', as you've detailed here:





I dont think of a hierachy of production goals as some kind of rigidly fixed, let alone detailed, schema as some of my critics have unreasonably suggested. It is more a rough rule of thumb based on intuition, more than anything, and informed by the cultural environment and values of a socialist society. Having said that, specific planned community based projects such as a new school or hospital might well indeed command priority attention in the allocation of resources precisely becuase of the fact that they are explicity community based and carry the weight of community opinion


*Any* 'blueprint'-type approach would be too administration-heavy, anyway -- realities call for more of a checks-and-balances among the three components of collectivist administration, liberated labor, and mass demand:





What's called-for is a system that can match liberated-labor organizing ability, over mass-collectivized assets and resources, to the mass demand from below for collective production. If *liberated-labor* is too empowered it would probably lead to materialistic factionalism -- like a bad syndicalism -- and back into separatist claims of private property.

If *mass demand* is too empowered it would probably lead back to a clever system of exploitation, wherein labor would cease to retain control over the implements of mass production.

And, if the *administration* of it all is too specialized and detached we would have the phenomenon of Stalinism, or bureaucratic elitism and party favoritism.

I'll contend that I have developed a model that addresses all of these concerns in an even-handed way, and uses a system of *circulating* labor credits that are *not* exchangeable for material items of any kind.




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?bt=14673


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Frankly you just dont wanna go down this road. I would far prefer suppliers of inputs to just use their own judgement/intuition in deciding which of several
competing claims for the input in question should receive priority and to what extent.


This part sounds too much like a localist syndicalism, or factionalism based on geography, which would be too close to private -- albeit communal -- ownership, which would basically be commodity production in relation to other production communes.

I'll counterpose a wide-open collectivization of *all* assets and resources, worldwide, to be administered on a per-project basis, by mass prioritization:





Ownership / control

communist administration -- All assets and resources will be collectivized as communist property in common -- their use must be determined through a regular political process of prioritized demands from a locality or larger population -- any unused assets or resources may be used by individuals in a personal capacity only




Infrastructure / overhead

communist administration -- Distinct from the general political culture each project or production run will include a provision for an associated administrative component as an integral part of its total policy package -- a selected policy's proponents will be politically responsible for overseeing its implementation according to the policy's provisions




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174


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Of course, it is a somewhat messy way of proceeding but it is headed in the right direction and that is the point.


(Again, no, due to the problematic of intrinsic geography-based constraints on collective production.)





Production units producing these inputs will be run by people like you and I. We will be part of the community, and consumers too, and our sense of values will be broadly similar to those of others. Free access communism in fact undermines the possiblity of special interests being brought to bear which might distort or conflict
with the broad sense of priorities held by society as a whole (of which we are all a part). In short there would be nothing to be gained by deliberately flouting the wishes of others around us.


*This* part itself I have no problem with, and see it as congruent with the model I just excerpted from.





I am not quite sure what you are saying here. In my view a distinction ought to be made between individual demands and social demands.


I see the two as merely being various facets, by scale, of the same *humanity* -- the 'endpoint' is either a person, singular, or people, plural.

I'll reiterate the point and include a graphic illustration of the same, here:







[M]any socialist-minded proposals are well-meaning in their *administrative* approaches, but can't resolve the inevitable discrepancy between self-determining, willful demand, and the collective administration of limited material quantities in relation to that mass demand.


Pies Must Line Up

http://s6.postimg.org/5wpihv9ip/140415_2_Pies_Must_Line_Up_xcf_jpg.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/erqcsdyb1/full/)





The former will be essentially mediated and met via the self regulating system of stock control and won't in that sense be "collectively adminstered" (The exception to this might be in the case of a category of goods that are rationed where collective administration is involved in the process of rationing. But this obviously would not apply to free access goods). Social demands, like the demand for roads or hospitals, on the other hand do clearly involve an element of conscious planning and so will be mediated by a process of democratic decision making in the first place (unlike say your decision as an individual consumer to opt for a bag of apples rather than a bag of oranges when you vist the distribution store). The fact that democratic decision making was involved in the formulation of social demands will, I suggest, give them greater weight in the evaluation of end uses when it comes to allocation of scarce inputs


I have no problem with this part, either, but would like to emphasize my previous point that there would be a problem if real, cumulative self-determining-derived demands could not be satisfied with existing material quantities -- you mention a 'process of rationing' but haven't explained any approach for addressing this.

[Ledur]

To illustrate what I am talking about, let us suppose that go-go boots are produced in three models, A, B, and J. The projected aggregate demand for go-go boots of all types is D. Based on that, the factories that produce the boots are allocated enough material to produce D units of type A or type B or type C. The actual composition will vary - at first the planning authorities might assume that the composition will be similar to that from the previous planning period - a units of type A, b of B etc., with a+b+j=D. Now, it might turn out that, monitoring the demand for the various kinds of go-go boots, type J has fallen out of favour, and the demand has fallen to j'=j/10. Now, it is actually trivial to signal the factories to produce the boots in the new ratios. Transportation to the various distribution centres would not be impacted - instead of a shipment containing a_s units of type A etc. it would contain a'_s units of type A etc.

If the new global demand of J drops to 10% of the previous demand, are you supposing that every truck would carry 10% of J demand to every distribution center? If it's the case, it doesn't consider that demand may have fallen in different places, and stayed stable (or even increased) elsewhere.

If that's not the case (and I believe you didn't want to say that), robbo's approach is self explanatory. You don't need a "plan" to meet demand; the sum of all shoes' factories will decrease production if demand falls to 10%. Some would halt production, and some would work like before, no need to each factory to know the situation of other factories (nor a central planner); each factory only needs to handle signals from the next production/distribuction in the production chain.

However, I do agree that a sort of democratic planning should exist, for example in housing production or a project that will affect many people (building a new airport). But for consumer (individual) goods, it's not necessary to plan production the same way. Supply and demand will balance without a omniscient plan.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

If the new global demand of J drops to 10% of the previous demand, are you supposing that every truck would carry 10% of J demand to every distribution center? If it's the case, it doesn't consider that demand may have fallen in different places, and stayed stable (or even increased) elsewhere.

But that's generally not what happens, even under capitalism. Now robbo assumes that socialism will entail less mobility than capitalism but that, as far as I am concerned, is a very bizarre assumption.


If that's not the case (and I believe you didn't want to say that), robbo's approach is self explanatory. You don't need a "plan" to meet demand; the sum of all shoes' factories will decrease production if demand falls to 10%. Some would halt production, and some would work like before, no need to each factory to know the situation of other factories (nor a central planner); each factory only needs to handle signals from the next production/distribuction in the production chain.

If the situation in other factories is unknown to the workers in one factory (how this is compatible with the social control of the means of production is beyond me), what is to stop all factories from stopping production, for example? Among other logistical and planning problems I have mentioned before.


However, I do agree that a sort of democratic planning should exist, for example in housing production or a project that will affect many people (building a new airport). But for consumer (individual) goods, it's not necessary to plan production the same way. Supply and demand will balance without a omniscient plan.

But this is explicitly the fable of the Invisible Hand, which doesn't work even under capitalism ("supply and demand" is a terrible description of the market). Why should the supply and demand balance out automatically?

[Ledur]

I have no problem with this part, either, but would like to emphasize my previous point that there would be a problem if real, cumulative self-determining-derived demands could not be satisfied with existing material quantities -- you mention a 'process of rationing' but haven't explained any approach for addressing this.

The bottlenecks are addressed in his system - hierarchy of needs and law of minimum (PRODUCTION side).

At the CONSUMPTION side (distribution of production), some kind of rationing would be needed for those not free-access items. Robbo has sketched a rationing based on "housing stock". I have my own views, but I think it's possible to ration items/services with some intuitive calculation.

[Ledur]

But that's generally not what happens, even under capitalism. Now robbo assumes that socialism will entail less mobility than capitalism but that, as far as I am concerned, is a very bizarre assumption.

Who knows? Today consumption is based on purchasing power and media incentives. If you give people freedom, consumption habits could be unpredictable, and a single bureaucratic plan wouldn't respond to quick changes.


If the situation in other factories is unknown to the workers in one factory (how this is compatible with the social control of the means of production is beyond me), what is to stop all factories from stopping production, for example? Among other logistical and planning problems I have mentioned before.

Situation of production itself? Hmm I don't think so. All you need is to follow a protocol of getting new materials and labourers if demand has increased, or liberate them to other production units otherwise.

Maybe situation of workers, workload, if there's exploitation, etc are responsibility of society... along with management of society's human resources outside production units.

Regarding the example, a gift economy is a moral economy, based on esteem and mutual colaboration. Liberated labour force would sign a kind of "social contract", but it's not up to me to embark this patch and detail this contract.


But this is explicitly the fable of the Invisible Hand, which doesn't work even under capitalism ("supply and demand" is a terrible description of the market). Why should the supply and demand balance out automatically?

I'm sorry, but supply and demand (not law of supply and demand) is the basic relationship of EVERY economy, wether barter, market or gift economy, from your home freezer up to the global economy.

The Invisible Hand is a myth, specific to the market system, where people were commodified, where competition is more important than collaboration and private accumulation is mandatory.

Supply and demand will balance if the correct signals from consumers are sent to producers. By "correct" signals, I mean direct access to products and services, considering that everyone has the same basic needs and ideally should have the same purchasing power for other desires.... not the noisy, vicious signals that money and private property propagate in capitalism.

[robbo203]

It's not that I have "run out of useful thoughts", but that we're talking past each other. Both of us want something we call "socialism" but the similarities, it seems to me, end there. You assume that in this "socialism" of yours, resources will be scarce, families will continue to exist (which is relevant to your proposals about housing, "household stock" and so on), mobility will be limited, various groups of workers will run "their" production units as autonomous enterprises, there will be a rediscovery of "community values" and so on. Well, to be honest, if that's socialism, you can keep it. As for me, I've had enough "community values" to last me a lifetime, and if more people "rediscover community values", chances are it's going to be a short life to boot. My distaste for what you propose aside, we simply aren't talking about the same thing. I don't assume scarcity. I don't think socialism is compatible with autonomous production units. And so on - in effect, we are talking about two entirely different economic arrangements. And you can't talk about "central planning" in abstract..

I dont assume "resources will be scarce". I think SOME resources may well be scarce and that the abundance of others will assured at the expense of the former. I explained the mechanism that will ensure the allocation of inputs is skewed in favour of high priority end uses and thereby underwrite their abundant availability. Sure, I believe the family in some form - or, more likely, many different forms - will continue to exist. Why not? The family in some form has always existed as long as human society has existed. And its no good appealing to Engels's Origins of the Family etc since he was talking about a specific form of family - the patriarchal family. Family units are clearly evdient in hunter gather societies so why not in communism? Do I think there will be a rennaisance of community life in socialism? Damn right I do! In fact, if anything, your kind of bland insipid cosmopolitanism in which there are no functioning communities left, only some amorphous global society, strikes me as being very much the expression of a quintessentally bourgeous outlook with its emphasis on standardisation, interchangeability, uniformity and conformity everywhere. Capitalism has mostly killed off communities and here you are, a "socialist", applauding it for doing precisely that. Next you will be rooting for an obligatory McDonalds outlet in every street corner of every city in the world on the pretext that will deal a body blow to your despised community life. I take a different view. I value human interactions and the nexus of those interactions is densest is at the face to face to level where we encounter real people not our so called Facebook "friends". On that score read up Robin Dunbars intriguing theory here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
.



As I said, I am not surprised that you haven't run into people who take central planning seriously, as you seem to keep fairly, well, peculiar company. As for me, I'm not interested in winning an argument against Austrians, as the Austrians are little more than Internet trolls, not taken seriously even in bourgeois economic departments, and for me to "win" an argument against them I would have to accept so much of their assumptions that I would stop arguing for socialism.



Actually the great bulk of my political discussions on the subject of the economic calcualtion argument have been with people on the Left. I tend not to keep company with the Austrians although I have crossed swords with them in the past. And, no, I dont have to win an argument against them by accepting their assumptions. The only assumption I accept of theirs is the impossiblity or complete impracticality of society-wide central planning. But that is not becuase of them that I accept this assumption. I have always felt this to be the case and was frankly quite surprised that they brought this up as an objection to "socialism" when I first ran up against them. I repeat - you are a rarity in my wide experience on this subject. You are the only one I have ever encountered who is fully prepared to go along with the fantastical idea of a single plan for the whole of world society - all 7 billion of us. I genuinely think a political conservation society should be set up in your honour to preserve and record for posterity the words of someone who seems quite genuinely committed to this sensational folly. Hats off to you for trying, though - at least you are prepared to doggedly argue in its defence and ward off the crticisms even if you resemble King Canute trying to turn back the waves



This is a blatant appeal to incredulity. In fact many branches already work with models that contain millions of interconnected elements - whether nodes in a simulation network, elements of a matrix or otherwise. And, of course, for every such system, you could find people making the same argument you are making - the system is too complex, there are too many variables and so on.

You are completely missing the point here arent you? Of course there are models which contain millions of interconnected elements. The fact that I advocate a self regulating system of stock control as the primary mechanism for equating supply and demand in socialism does not in any way detract from the fact that a socialist economy contains "millions of interconnected elements". In fact it is precisely becuase of that , becuase of the fact that the overall pattern of production cannot possibly be consciously planned in advance but must emerge spnanteously through the interactions of numeropus conscious plans that I advocate this model. You seem to have lost sight what the argument is about - can such a complex system as a world economy be planned in toto. Clearly it cannot




The question of how "coarse-grained" the central planing should be is a fascinating one - but the implication that any "fine-graining" will be done on a local level (and not as an adjustment within the parameters of the plan, done on a global level) depends crucially on your assumption that mobility will be limited. Which is nonsensical..

No its not. Unless you are assuming transportation is a costless facility which is clearly nonsensical



The questionnaires were explicitly only about consumer goods. I don't know how many osmium-iridium spinnerets are necessary to produce one pair of nylon stockings, and I don't think I ought to. We can leave that sector to the planners, unless some of us want these spinnerets for their own private nefarious purposes. The chief input into the model is demand for consumer goods - that having been fixed, the planning authorities can use the information contained in the input-output matrix to see how many industrial goods are necessary to produce the required consumer goods, and ultimately where labour needs to be allocated...

Oh right -so your questionaariues is now only confined to consumer goods which I guess still amounts to several tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands (does a 3 inch screw for putting up a shelf in the house count as a consumer good?) of items. I still cant see it working though even without the need for consumers to comment on producer goods. You would be extremely lucky if you got more than a 5% response rate on 7 billion questionaires meaning it would be up to the planners to wildly guess what the consumers wanted. As you admit, it is they who have to "fix" the targets for these consumers goods which means, amongst other things , that for the plan to stand even the slightest chance of working the consumers cannot take more than the planners allow for - even if what the planners allowed for bore no relation to what the comsumers really wanted. Their consumer preferences must be set in concrete for the next 5 or 10 years or whatever. And then there are the producer goods required to produce the consumer goods. You seem content to "leave that to the planners". They can "use the information contained in the input-output matrix to see how many industrial goods are necessary to produce the required consumer goods, and ultimately where labour needs to be allocated". Ha! Were is so simple as that. To plan what industrial goods are needed requires amongst other things an intimate familarity with the process of production and in particular, the specific technical ratios involved that determine the configuration or bundle of inputs required to produce a given output. Even this is more complicated than it sounds becuase the techncial ratios may vary form one production unit. Coming up with some industry wide technical ratio can therefore turn out to be very wide off the mark; some production units might very well need far more or far less of a particular input than allowed for in the Plan. As if this was not bad enough, the global planning office has to liaise with every single one of the millions of productiuon units throughout the world about their industrial capacity and ability to ensure a committed labour force throughout the duration of the Plan and then shape the Plan around the information they receive back - rather like GOSPLAN'S so called consultations with state enterprises . But the central plan stands no more chance of working than GOSPLAN'S plans did. What will happen is that the Plan will constantly have to change to catch up with the changing economic realities on the ground. It will become as I said no longer a "plan" as such but a kind of momentary snapshot of the economy, a sort of designer wishlist of what the planners want the producers to do but clearly lack the means to ensure they do



Except, as I keep pointing out, there is nothing sacred about the five years from the famous Five Year Plan (the plan, not the regrettably banned user). In fact it would make sense to keep the planning period as short as possible precisely because of things like this - the longer you rely on an extrapolation, the more it diverges from reality. That is a general fact that applies to all complex systems - it's most notable when it comes to weather prognoses.

Your chief objection to this is that it involves administrative work. Who would have thought? The problem, of course, is that to you administrative work equals bureaucracy, on which more below..

Thats ridiculous what you are saying here. Actually from you point of view I would have thought the longer the better. Try to imagine what is involved in repeating the whole procdure not every 5 years but every single year. Imagine trying to send out 7 billion questionnaires to ascertain the views of the public and thats just for styarters! Sorry but you have an utterly childlike naivete about everything. Christ, there are commisions of enquiry looking into something as comparatively simple as a football stadium collapsing or a train derailment that have taken YEARS too reach some kind of definitive conclusion. And here you are unebeliebably expecting a bunch of overworked bureaucrats in the global planning office to come up with a detailed blueprint on the total world output of everything in the space of a year or whatever. It beggars beliefs frankly.

And the elephant in the room is still this - why, even assuming your fantasy could be put into effect at such huge bureaucratic expense, do youy not consider the much more reaonable and workable alternative I outlined here? A self regulatig system of stock control allows for a more or less instanteous adjustment of supply to demand. Why go through the collosally complex roundabout process of trying to "fix" demand in advance even assuming you could do this. You simply have nothing to say on the matter



But, as I already pointed out, you haven't given us a reason to suppose the supply patterns would be interrupted. Any sane planning authority will factor in the risk of work stoppages - it would take genuine cretinism to assume every production unit will work at full efficiency forever. What might lead to the interruption of supply patterns are catastrophic accidents, but these do not happen constantly.
..

You still dont seem to understand. Im not suggeting that your central planners would be working on the assumption that production uinits will work at full efficiency. Nor am I saying that they will not allow for sub-optimal performance by the impostion of reserve or buffer stocks. What I am saying is that even despite these things and even in the absence of catastrophic accidents, supply patterns will STILL be hugely interrupted. Firstly, because despite everything you say to contrary ,the central planners will have no real way of knowing for sure the level of demand is for each of each of the hundreds of thousands of consumer products - millions if you take into account product variations - across the globe. They can only guess and the chances are their guesses are likley to be way off mark. Which means that whatever level of buffer stocks they specifiy could well turn out to be grossly inadequate. This can work the other way too . Demand for a particular product can fall signifcantly. Is the central planning office going to allow unwanted goods to continue to stockpile to absurd heights? Of course not. But that means not only telling the producers of said goods to stop producing them but also their own suppliers too. Secondly you cannot guarantee that any production unit is going to be up to fully meeting its target and supplying its specific outlets as planned for in the global plan. In the event that it does not, buffer stocks are going to rapidly fall away and shortages will arise. So what is the central planning offcie going to do? The immediate thought is that it might contact other production units to take up the slack but here we already see the Plan having to be modifed since included in the concepot of a single soceity wide plan are the precise specifications as to where specific outputs ought to be delivered. You cannot allow production units to decide for themselves where to send their output since this would be introducing other plans into the framework whuich would then become a polycentric and not a unicentric planning framework. As well as that other instructing other production units to take up the slack has cost implications such as additional transportations costs which likewise necessitates a modification to the Plan

So these two things alone - and there are other points I could raise - sink you whole argument completely




This is, I think, by far the least coherent of your objections, as you've completely assimilated the market logic of the Austrians you so love to debate. Again, in a planned economy there is no need to guess scarcity on the basis of stock shortages, it is possible to directly see what is being produced, what the demand is and so on. As for waste, who cares. To the Austrians that represents an "opportunity cost" as it could have been used to drive the M-C-M' cycle, but what is important to us is that the consumer demand is fulfilled.
..

Strewth, I sometimnes despair of you ever getting your head around the problem. You are simply not seeing or wanting to see what the issue is; you are simply not engaging with the argument. I refer to your nonsensical claim", in a planned economy there is no need to guess scarcity on the basis of stock shortages, it is possible to directly see what is being produced, what the demand is and so on". Even if it were possible to see what demand was - how? On the basis of a 5% response rate to your 7 billion questionnaires? - and even if it was possible to ensure that "demand" did not change from jhat was specified in the Plan, how can you be sure that supply will be sufficient to meet this demand? Actually the only way you can really do this is on the basis of a self regulating system of stock control which instantly responds to shortages of supply in relation to social demand. However you have rejected this proposal in favour of your central planmning model. According to this model the planners will ensure that demand is met by building in a safeguard in the form of buffer or reserve stocks and, of necessity, this will have to apply acorss the board for every single consumer and producer good in the economy. But note the point that the size of this buffer is imposed by diktat and in advance; it is not the emergent property of the spontaneous interplay of supply and demand. More to the point, since it applies to EVERY good it cannot discrimninate. It cannot tell us anything about the relative scarity or abundance of a good vis a vis others goods since by defintition everything is abundant becuase the planners insist that there must be a buffer for every kind of good. Its a crassly idealistic argument when you think of it which boils down to a simple tautology. You get round the problem by defining your way out of the problem. Production units will ensure that buffer stocks wll exist and thats the end of the matter. The Plan has decreed that this will hapen so "obviously" this will happen, There is no inkling here of the need to ascertain the relative scarcity of a product since its all been figured out in advance by the omiscient Plan. Everythging will be abundant so there realtive scarcity is meaningless. The problem is that if you cannnot compare and constrast different inputs in terms of their relative scarcity you simply have no way of ensuring that you allocate resoruces in a way that economises most on what is most scarce. Do not mistake this for the economic calculation argument of the Austrians; its not the same argument at all even if it bears a certain outward similairty in form. So my question to you is how are you going to economise effectively in your system? Or do you think you dont need to economise at all and that we can just use whatever resoruces we like indiscriminately to produce any given product? What is to prevent your inability to economise resulting in increasing wastage and a steady reduction in output leading eventually to the reinstatement of commodity prpduction?



Because, of course, there is no administrative work to be done in capitalism, the various company administrations apparently don't exist. Of course, these mostly fulfill pointless and parasitic functions, whereas the administration of the socialist society would fulfill a socially-useful one (and, of course, it would not be a "bureaucracy" in the sense of a separate body).



If you have two ways of doing something - one which is direct, simple, cost effective and straightforward ; the other which is massively more complicated, uses vastly more rersources and labour power and leads to an outcome that is very likely going make matters worse for you - which would you chose? What I refer to here are two different ways of adminstering socialist society. The latter is the option you have chosen. It is not a socially useful way of adminstering a socialist society - quite the opposite! - and I disagree flatly with your claim that what you advocate would not give rise to a bureaucracy in the sense of a separate body. The very complexity of the task you have set yourself almost guarantees such a thing




This is ridiculous. First of all, it is good that you insist on free access - but in fact you can't have free access in your model, as you assume scarcity across the board. So your "genuine free-access communism" is reduced to free access to "necessary" goods and bizarre rationing schemes for the rest. Whether that is "genuine" is left to the reader as an exercise.

You contradict yourself. You say I cant have free access in my model and then in the same breath assert that my model is "reduced to free access to "necessary" goods and bizarre rationing schemes for the rest" So there is, you agree, a component of free access in my model after all , contradicting your claim that there cannot be free access in the model. My whole argument which you have completely ignored is that this dichormy of free access versus rationed goods arises out of the way in which resources are allocated in accordance with some sense of society's priorities so that it will be basic needs that will tend to be served first and therefore more likely to be provded in abundance and so can be distributed on a free access basis. Luxury goods being lower down the scale of priorities will tend to be discrimnated against in the allocation of inputs and hence more likely to be scarce making them the likely targets of any kind of rationing system. In the absence of informed criticism I have no way of knowing why you consider my rationing scheme to be bizarre; I think it is a very do-able scheme, frankly



Now, this objection fails principally because it treats the labour force as something external to the society that, ultimately, plans production. In a socialist society, planning is a matter of members of society - who are at the same time consumers and producers - deciding on what they are going to do together. It stands to reason that they will not vote for plans they are unwilling to put into effect. Of course, if that happens, such is life. That is one of the hazards of free labour - and it would happen in your little scheme as well, unless you're trying to say you would put some sort of pressure on members of society to induce them to work..

This a straw argument. Yes of course producers are consumers and vice versa in a socialist society. So what? The point is that it is simply not possible for you and me as both a consumers and producers to vote on the totality of what gets produced and distributed in a socialist society. It is just not logistically possible. Are you prposing to veto what colur train the citizens of Singapore want for their new metro system . Of course not. 99.99% of what goes on in the world we cannot possibly be aware of as individuals. How can we make an informed decision on that which we are not aware of. If the central planners prpose to put everything down in one single plan then almost defintion if this were possible it would be grossly undemocratic 99.99% could not possibly be involved in the formulation of such thing let alone the vote to implement ot. How the hell are you even going to handle the stupendus task of organising a vote amongst the world poplation on all these countless things which your fantasy Plan seeks to encompass from some sort of gods-eye view on the world? Its beyond ridiculous. Its surreal

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, fuck me, this is what happens when I can't leave some things alone. Again, we are talking about different things. I don't think that what you want has anything to do with socialism, and if it were a realistic possibility it would be contrary to the interests of the workers and oppressed worldwide. It is, and let me be honest here, petit-bourgeois reactionary "anti-capitalism" of the worst kind. I mean, good god, MacDonalds. I always get a kick out of eating at such places as I know it offends the petite bourgeois r-r-radicals. As such, and given your dishonest style of arguing (I imagine you have convinced yourself that you have won many discussions where the other person or persons simply got tired of it and dropped the subject), there really is nothing more to say.

I mean, am I supposed to believe that you genuinely don't know that, when I talked about millions of elements interacting, I was talking about mathematical models, and not your beloved simulated market? Well, to be fair, that was only obvious from the context, from the examples used, and so on.

As for my ostensible naivete, I am a contact of an international organisation that - while not large - is serious, unlike the WSM and their "contest elections in multiple constituencies" guff. I am by no means special when it comes to central planning - if anything, I imagine most members and sympathisers would prefer the more rigid material balance style of planning. That's neither here nor there, though. Perhaps you should consider stepping out of the bubbles of RevLeft and the SPGB/WSM/WIC/whatever. Oh, and as for my supposed non-comprehension of the problem, I deal with complex systems, with hundreds of thousands of elements when the entire problem is reduced to matrix equations on a daily basis. My partner works in oceanography, and their models are much more complex than a realistic economic model would need to be. And so on - on your part, however, all we get is a hand-wavy "it's too complex", a bad analogy to natural selection that betrays an orthogenetic mode of thinking, and an attempt to take fictitious capital as evidence of chaos in the mathematical sense. So, which one of us is naive, again?

I won't give you an opportunity to continue your cultish chanting of "only a self-regulating system of stock control", so, so long.

[robbo203]

Well, fuck me, this is what happens when I can't leave some things alone. Again, we are talking about different things. I don't think that what you want has anything to do with socialism, and if it were a realistic possibility it would be contrary to the interests of the workers and oppressed worldwide. It is, and let me be honest here, petit-bourgeois reactionary "anti-capitalism" of the worst kind. I mean, good god, MacDonalds. I always get a kick out of eating at such places as I know it offends the petite bourgeois r-r-radicals. As such, and given your dishonest style of arguing (I imagine you have convinced yourself that you have won many discussions where the other person or persons simply got tired of it and dropped the subject), there really is nothing more to say.

My, my, a bit touchy - arent we? - today And all because I beg to differ with your idiosyncratic conception of the nature of social existence in a post capitalist world. You suggest that to talk of communities and community life - at least I think that is what you are referring to - hasnt got "anything to do with socialism" and that "if it were a realistic possibility it would be contrary to the interests of the workers and oppressed worldwide". Really? How so? You are constantly coming out with outlandish statements like this and failing to back them up when challenged.

And what exactly to you propose as an alternative - a continually migrating rootless populace with no ties to anyone or anywhere and whose only source of social interaction is presumably with their Facebook "friends" (sic). I can't think of anything more depressingly grim and alienating. You are already on recond for saying "I don't think there would be towns or villages in socialism" amd that "Villages and towns are stupidly wasteful, inefficient and socially problematic ways of storing live humans - therefore it stands to reason that they will be abandoned in socialism." All of which is a little rich coming from you since I cant think of anything more "stupidly wasteful, inefficient and socially problematic" than your proposal that the entire global economy right down to the last 3 inch screw, should be consciously planned in advance and overseen by one single remote global planning office.


And while we are at it, dont you think abandoning villages and towns would itself be an absolutely collossal waste of resources or has the thought not occured to you? But I tell you what - come socialism, please feel free to travel around the world as you please but dont presume to tell the rest of us that we should not settle down as we please and establish communities as we please. Agreed?



I mean, am I supposed to believe that you genuinely don't know that, when I talked about millions of elements interacting, I was talking about mathematical models, and not your beloved simulated market? Well, to be fair, that was only obvious from the context, from the examples used, and so on.


I know exactly what you are on about and that's your problem. Mathemetaical models , economic models, ecological models or whatever -it really doesnt matter. The point that needs ramming hiome again and again - is that there is not a snowballs chance in hell of running any sort large scale modern production system on the basis that you propose. Not a chance. The key is in the very words you use - the millions and millions of elements of interacting with each other not with some mythical global planning centre

And once again - No it is not a simulated market that I am proposing, Ive explained this many times to you but you dishonestly persist in misrepresiing me. If anything it is the other way round. Markets simulate a self regulating economy but there is no trace of a market, no trace of commidity prpduction, in what I propose. It is simply a way of meshing supply and demand



As for my ostensible naivete, I am a contact of an international organisation that - while not large - is serious, unlike the WSM and their "contest elections in multiple constituencies" guff. I am by no means special when it comes to central planning - if anything, I imagine most members and sympathisers would prefer the more rigid material balance style of planning.



Well blow me over . You mean there is more than one of you advocating this crackpot idea? Well invite him/her on to Revleft in that case. Lets see if he/she can do a better job at defending this crackpot idea




Oh, and as for my supposed non-comprehension of the problem, I deal with complex systems, with hundreds of thousands of elements when the entire problem is reduced to matrix equations on a daily basis. My partner works in oceanography, and their models are much more complex than a realistic economic model would need to be. And so on - on your part, however, all we get is a hand-wavy "it's too complex", a bad analogy to natural selection that betrays an orthogenetic mode of thinking, and an attempt to take fictitious capital as evidence of chaos in the mathematical sense. So, which one of us is naive, again.

Once again, saying or acknowleging the world economy out there is stupendously complex is one thing; trying to plan the total patten of production in advance from a single planning centre is quite another thing. Try to understand the difference for a change. Yes of course we engage with this stupendously complex system but the point is that our best laid plans are necessarily just one of millions of plans that interact with each other resulting in an overall pattern that could not possibly have been planned at the outset. The key here is not to stive futilely to predetermine the overall pattern but rather to change the basis on which the millions of plans interact. Once you understand that you are well on the way to understanding the larger picture

[ckaihatsu]

I have no problem with this part, either, but would like to emphasize my previous point that there would be a problem if real, cumulative self-determining-derived demands could not be satisfied with existing material quantities -- you mention a 'process of rationing' but haven't explained any approach for addressing this.





The bottlenecks are addressed in his system - hierarchy of needs and law of minimum (PRODUCTION side).


If by 'hierarchy of needs' you mean Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs -- as I included in my 'Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy' diagram in post #50 -- then that regards the *demand* side of things (which needs to be supplied-to), and does not address the political-logistical issue of how to equitably resolve material bottlenecks for the same.

Also I did a search for 'law of minimum' throughout the thread and only found your mention of it -- if you mean that all-people's needs should be met at a minimum, first, before further qualitative advances in the same are considered as a next-step, then I concur, and that's also included in the same diagram at post #50.





At the CONSUMPTION side (distribution of production), some kind of rationing would be needed for those not free-access items. Robbo has sketched a rationing based on "housing stock". I have my own views, but I think it's possible to ration items/services with some intuitive calculation.


This only displaces the discrepancy, at best -- it's the 'Robbing Peter to pay Paul' dynamic, because it's summarily administrating over housing stock, to fulfill one particular policy, without comprehensively addressing *housing stock* on its own, full, real, material terms. (In other words, what if there is an oversupply of existing housing stock, even after implementing Robbo's 'rationing' method relative to other material quantities -- ? The consequence would be that many people would be living in unnecessarily undesirable housing conditions while surplus quantities are unused and available -- similar to today, under capitalism.)

[robbo203]

Also I did a search for 'law of minimum' throughout the thread and only found your mention of it -- if you mean that all-people's needs should be met at a minimum, first, before further qualitative advances in the same are considered as a next-step, then I concur, and that's also included in the same diagram at post #50.

No thats not what it means at all. The "law of the minimum" was formulated by the 19th century agricultural chemist, Justus von Liebig, and basically holds that agricultural output is always constrained by some "limiting factor". He was particularly concerned with nitrogen based fertilier as the limiting factor in his day. Increasing the supply of the limiting factor allows for an increase in output but it also means some other factor might then become the new limiting factor - for example, water or sunlight. Check out this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum

This basic model can be applied generally, as I have done, to the question of resource allocation in a socialist economy. For any particular bundle of inputs required to produce a given output, one of these inputs can be identified as the limiting factor. This why a self regulating system of stock control will play such a vital role in a socialist economy- i.e. it enables one to identify resource bottlenecks obstructing increased output of the good in question.

The basic principle invoked here is that one should economise most on that which is most scarce, or least abundant, meaning the limiting factor. That might very well mean resticting the allocation of the good in question to only high priority end uses. You can thus see how this principle of the law of the minimum could mesh with the principle of a hierarchy of production priorities which we discussed earlier

[ckaihatsu]

No thats not what it means at all. The "law of the minimum" was formulated by the 19th century agricultural chemist, Justus von Liebig, and basically holds that agricultural output is always constrained by some "limiting factor". He was particularly concerned with nitrogen based fertilier as the limiting factor in his day. Increasing the supply of the limiting factor allows for an increase in output but it also means some other factor might then become the new limiting factor - for example, water or sunlight. Check out this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum

This basic model


This isn't a model, it's a description of material reality.





can be applied generally, as I have done, to the question of resource allocation in a socialist economy. For any particular bundle of inputs required to produce a given output, one of these inputs can be identified as the limiting factor. This why a self regulating system of stock control will play such a vital role in a socialist economy- i.e. it enables one to identify resource bottlenecks obstructing increased output of the good in question.

The basic principle invoked here is that one should economise most on that which is most scarce, or least abundant, meaning the limiting factor. That might very well mean resticting the allocation of the good in question to only high priority end uses.


Yes, but, again, it's neither a model nor a principle -- you're using the terms 'high priority end uses' and 'hierarchy of production priorities' without being clear as to how these would be determined in a regular, consistent way, nor how to distinguish and resolve among various claims to the same, scarce resources.





You can thus see how this principle of the law of the minimum could mesh with the principle of a hierarchy of production priorities which we discussed earlier


You've been downright *contradictory* about such a set of goals, as I pointed out in post #50:





[W]hat I am saying is "absurd" is the notion that you can devise some kind of rigid and extensive ordinal scale representing in detail how society evaluates the myriad end uses of production and where it places each of these within this formalised hierarchy of production goals. Quite apart from anything else the very business of deciding whether one end use (e.g. road construction) should be placed higher or lower than another (e.g. hospital construction) would be ridiculously complicated and pointless. Who gets to vote on the matter - the whole world, the local community, the region? And how much more desirable or valuable are hospitals than roads or vice versa anyway which would presumably be reflected in the allocation of resources?





This line of yours here *contradicts* your overall proposal of using a 'broad based hierarchy of production goals'


---


Also:

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

[ckaihatsu]

At this point in the exchange I think would be a good time to posit my own approach to the question -- here's from a recent post at another thread:





'additive prioritizations'





Better, I think, would be an approach that is more routine and less time-sensitive in prioritizing among responders -- the thing that would differentiate demand would be people's *own* prioritizations, in relation to *all other* possibilities for demands. This means that only those most focused on Product 'X' or Event 'Y', to the abandonment of all else (relatively speaking), over several iterations (days), would be seen as 'most-wanting' of it, for ultimate receipt.

My 'communist supply and demand' model, fortunately, uses this approach as a matter of course:





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




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




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




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174





I'm also realizing that this model / method of demand-prioritization can be used in such a way as to lend relative *weight* to a person's bid for any given product or calendar event, if there happens to be a limited supply and a more-intensive prioritization ('rationing') is called-for by the objective situation:

Since everyone has a standard one-through-infinity template to use on a daily basis for all political and/or economic demands, this template lends itself to consumer-political-type *organizing* in the case that such is necessary -- someone's 'passion' for a particular demand could be formally demonstrated by their recruiting of *others* to direct one or several of *their* ranking slots, for as many days / iterations as they like, to the person who is trying to beat-out others for the limited quantity.

Recall:





[A]ggregating these lists, by ranking (#1, #2, #3, etc.), is *no big deal* for any given computer. What we would want to see is what the rankings are for milk and steel, by rank position. So how many people put 'milk' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'steel' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'milk' for #2 -- ? And how many people put 'steel' for #2 -- ? (Etc.)

*This* would be socially useful information that could be the whole basis for a socialist political economy.





So, by extension, if someone was particularly interested in 'Event Y', they might undertake efforts to convince others to *donate* their ranking slots to them, forgoing 'milk' and 'steel' (for example) for positions #1 and/or #2. Formally these others would put 'Person Z for Event Y' for positions 1 and/or 2, etc., for as many days / iterations as they might want to donate. This, in effect, would be a populist-political-type campaign, of whatever magnitude, for the sake of a person's own particularly favored consumption preferences, given an unavoidably limited supply of it, whatever it may be.

[robbo203]

This isn't a model, it's a description of material reality.


I dont get this at all. Certainly the "law of the minimum" is a model. And its more than just a description; it is an attempt to explain what limits the yield of a crop, for instance, by identifying the proximate or limiting factor involved e.g. lack of nitrogen fertiliser





Yes, but, again, it's neither a model nor a principle -- you're using the terms 'high priority end uses' and 'hierarchy of production priorities' without being clear as to how these would be determined in a regular, consistent way, nor how to distinguish and resolve among various claims to the same, scarce resources.

Thats because I stated quite clearly that you can really only do this in a very broad terms and not in any detail. I pointed out that it would be probably be best to leave it to the suppliers of inputs to resolve the various claims on a scarce input, using their own judgement and intuition. As part of the community they would share broadly the same values and this would be reflected in the allocation decisions they made. I also pointed out that social consumption demands are likely to carry greater weight than individual consumption demands. The point is not to ensure 100% accuracy in such allocation decisions - in a messy world thats not realistically achievable - but rather to ensure that one's decisions are broadly orientated in the right direction and skewed in favour of high priority end uses, how ever these are determined. Trying to "aggregate" individual's rankings of thousands of different products is an absolutely futile and pointless exercise not to mention a huge waste of time and resources. And it suffers from the same defect as 870's daft plan for a single worldwide plan for everything: it is a static represenation of individuals priorities when in the real world things are always changing






You've been downright *contradictory* about such a set of goals, as I pointed out in post #50:

Well enlighten me then because Im damned if I can see this "contradiction" you keep going on about ...

How does this statement:

What I am saying is "absurd" is the notion that you can devise some kind of rigid and extensive ordinal scale representing in detail how society evaluates the myriad end uses of production and where it places each of these within this formalised hierarchy of production goals.

"contradict" this?

I dont think of a hierachy of production goals as some kind of rigidly fixed, let alone detailed, schema

[ckaihatsu]

I dont get this at all. Certainly the "law of the minimum" is a model. And its more than just a description; it is an attempt to explain what limits the yield of a crop, for instance, by identifying the proximate or limiting factor involved e.g. lack of nitrogen fertiliser


I mean that it's a *mechanism*, like the self regulating system of stock control -- both are good in that way, in that they're algorithmic, but the political logistics of a post-capitalist social order are / would be significantly more complex than just employing either mechanism.

In my 'communist supply & demand' model I have the following item, which, likewise, is an automated, algorithmic process, and encompasses the functions of both the stock-control mechanism and the limiting-factor assessment, from a *human-conscious* perspective / initiative -- and it's one item out of a total of *18* items:





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




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174


This means that once a person has a sense of their regular routine of ordering of materials -- as for personal use -- that routine can simply be a standing order, on a daily basis, or whatever. Such orders, and/or requests and/or demands, can *easily* be aggregated from all in any given locality, and sorted by computers according to the rankings given them by those putting in the lists, meaning everyone. Here's from my previous posting, in case you missed it:





[A]ggregating these lists, by ranking (#1, #2, #3, etc.), is *no big deal* for any given computer. What we would want to see is what the rankings are for milk and steel, by rank position. So how many people put 'milk' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'steel' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'milk' for #2 -- ? And how many people put 'steel' for #2 -- ? (Etc.)

*This* would be socially useful information that could be the whole basis for a socialist political economy.


This approach / method is *better* than the self regulating system of stock control because it reflects people's actual, pro-active *initiatives*, including newly introduced ones, and *doesn't* rely on *past data* whatsoever for assessing what needs to be produced going-forward. (So even if a person has a standing template order for 'milk' and 'steel' on a daily basis, they could just as well *interrupt* that pattern to remove 'steel' and instead insert 'cookies', for a new and different standing order, indefinitely into the future. This information would be relayed *immediately* into the political-economy process, whereas the stock-control method would only "know" about such a change once it "saw" that overall removal of 'steel' had decreased. I don't mean to nit-pick here, though -- just pointing out the difference / distinction.)

In an industrial / professional setting the standing order to enable throughput production might include 'steel', and it would likewise be a standing order, given any specific, routine production schedule -- but as soon as any changes became necessary in ordering, the process for making the change would be the same, and the standing order would be proactively altered, with consequences / a ripple-effect going both up and down the supply chains. (Hopefully shortages wouldn't be an issue, but if any complications arose those liberated laborers collectively controlling production would have to weigh various scenarios regarding supplies coming in for the future, and would have to relay their analyses outward, probably as public information.)





Thats because I stated quite clearly that you can really only do this in a very broad terms and not in any detail. I pointed out that it would be probably be best to leave it to the suppliers of inputs to resolve the various claims on a scarce input, using their own judgement and intuition. As part of the community they would share broadly the same values and this would be reflected in the allocation decisions they made. I also pointed out that social consumption demands are likely to carry greater weight than individual consumption demands. The point is not to ensure 100% accuracy in such allocation decisions - in a messy world thats not realistically achievable - but rather to ensure that one's decisions are broadly orientated in the right direction and skewed in favour of high priority end uses, how ever these are determined.


In general I agree that, yes, the overall political ethos would be enough of a guide to carry through any 'no-brainer' decisions, by the workers themselves, on which is more of a humane-type usage for any given materials that are undetermined.

But -- once humanity is fully liberated and a certain stasis of humaneness has been achieved and sustained, further directions in social production would become much more arbitrary and subjective. Production at that point would be highly discretionary and I would think there would be more possibilities for contention over the 'best' directions for the advancement of society, and how resources, including liberated labor, should be used.

It would be better to have a familiar method already in operation that would help society to 'see its own reflection', so to speak, for information-based clarity, for moving forward collectively. The absence of this could lead to a lacking of collective organization.





Trying to "aggregate" individual's rankings of thousands of different products is an absolutely futile and pointless exercise not to mention a huge waste of time and resources.


*Or* it could be as simple as a spreadsheet and email account:





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


Incredibly you make the algorithmic sorting of already-ranked items sound like a monumental task when in fact the processing power for such is already available on anyone's desktop, on their own now-overpowered PC computer.

To clarify, I'm *not* calling for people to submit *opinion surveys* on every consumer product in existence -- only to make a 'shopping list' for themselves for any given day, and/or a 'standing-order shopping list' for a daily (or longer) basis. This method would also extend to *political* demands, which, when algorithmically aggregated, would provide a precise reflection of society's 'state of mind' back to itself, for potential collective activity.





And it suffers from the same defect as 870's daft plan for a single worldwide plan for everything: it is a static represenation of individuals priorities when in the real world things are always changing


No, this process would iterate on a daily basis, at least, to reflect updated political-and-economic-demand-based information out to everyone, for further considerations and activity.

Such a process *could*, eventually, generalize over all localities to present a 'single worldwide plan', but I doubt it would / could include *everything* -- rather it would be the result of a vast bottom-up political participation.

Also, we haven't yet touched on the provisioning of liberated labor to fulfill any or all of this collective plan-making -- my model addresses such, through the use of labor-hour-based labor credits:





labor [supply] -- All workers will be entirely liberated from all coercion and threats related to basic human living needs, regardless of work status -- any labor roles will be entirely self-selected and open to collective labor organizing efforts on the basis of accumulated labor credits


---





Well enlighten me then because Im damned if I can see this "contradiction" you keep going on about ...

How does this statement:

What I am saying is "absurd" is the notion that you can devise some kind of rigid and extensive ordinal scale representing in detail how society evaluates the myriad end uses of production and where it places each of these within this formalised hierarchy of production goals.

"contradict" this?

I dont think of a hierachy of production goals as some kind of rigidly fixed, let alone detailed, schema



I won't pursue an argument here, Robbo -- I think I understand where you're coming from, and will welcome any elaboration / specification you'd like to provide.

[robbo203]

Incredibly you make the algorithmic sorting of already-ranked items sound like a monumental task when in fact the processing power for such is already available on anyone's desktop, on their own now-overpowered PC computer.

To clarify, I'm *not* calling for people to submit *opinion surveys* on every consumer product in existence -- only to make a 'shopping list' for themselves for any given day, and/or a 'standing-order shopping list' for a daily (or longer) basis. This method would also extend to *political* demands, which, when algorithmically aggregated, would provide a precise reflection of society's 'state of mind' back to itself, for potential collective activity.


No, this process would iterate on a daily basis, at least, to reflect updated political-and-economic-demand-based information out to everyone, for further considerations and activity.

Such a process *could*, eventually, generalize over all localities to present a 'single worldwide plan', but I doubt it would / could include *everything* -- rather it would be the result of a vast bottom-up political participation.


Try as I might I really can't see the point of your proposal. You say, if I understand you correctly, that it makes for a kind of proactive method of feeding information to production units and distribution centres to assist them in their decisionmaking. Individuals, millions and millions of us, each compile a kind of daily "shopping" list which is fed into a computer and then passed on in some unexplained fashion to the above producer units/ distribution stores to adjust their daily schedules accordingly. But why bother when they can monitor their own supplies directly and respond accordingly in accordance with the actual take up rates of stock. I would far sooner put the emphasis on the pro-activity on these units themselves than millions of dispersed "consumers". What would be the problem with that? Ideally such units would seek to maintain a buffer of stock to accommodate unexpected fluctuations in demand anyway

And, besides, there are all sorts of practical problems that I can see would arise with your proposal. What if people change their mind in the course of the day or for some reason do not take what they indicated they wanted to take on their "shopping list"? How do you disaggregate this massive body of data being generated on a daily basis and selectively direct the relevants bits of information to the relevant production unit or distribution centre? Are you going to distinguish between consumers on the basis of where they happen to live (their IP address perhaps?) and despatch only the response of consumers living in close proximity to a store for the store in question to act on? What about those consumers who for whatever reason have not submitted a daliy shopping list but still go along and help themselves to stock?

It all sounds terribly cumbersome and unwieldy to me. And there is a fundamental theoretical problem with trying to "aggregate" the numerous ordinal rankings of many individuals. Becuase we dont know the cardinal values individuals attach to each item on the list (even assuming people submit identical lists of items which is unlikely) we cannot know how much more one individuals might value her item 3 on the list compared with her items 4 or 5 in compairson with how much some other individual might value these same items.

Simply aggregating the multiple lists on the basis of their ordinality may therefore produce a quite distorted picture of what people really value since it presupposes individuals value each number on their ordinal list to the same extent. So John values number 3 on his list - a bag of carrots- equally passionately as Jill values her number 3 - a tin of olives. Crudely aggregating both their lists, rather like the voting procedure for the Eurovision song contest, can therefore present a quite misleading picture of what people actually want. This becomes particularly inportant if a given input is scarce and you have to select beween a number of end uses which one should receive priority in the allocation of that input

But, mainly, my objection would be that this whole procedure is simply unnnecessary and redundant. Why waste time and resources on it when the stores and production units have at the their finger tips the vital information they need to respond to changes in the pattern of demand?

[ckaihatsu]

Try as I might I really can't see the point of your proposal. You say, if I understand you correctly, that it makes for a kind of proactive method of feeding information to production units and distribution centres to assist them in their decisionmaking.


No, I'm going to throw a twist into the midst of your guesswork and note that liberated-labor might *not* want to be simple order-takers.

You *are* correct to use the term 'assist', though, since that's more in the appropriate spirit and direction of things, post-capitalism. I'll posit that there would be a procedural 'gap', or 'synapse', between the aspect of mass demands / orders collation, and the potential of liberated-labor to address the same to potentially fulfill it.





Individuals, millions and millions of us, each compile a kind of daily "shopping" list which is fed into a computer and then passed on in some unexplained fashion to the above producer units/ distribution stores to adjust their daily schedules accordingly. But why bother when they can monitor their own supplies directly and respond accordingly in accordance with the actual take up rates of stock. I would far sooner put the emphasis on the pro-activity on these units themselves than millions of dispersed "consumers". What would be the problem with that? Ideally such units would seek to maintain a buffer of stock to accommodate unexpected fluctuations in demand anyway


As I mentioned before I have no inclination or interest to nitpick over such labor-sided practices -- I see it as being strictly an algorithmic mechanism, or technique, and it would be within the collective discretion of a liberated labor as to whether to use such a technique or not.





And, besides, there are all sorts of practical problems that I can see would arise with your proposal. What if people change their mind in the course of the day or for some reason do not take what they indicated they wanted to take on their "shopping list"?


Discrepancies, or alterations within the span of a single day would hardly be disruptive of any production process -- and, with today's current technologies I'm sure all of the dynamics of my 'communist supply and demand' could very well take place in realtime instead of being pulsed day-to-day.

The worst-case, anyway, would be a slight surplus from a day's worth of superfluous orders, or a day's-worth of delay from an under-estimate of real needs -- hardly different from dealing with material quantities anyway, under hypothetically-perfect logistical conditions.





How do you disaggregate this massive body of data being generated on a daily basis and selectively direct the relevants bits of information to the relevant production unit or distribution centre?


Sure -- first off, the fundamental geographic unit for demand-pooling would be the 'locality', or local discrete area of concentrated population density and regular patterns of consumption. The aggregated, sorted ranked data would *not* have to be "disaggregated" because it would not function as live policy-setting information. Rather, it would effectively form a daily-iterating 'grand to-do list' that *informs* liberated labor / production units / distribution centers, for potential fulfillment.





Are you going to distinguish between consumers on the basis of where they happen to live (their IP address perhaps?) and despatch only the response of consumers living in close proximity to a store for the store in question to act on?


Geographic logistics wouldn't be a problem here -- consumers wouldn't even have to be identified at such a granular level for the purposes of distribution. Perhaps within a locality there might be geographical sub-divisions like zip codes / postal codes, for the purposes of a direct distribution to clusters of nearby end users. (The zip-code designation could accompany each individual demand list on the way in, thus providing appropriate data for the distribution of end-product quantities to a sub-locality area, like a neighborhood.) Warehouses and/or stores could be the final endpoint for distribution of altogether free-access goods.





What about those consumers who for whatever reason have not submitted a daliy shopping list but still go along and help themselves to stock?


I don't see this as being a problem, and this could also be where your automated stock-inventory mechanism could come into play, since it would provide real-world realtime data regarding actual rates of inventory depletion. In the case of many people simply being content with choosing from existing patterns of goods production, this consumption data would be relayed 'upstream' and liberated producers would get a sense over time of how actual quantities of consumption correlate to formal, aggregated demand lists.

(So, perhaps, workers might find that household goods tend to be consumed at about 20% over formal demand quantities, by item, on average, and they would know in advance to produce a 20%-30% surplus over formal demand for this category of products.)





It all sounds terribly cumbersome and unwieldy to me. And there is a fundamental theoretical problem with trying to "aggregate" the numerous ordinal rankings of many individuals. Becuase we dont know the cardinal values individuals attach to each item on the list (even assuming people submit identical lists of items which is unlikely) we cannot know how much more one individuals might value her item 3 on the list compared with her items 4 or 5 in compairson with how much some other individual might value these same items.

Simply aggregating the multiple lists on the basis of their ordinality may therefore produce a quite distorted picture of what people really value since it presupposes individuals value each number on their ordinal list to the same extent. So John values number 3 on his list - a bag of carrots- equally passionately as Jill values her number 3 - a tin of olives. Crudely aggregating both their lists, rather like the voting procedure for the Eurovision song contest, can therefore present a quite misleading picture of what people actually want. This becomes particularly inportant if a given input is scarce and you have to select beween a number of end uses which one should receive priority in the allocation of that input


But that's the whole point -- people already *know* in advance what they're doing and how the demand-pooling system functions. You're acting as though no one filled them in on what they're doing, and that they're just acting myopically and blank-mindedly whenever they submit an individual demands list. People would *know that they only get one #1 ranking slot on their lists and that that slot would signify paramount importance for the purposes of formal demand-making. They would *know* that their #1, #2, #3 slots, etc., would be formally considered as politically equivalent and proportionate to the *next person's* #1, #2, and #3 slots, etc., for any given day.

This method is well-suited to any situation where there *is* scarcity because the data would show that 'x' many people from a certain locality are requesting something that is scarce, whereas 'y' number of people from elsewhere may be requesting the same thing, *and* they happen to be physically *closer* to the location of the scarce resource, which may have an impact on collective decision-making over where that material is ultimately supplied-to.





But, mainly, my objection would be that this whole procedure is simply unnnecessary and redundant. Why waste time and resources on it when the stores and production units have at the their finger tips the vital information they need to respond to changes in the pattern of demand?


I'll differ with you because, once again, the stock-inventory mechanism can only address *existing patterns* of material uptake, and so is dependent on *past data* -- it cannot proactively address consumers who 'change their mind', as you put it, because there is no direct link from expressed consumer preferences to an initiation of new, unique production for creating new types of inventory supplies.

You're simply *asserting* that the stock-control mechanism would be able to respond to qualitative changes in demand -- (what if millions of people suddenly called for the production of driverless cars?) -- but you're not *explaining* how this could conceivably occur.


---


Also -- regarding 'zoning' for purposes of production and distribution / consumption:

tinyurl.com/66b3t4l




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

http://s6.postimg.org/cp6z6ed81/Multi_Tiered_System_of_Productive_and_Consumptiv.j pg (http://postimg.org/image/ccfl07uy5/full/)

[robbo203]

I'll differ with you because, once again, the stock-inventory mechanism can only address *existing patterns* of material uptake, and so is dependent on *past data* -- it cannot proactively address consumers who 'change their mind', as you put it, because there is no direct link from expressed consumer preferences to an initiation of new, unique production for creating new types of inventory supplies.

You're simply *asserting* that the stock-control mechanism would be able to respond to qualitative changes in demand -- (what if millions of people suddenly called for the production of driverless cars?) -- but you're not *explaining* how this could conceivably occur.



Yes, that much is true what you say above but then I have never asserted that a self regulating stock control mechanism is the only player in town. I agree that for qualitatively new products, quite different procedures are called for - perhaps something along the lines of consumer surveys , pilot studies and the like. However for the great bulk of consumer demand which is simply repeat demand, the stock control mechanism more than suffices and I cannot see the point in your proposal at all. It is simply not necessary in my view and therefore is a (considerable) waste of peoples' time and resources.

You still haven't answered my central question - why do distribution centres need to know in advance what people's intended daily shopping list is when they are perfectly capable of monitoring the actual uptake of stock they hold (the best indicator of all of actual consumer demand) and responding accordingly when stock reaches the re-order level?

This is to say nothing of the reliability of these daily "shopping" lists which I dont think youve really dealt with either, frankly. You assert confidently that " The worst-case, anyway, would be a slight surplus from a day's worth of superfluous orders, or a day's-worth of delay from an under-estimate of real needs -- hardly different from dealing with material quantities anyway, under hypothetically-perfect logistical conditions." But if you worse case scenario is repeated every day and you accumulate a slight surplus every day that adds up to quite a substantial surplus at the end of the week . Is your distributioin centre then going to continue being guided by these misleading "shopping lists" or is to going to say: "lets ignore these lists for the time being and deal with the actual situation we have on our hands which is a steadily accumulating surplus. If we continue being guided by these lists the situation is only going to get worse and worse" .

Which means in the end that the distributiion centre would have tell its suppliers to hold off sending any more of stuff over for a while until the stock is depleted sufficiently for the centre to consider restocking. In other words at the end day it would still fall back on the familiar old system of self regulating stock control mechanism which at least has a proven track record which is more than can be said about some other prposals

[ckaihatsu]

Yes, that much is true what you say above but then I have never asserted that a self regulating stock control mechanism is the only player in town.




I agree that for qualitatively new products, quite different procedures are called for - perhaps something along the lines of consumer surveys , pilot studies and the like.


*Or* -- why not just allow people to simply make a list, like a shopping list -- ?

If the items are already in production then they're most likely readily available, and the consumer orders are filled and distributed. (Or the person could take from already-existing supplies from known distribution sites, and your stock control mechanism kicks in, for replenishment.) The use of formal demand lists would contribute information to the public sphere, for the overall political economy, especially if the goods and services being requested were *not* already in production.





However for the great bulk of consumer demand which is simply repeat demand, the stock control mechanism more than suffices and I cannot see the point in your proposal at all. It is simply not necessary in my view and therefore is a (considerable) waste of peoples' time and resources.


We don't know the proportion of proactive demand that would be covered by repeating production, and what proportion would not -- you surmise that most ('the great bulk of') demand *would* be for repeating production, but your method can't accommodate even a *single* new request, if anyone happened to want a change from the status quo "catalog".

Also, the political / consumer demands list would be entirely optional, as I've already stated -- the whole 'communist supply and demand' model, including the 'labor credits' system, would not have to be used *at all* if everything could be done entirely on a gift-economy basis, everywhere. But if there was the slightest glitch with the gift economy, for even *one* item, or just *one* liberated laborer, then the social consequence would be a *political* one, which then couldn't be addressed by any post-capitalist political economy that operated on an ad-hoc basis by default.

The political demands list (and the whole model) is meant to be a society-wide formal guarantee mechanism for having a consistent, uniform approach to the post-capitalist political economy and liberated mass production.





You still haven't answered my central question - why do distribution centres need to know in advance what people's intended daily shopping list is when they are perfectly capable of monitoring the actual uptake of stock they hold (the best indicator of all of actual consumer demand) and responding accordingly when stock reaches the re-order level?


It's not so much the 'distribution center' per se, as much as it's the subset of *liberated labor* that should have such information -- you say 'distribution center' in such a way as to make it sound that such would be a known fixture, an institution of granite due to its capacity for algorithmically replenishing inventories.

Again, I find the prospect / project of a post-capitalist political economy to be a *bit* more involved and complex than just the part you're covering with the stock control mechanism.





This is to say nothing of the reliability of these daily "shopping" lists which I dont think youve really dealt with either, frankly. You assert confidently that " The worst-case, anyway, would be a slight surplus from a day's worth of superfluous orders, or a day's-worth of delay from an under-estimate of real needs -- hardly different from dealing with material quantities anyway, under hypothetically-perfect logistical conditions." But if you worse case scenario is repeated every day and you accumulate a slight surplus every day that adds up to quite a substantial surplus at the end of the week .


Again, you're either misunderstanding or intentionally misrepresenting how the daily political demand lists feed into the larger political-economy process. I'll excerpt from my model, as appropriate:





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




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




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174


So at this point the question you should be asking is 'How will the work get done to fulfill all of these requests and demands?' -- especially in a society that does not coerce people for their basic human needs to be met.





Is your distributioin centre then going to continue being guided by these misleading "shopping lists" or is to going to say: "lets ignore these lists for the time being and deal with the actual situation we have on our hands which is a steadily accumulating surplus. If we continue being guided by these lists the situation is only going to get worse and worse" .



From my previous post:





[T]he fundamental geographic unit for demand-pooling would be the 'locality', or local discrete area of concentrated population density and regular patterns of consumption. The aggregated, sorted ranked data would *not* have to be "disaggregated" because it would not function as live policy-setting information. Rather, it would effectively form a daily-iterating 'grand to-do list' that *informs* liberated labor / production units / distribution centers, for potential fulfillment.


---





Which means in the end that the distributiion centre would have tell its suppliers to hold off sending any more of stuff over for a while until the stock is depleted sufficiently for the centre to consider restocking. In other words at the end day it would still fall back on the familiar old system of self regulating stock control mechanism which at least has a proven track record which is more than can be said about some other prposals


This runaway-nightmare scenario you're putting forth wouldn't be logistically possible, because of the attentions of liberated labor itself -- orders / demands would be consciously reconciled with production possibilities, by policy package, and in relation to existing supplies. That's what workers do.





communist administration -- Distinct from the general political culture each project or production run will include a provision for an associated administrative component as an integral part of its total policy package -- a selected policy's proponents will be politically responsible for overseeing its implementation according to the policy's provisions

[Ledur]

robbo203,

Playing a little of devil's advocate, Austrian fanboys would say that the price system is better than any alternative, because:

(1) it is a way to allocate resources. "do more with less" means more private profit, when producing something other people want.
(2) it is a way to signal supply and demand among different actors in the production chain.
(3) it is a way to distribute/ration what society produces based on purchasing power.
(4) it is a way to valuate different alternatives, i.e opportunity costs (producers) and willingness to pay (consumer)
(5) it is dumb simple - serving as a unit of value and medium of exchange.

As a communist, I can deny every single item above. The market/price system is not a rational system, nor a fair system, not even a "natural" system, as discuted endlessly here. However, it's a complete, closed system, because it can handle all the aspects above.

Your system of self-regulating stocks is used side-by-side the price system every day. This in natura approach is basic, underlying of any economic system. But it doesn't solve the economic calculation problem, that's why you brought Liebig's law of minimum and the hierarchy of needs. It clearely works around (1) resource allocation, (2) supply and demand and (4) opportunity cost and use-value.

It's not a complete system yet, because item (3) - rationing and purchase power (or in a communist society, "access") - remained untouched. You could argue that rationing would not be needed for "most" items, just for scarce ones. That, though, leaves a giant Achilles heel. Your system is not closed like the price system if you don't provide a concrete solution.

Also, item (5) is only partially solutioned: while direct use is more natural than money accounting, it's not clear wether any other kind of accounting is needed or not. If you want to introduce the simplest ration system, yes, you'll need to fill things with numbers.

[RedMaterialist]

You still haven't answered my central question - why do distribution centres need to know in advance what people's intended daily shopping list is when they are perfectly capable of monitoring the actual uptake of stock they hold (the best indicator of all of actual consumer demand) and responding accordingly when stock reaches the re-order level?

[/I]
Which means in the end that the distributiion centre would have tell its suppliers to hold off sending any more of stuff over for a while until the stock is depleted sufficiently for the centre to consider restocking. In other words at the end day it would still fall back on the familiar old system of self regulating stock control mechanism which at least has a proven track record which is more than can be said about some other prposals

Isn't that what giant companies like Walmart and McDonalds already do? As soon as an item is purchased the sale is registered on a central computer system which then, in a micro-second, directs that more or less of the product be manufactured or shipped. Price, supply, even demand, through advertising, are centrally planned and controlled through computers. Most people on this website are using a centrally planned and controlled browser, google, probably.

The final decision these monopolies make, however, is based on their rate of profit, which is constantly diminishing. If there is a slight misadjustment anywhere in the system the whole thing can come crashing down.

So, is there any rational basis for preventing society from taking over the central planning system of the monopoly portion of the economy and running it as a non-profit? And then allowing the smaller companies to compete with themselves until one or two of them reach the monopoly stage (i.e., Lenin's control of the commanding heights of the economy?)

In other words, if a centrally planned economy can work for Walmart, McDonalds, GM, Microsoft, Google, etc. then why can't it work for society as a whole? In fact, isn't that the whole idea behind historical materialism? That the means of production, monopoly pricing and production, ultimately determines the social structure of production, i.e. monopoly control by society?

[robbo203]

Isn't that what giant companies like Walmart and McDonalds already do? As soon as an item is purchased the sale is registered on a central computer system which then, in a micro-second, directs that more or less of the product be manufactured or shipped. Price, supply, even demand, through advertising, are centrally planned and controlled through computers. Most people on this website are using a centrally planned and controlled browser, google, probably.

The final decision these monopolies make, however, is based on their rate of profit, which is constantly diminishing. If there is a slight misadjustment anywhere in the system the whole thing can come crashing down.

So, is there any rational basis for preventing society from taking over the central planning system of the monopoly portion of the economy and running it as a non-profit? And then allowing the smaller companies to compete with themselves until one or two of them reach the monopoly stage (i.e., Lenin's control of the commanding heights of the economy?)

In other words, if a centrally planned economy can work for Walmart, McDonalds, GM, Microsoft, Google, etc. then why can't it work for society as a whole? In fact, isn't that the whole idea behind historical materialism? That the means of production, monopoly pricing and production, ultimately determines the social structure of production, i.e. monopoly control by society?

As Ledur points out a self regulating system of stock control using calculation in kind is something that already exists and upon which capitalist production utterly depends. Communism simply dispenses with monetary calculation which operates alongside calculation in kind as a parralel system of accounting.

Central planning, at least in its classic sense, is the proposal to replace multiple planning agencies with one single planning agency, formulating one single, apriori, society wide plan covering the entire inputs/outputs of the economy. So, no, I wouldn't call Walmart, McDonalds, GM, Microsoft, Google, etc examples of "central planning". They are clearly separate planning agencies which, independently of each other, formulate their own business plans. Indeed, the different departments/branches of each of these corporations also to an extent act independently of each other - they have a degree of autonomy over certain matters.

Communism is not a case of taking over these large corporations and running them on a so called "non profit" basis while allowing smaller non monopolistic companies to compete among themselves. The subtext of what you are suggesting is the retention of capitalism in all its essentials.

Communism fundamentally gets rid of all production for the market , all buying and selling, money, the wages system - the lot - and puts production on an entirely new basis in which the organisational forms of capitalism - big corporations, little companies - disappears as well.

I think a lot of confusion over this point arises from the fact that some people here seem to think that a self regulating system, of stock control is a sort of "simulated market". Its got nothing to do with the market whatsoever but simply arises from the fact that inevitably planning in communist society or any other kind of feasible society, will necessarily take the form of polycentric planning. Society wide planning is simply not a realistic option; you cannot possibly "plan" trhe total pattern of production from the outset

[cyu]

Yep, although there's a different underlying theme, http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we-need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into-todays-corporate-world/ makes the same basic observation:

there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!

The firm operates outside the market; as an island within the market archipelago. firms can be seen as oases of planning and command within the vast expanse of the market.

[Ledur]

No thats not what it means at all. The "law of the minimum" was formulated by the 19th century agricultural chemist, Justus von Liebig, and basically holds that agricultural output is always constrained by some "limiting factor". He was particularly concerned with nitrogen based fertilier as the limiting factor in his day. Increasing the supply of the limiting factor allows for an increase in output but it also means some other factor might then become the new limiting factor - for example, water or sunlight. Check out this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum

This basic model can be applied generally, as I have done, to the question of resource allocation in a socialist economy. For any particular bundle of inputs required to produce a given output, one of these inputs can be identified as the limiting factor. This why a self regulating system of stock control will play such a vital role in a socialist economy- i.e. it enables one to identify resource bottlenecks obstructing increased output of the good in question.

The basic principle invoked here is that one should economise most on that which is most scarce, or least abundant, meaning the limiting factor. That might very well mean resticting the allocation of the good in question to only high priority end uses. You can thus see how this principle of the law of the minimum could mesh with the principle of a hierarchy of production priorities which we discussed earlier

From another thread:


From http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionI4:


To indicate the relative changes in scarcity of a given good it will be necessary to calculate a "scarcity index." This would inform potential users of this good whether its demand is outstripping its supply so that they may effectively adjust their decisions in light of the decisions of others. This index could be, for example, a percentage figure which indicates the relation of orders placed for a commodity to the amount actually produced. For example, a good which has a demand higher than its supply would have an index value of 101% or higher. This value would inform potential users to start looking for substitutes for it or to economise on its use. Such a scarcity figure would exist for each collective as well as (possibly) a generalised figure for the industry as a whole on a regional, "national," etc. level.

In this way, a specific good could be seen to be in high demand and so only those producers who really required it would place orders for it (so ensuring effective use of resources). Needless to say, stock levels and other basic book-keeping techniques would be utilised in order to ensure a suitable buffer level of a specific good existed. This may result in some excess supply of goods being produced and used as stock to buffer out unexpected changes in the aggregate demand for a good.

Such a buffer system would work on an individual workplace level and at a communal level. Syndicates would obviously have their inventories, stores of raw materials and finished goods "on the shelf," which can be used to meet excesses in demand. Communal stores, hospitals and so on would have their stores of supplies in case of unexpected disruptions in supply. This is a common practice even in capitalism, although it would (perhaps) be extended in a free society to ensure changes in supply and demand do not have disruptive effects.


There's a part of robbo's article called law of minimum, which says that, in an environment without prices, the scarciest input will limit the output.

I'll try to join the "scarcity index" and the "law of minimum", and use some numbers.

For example, to produce X you need inputs A, B and C.

1000 units of X = 15 units of A + 50 units of B + 5 units of C

Suppose that you usually produce 1000 units of X in a month. You call your suppliers. The scarcity index of each input is:
A: 0,80
B: 0,70
C: 1,25

Scarcity index (demand/supply) of C is 1,25. That means C must save their stock and can't deliver you 5 units. This time, C will hand you over 1/1,25 = 0,8*5 = 4 units.

All your production will respect your scarciest input (unless you can change the industrial process, but let's suppost it's not the case), and you can only produce 80% of the usual output:

800 units of X = 12 units of A + 40 units of B + 4 units of C

Finally you have to signal ahead this scarcity to your "customers". Scarcity index of X is 1,25. Production units ahead of X expected 1000 units, but only 800 units will be distributed accordingly.

Above I tried to explain numerically how the Law of Minimum would relate with supply/demand in an environment without money, signaling scarcity through the supply chain.

How the Hierachy of Needs could be implemented using the scarcity index?

Let's suppose we have 4 categories, '1' is the most important, '4' is the most superfluous. In a situation of scarcity, stocks would give preference to "customers" of the category '1'.

In the example above, usually 1000 units of X are produced for 4 customers, one of each category:
100 category '1' + 200 category '2' + 300 category '3' + 400 category '4'

If only 800 of X are produced, if we didn't consider their category, then output would be proportionally distributed:
80 category '1' + 160 category '2' + 240 category '3' + 320 category '4'

Considering the hierarchy of needs, the solution I think of is to weigh the category to each customer, by
1) modificating the scarcity index of X, from category '1' to category '4'
'1': 1,0000
'2': 1,0833
'3': 1,1667
'4': 1,2500

2) applying the weight above and distributing accordingly. I won't show details, but final output would be:

93 category '1' + 171 category '2' + 239 category '3' + 297 category '4'

(By the way, robbo203, your article is off-line again)

[Illegalitarian]

This is all way too fucking complicated you guys I think we should just keep capitalism.



On a serious note, to address the OP: The calculation problem at its core is one of feedback. Capitalism's feedback mechanism is money, of course.. if enough people buy a certain product, this shows that product's popularity, and thus more of it and different types of it get produced and distributed. If a product is not popular, if not enough people are buying it to make up production costs etc, the product generally does not last very long.

It's kind of like the worst democracy ever, where people vote with a little green piece of paper and some people have way more of this paper than others.



I've always imagined that any sort of socialist system of planning would include perhaps some sort of electronic feedback system, where one takes their product to, what in a capitalist society would be a cash register, and the person behind the counter would scan said product's barcode as they do now to see what the price is.. only the function of this would not be to gauge price, but to record that the product being obtained by an individual is, indeed, being consumed, and either directly feeding that information to producers or storing it to send at the end of a day, or whatever period is appropriate.


Chile under Allende had a pretty interesting planning system that was decentralized in such a manner and worked quite well.

[John Nada]

This is all way too fucking complicated you guys I think we should just keep capitalism.



On a serious note, to address the OP: The calculation problem at its core is one of feedback. Capitalism's feedback mechanism is money, of course.. if enough people buy a certain product, this shows that product's popularity, and thus more of it and different types of it get produced and distributed. If a product is not popular, if not enough people are buying it to make up production costs etc, the product generally does not last very long.

It's kind of like the worst democracy ever, where people vote with a little green piece of paper and some people have way more of this paper than others.I'd say it's capitalism that has an economic calculation problem. Billions are spent on trinkets that will get thrown out. Planned obsolesce forces people to buy newer shit. And yet there's no profit motive to give everyone bare necessities There's enough food to feed the world a few times over and most of it gets thrown out. There's homeless people and vacant houses at the same time. Painkillers and antimalarial drugs that were discovered about 200 years ago are scarce in many undeveloped countries. Some CEOs make more than whole countries. I really can't imagine socialism doing any worse.
I've always imagined that any sort of socialist system of planning would include perhaps some sort of electronic feedback system, where one takes their product to, what in a capitalist society would be a cash register, and the person behind the counter would scan said product's barcode as they do now to see what the price is.. only the function of this would not be to gauge price, but to record that the product being obtained by an individual is, indeed, being consumed, and either directly feeding that information to producers or storing it to send at the end of a day, or whatever period is appropriate.They do that already. Inventory and logistics is computerized already, be it mines, farms, factories, stores, construction, restaurants, banks, everything. The problem is it's all for profit, not for need. Hell, managements' job is basically to discipline workers for profitability. If anything socialism would greatly reduce the bureaucracy that exists in "actually existing capitalism."

No business acts like the "Austrian economists" think, where two men or "rational actors" make exchanges that only exist in isolation. Which is why they weren't taken seriously by anyone till the recession, where they provided much need porn for the bourgeoisie's broken egos.:(

It's like they're stuck on the first chapter of "Capital" with the Robinson Crusoe part. Torturing myself reading Hayek, Mises, and Menger, I might have noticed something; Menger plagiarized Marx!:ohmy: He just rips off a lot of what Marx wrote in "Capital" and then slaps on his own ideas and conclusions. Was Menger one of the people Engels complained were plagiarizing Marx? Mises and Hayek did this same shit too. What you end up with is a few things that appears insightful(Marx) trapped in total nonsense(the Austrians). And people swallow it up, hook, line and sinker. How any of them even got into a university in the first place, probably cronies in the Austrian government:rolleyes:. In stripping Marx's analysis of any historic/dialectical materialism and revolution, and adding their own metaphysics and mysticism, it's used as theology for the rich. Bukharin called it:
We consider the Austrian theory as the ideology of the bourgeois who has already been eliminated from the process of production, the psychology of the declining bourgeois, who has thus immortalized, in his scientifically fruitless theory - as we shall see later — the peculiarities of his failing psychology. http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1927/leisure-economics/introduction.htm This "economic calculation problem" never made sense to me. If their was a calculation problem, it's probably because Russia wasn't socialist. Hell, I don't even think the Soviets thought they were socialist when Mises shitted out the "economic calculation problem".
Chile under Allende had a pretty interesting planning system that was decentralized in such a manner and worked quite well.Too bad the "free market' took him out.:( Who knows what could have happened if that program succeed. It could have changed the economic books.

[Loony Le Fist]

My partner works in oceanography, and their models are much more complex than a realistic economic model would need to be.

Fascinating. Real economic problems are non-convex, so you can't solve them in many cases. Once you exceed a single producer and consumer the complexity class is PSPACE (or greater). Our current understanding of computer science means that a monkey throwing darts at a chart (a random search) is no more efficient than any discoverable algorithm. Some are provably impossible to solve--without super-Turing computation. I'd like to know how you managed to accomplish this.

[tuwix]

Fascinating. Real economic problems are non-convex, so you can't solve them in many cases. Once you exceed a single producer and consumer the complexity class is PSPACE (or greater). Our current understanding of computer science means that a monkey throwing darts at a chart (a random search) is no more efficient than any discoverable algorithm. Some are provably impossible to solve--without super-Turing computation. I'd like to know how you managed to accomplish this.

^^ And Super-Turing computation is impossible to build according to mathematics end computer science. :)

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Fascinating. Real economic problems are non-convex, so you can't solve them in many cases. Once you exceed a single producer and consumer the complexity class is PSPACE (or greater). Our current understanding of computer science means that a monkey throwing darts at a chart (a random search) is no more efficient than any discoverable algorithm. Some are provably impossible to solve--without super-Turing computation. I'd like to know how you managed to accomplish this.

We're talking about two entirely different things. Realistic models of capitalist markets sometimes violate what is called the convexity assumption. That is all well and interesting but - it's completely irrelevant. We aren't talking about the markets, god's sakes. There is no finance in socialism, not even finance with money replaced by labour money or waiting lists or whatever. All that is left for the socialist society is to assign inputs to produce enough objects and services to satisfy need - computationally, this is a fairly trivial problem.