Luxuary in a Planned Economy

[Redhead]

So i was wondering: in a planned economy, how would "luxuary goods" be produced? I know that things which is not worth producing will be stopped and be replaced with something usefull (for example food production) But who decides whats worth producing? It feels wierd to go to a workers council and demand a new TV, or a massaging chair. Surely not everyone would want a massaging chair, personal preferances are individual. But to start a massaging chair producing factory would need a majority vote. So... What to do?

(Massaging chairs is just an example, i doubt it will be the most demanded product ;) )

[Ledur]

Possible solutions and some examples:

1) Public massaging chairs, public yatchts, etc
2) Some kind of "rent" system (not based on money though), for jewelry and other small luxury items
3) Enter a line, first come, first serve - for fine wine
4) Instead of mansions and luxury private apartments, more nice hotels, where anyone could spend some time if there's room

[bropasaran]

Kropotkin's idea was that the communally planned work will be concerned only with necessities of life, which I think is reasonable, as they have a relatively constant demand and can thus be most efficiently planned for in advance.

Kropotkin says how, living in an anarcho-communist community, for example "from 20 to 45 or 50 years of age, you consecrate 4 or 5 hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to existence. Choose yourself the producing groups which you wish to join, or organize a new group, provided that it will undertake to produce necessaries." He says "by working 4 or 5 hours a day till the age of 45 or 50, man could easily produce all that is necessary to guarantee comfort to society." Even though what were needs in Kropotkin's time like food, clothing, furniture, "houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools, museums, etc.," have evolved to be far more complex and encompass a lot more infrastructure, the approximative calculation of time needed for that will be surely smaller even then Kropotkin anticipated, due to great development of technology since his time.

When the community agrees upon the common plan of production, decides what they consider necessities, and make plans how to provide them for themselves- how do people then acquire things that are not considered necessities by the community, and are thus not part of the common plan of production? Answer- productive affinity groups.

Again from Kropotkin: "He will discharge first his task in the field, the factory, and so on, which he owes to society as his contribution to the general production. And he will employ the second half of his day, his week, or his year, to satisfy his artistic or scientific needs, or his hobbies. Thousands of societies will spring up to gratify every taste and every possible fancy."

"He who wishes for a grand piano will enter the association of musical instrument makers. And by giving the association part of his half-days' leisure, he will soon possess the piano of his dreams. If he is passionately fond of astronomical studies he will join the association of astronomers, with its philosophers, its observers, its calculators, with its artists in astronomical instruments, its scientists and amateurs, and he will have the telescope he desires"...

Whatever number of "hours a day which each will have at his disposal, after having consecrated several hours to the production of necessities, will amply suffice to satisfy all longings for luxury however varied. Thousands of associations would undertake to supply them. What is now the privilege of an insignificant minority would be accessible to all. Luxury, ceasing to be a foolish and ostentatious display of the bourgeois class, would become an artistic pleasure."

[tuwix]

Possible solutions and some examples:

1) Public massaging chairs, public yatchts, etc
2) Some kind of "rent" system (not based on money though), for jewelry and other small luxury items
3) Enter a line, first come, first serve - for fine wine
4) Instead of mansions and luxury private apartments, more nice hotels, where anyone could spend some time if there's room

The solution is booking. Everything luxury left should be given for a free rent. The free rent should be reserved in computer system.

[Red Economist]

In the case of Marxism, I think there is an ideological change is how people define what they want;
under capitalism, as a sovereign individual, you get to demand what ever you want because we are alienated from the process of production (and just walk into a shop expecting things to be there);
whereas under communism: I think people are (supposed) to be more collectivist and recognize that people actually have to produce it- so the sense of entitlement shouldn't be a strong.
So I think it would be discussed amongst people and democratically voted on based on what they think they can do. But the important thing here- is that it is subject to a collective decision, and cannot just be individualistic instant gratification. There is kind of a process of negotiation involved.

[Red Star Rising]

I imagine that, if demand is high enough for something like a massaging chair, massaging chairs would be produced by society in general (some of the people who want massaging chairs would know how or work out to make them) because one of the goals of Communism is to have people rule the commodities they produce (not that the term commodities would exist) so some kind of democratic system would probably take place for people to decide what does and doesn't get produced rather than everyone being ruled by a globalized system of private production. This is alienation as Marx put it.

The mysteriousness and fetishism surrounding material goods would not be nearly as high as it is now so the mentality I think would not be "what do I want, and when is it magically materializing on a supermarket shelf?" but something more like "what are we capable of producing and is what I want worth it?"

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I don't see the problem, to be honest. The need for massage chairs is assessed by the planning bodies, a plan is drawn up that includes X units of massage chairs being produced in the next period, and that plan is either accepted or voted down. Communism is not some sort of hairshirt asceticism, in fact asceticism would presumably not exist in communism.

[We Must Devour]

Though, I don't see a communist society as focused on material goods as a capitalist one, should limits be imposed to ensure nobody abuses the hard work of producers? Maybe the planning body would collect a list of names for those interested in the product, and depending how much can be made, decide how much is allowed per citizen? IE maybe we have 1000 citizens, and the group decides to create 1000 bottles of vodka per week. Naturally, a good portion of these citizens wouldn't be interested, and some would be extremely interested, so the group decides to impose a limit of 3 bottles per person per week. At the end of the week, whatever is left over is up for grabs.
Is this a viable/reasonable idea? Do you think it could lead to problems? Let me know because I'm new to these forums and my only socialist friend to discuss this stuff with has been my brother :ohmy:

[Red Star Rising]

I don't see the problem, to be honest. The need for massage chairs is assessed by the planning bodies, a plan is drawn up that includes X units of massage chairs being produced in the next period, and that plan is either accepted or voted down. Communism is not some sort of hairshirt asceticism, in fact asceticism would presumably not exist in communism.

I think the question is more about how luxury goods/indulgences would be organised in a moneyless system of free access. In which case the problem is that luxury commodities would have to be unequally distributed if they are scarce.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I think the question is more about how luxury goods/indulgences would be organised in a moneyless system of free access. In which case the problem is that luxury commodities would have to be unequally distributed if they are scarce.

That's not what was being asked, though.

Anyway, I have to admit that the popularity of this argument fascinates me. Why would "luxury items" be scarce? Keep in mind that, even in the present, in the epoch of decaying capitalism, human society can produce things like main battle tanks, i.e. waste tonnes of metal, electronics and so on, for some idiot to get killed in, and it can produce them by the thousands. But you think that giving everyone who wants a massage chair one is beyond our abilities?

[Red Star Rising]

That's not what was being asked, though.

Anyway, I have to admit that the popularity of this argument fascinates me. Why would "luxury items" be scarce? Keep in mind that, even in the present, in the epoch of decaying capitalism, human society can produce things like main battle tanks, i.e. waste tonnes of metal, electronics and so on, for some idiot to get killed in, and it can produce them by the thousands. But you think that giving everyone who wants a massage chair one is beyond our abilities?

things like paintings and fine wine etc. will always be scarce.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

things like paintings and fine wine etc. will always be scarce.

Wine can be (and is) mass-produced; the demand for paintings isn't that great but their prints can be mass-produced as well.

[Red Star Rising]

Wine can be (and is) mass-produced; the demand for paintings isn't that great but their prints can be mass-produced as well.

Fine Champagne can't be mass produced and people prefer originals.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Fine Champagne can't be mass produced and people prefer originals.

The worldwide production of Champagne is something like, what, 300 million bottles per year? That's mass production. Given the size of the Champagne wine district, that production could be increased with few if any problems.

(Also, the original Champagne wine was a heavy red designed to compete with Burgundy. I think most people would be able to detect only slight differences between Champagne and other quality sparkling wines. What sells Champagne, in capitalism, is the marketing. Without the marketing, Champagne would probably be top-tier among sparkling wines, but it wouldn't be sought after as such.)

[Red Star Rising]

The worldwide production of Champagne is something like, what, 300 million bottles per year? That's mass production. Given the size of the Champagne wine district, that production could be increased with few if any problems.

(Also, the original Champagne wine was a heavy red designed to compete with Burgundy. I think most people would be able to detect only slight differences between Champagne and other quality sparkling wines. What sells Champagne, in capitalism, is the marketing. Without the marketing, Champagne would probably be top-tier among sparkling wines, but it wouldn't be sought after as such.)

I don't disagree, but the fact of the matter is that people still like to have things that in a capitalist society have a 200 pound price tag and such things have to be produced and matured in very specific conditions. Is it worth the price? certainly not, but people still want it. I don't doubt that the prestige surrounding such items would decrease greatly in a moneyless society but it is a bit of a stretch to claim that demand for "fine wines" will disappear entirely, or at least would drop to a level at which free access is manageable.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I don't disagree, but the fact of the matter is that people still like to have things that in a capitalist society have a 200 pound price tag and such things have to be produced and matured in very specific conditions. Is it worth the price? certainly not, but people still want it. I don't doubt that the prestige surrounding such items would decrease greatly in a moneyless society but it is a bit of a stretch to claim that demand for "fine wines" will disappear entirely, or at least would drop to a level at which free access is manageable.

But even at this stage, being "produced and matured in specific condition" (which is often a marketing ploy, or what we in the trade call "bullshit") doesn't prevent mass production, why should it prevent mass production in socialism?

[Lord Testicles]

I don't disagree, but the fact of the matter is that people still like to have things that in a capitalist society have a 200 pound price tag and such things have to be produced and matured in very specific conditions. Is it worth the price? certainly not, but people still want it. I don't doubt that the prestige surrounding such items would decrease greatly in a moneyless society but it is a bit of a stretch to claim that demand for "fine wines" will disappear entirely, or at least would drop to a level at which free access is manageable.

Nobody is saying that the demand for fine wines will disappear entirely or even would drop. I would actually argue the opposite, as more of humanity rises out of poverty and subsistence living then the demand for things like fine wine and other luxuries would rise.

Why do you think that a society which tries to organise itself along rational lines (with all the extra labour and materials that is currently tied up in useless occupations) would be unable to provide for those needs?

[Red Star Rising]

Nobody is saying that the demand for fine wines will disappear entirely or even would drop. I would actually argue the opposite, as more of humanity rises out of poverty and subsistence living then the demand for things like fine wine and other luxuries would rise.

Why do you think that a society which tries to organise itself along rational lines (with all the extra labour and materials that is currently ties up in useless occupations) would be unable to provide for those needs?

I don't necessarily, I am just pointing out that that is the key issue of debate here. I am providing the alternative view though I don't really subscribe to either side because A) such arguments are often fruitless seeing as we can't possibly know how a Communist society would organize itself in such fine detail and B) Civilization isn't going to collapse because some people had to wait for their fine wine or massage chair, people would work something out (a rotational order system perhaps?)

[Slavic]

A) such arguments are often fruitless seeing as we can't possibly know how a Communist society would organize itself in such fine detail

Such an argument has no place in a discussion like this because it negates the entire discussion.

Honestly, if a good is luxury or not doesn't matter, what does matter is scarcity or not.

Just because I may want a wine that has been aged for 500 years in a barrel handcrafted by monastic monks does not mean that I can or should be allowed to have such a wine.

Some goods are scarce yet beneficial, ie. airline flights, others are scarce and highly impractical to produce, ie. 500 year old wine made from monastic monk blood and toil.

[Red Star Rising]

Such an argument has no place in a discussion like this because it negates the entire discussion.

Honestly, if a good is luxury or not doesn't matter, what does matter is scarcity or not.

Just because I may want a wine that has been aged for 500 years in a barrel handcrafted by monastic monks does not mean that I can or should be allowed to have such a wine.

Some goods are scarce yet beneficial, ie. airline flights, others are scarce and highly impractical to produce, ie. 500 year old wine made from monastic monk blood and toil.

i didn't say the discussion is pointless, I said that i don't subscribe to either side of the debate seeing as it is impossible to come to a final conclusion. Not every discussion has to be resolved you know.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I don't necessarily, I am just pointing out that that is the key issue of debate here. I am providing the alternative view though I don't really subscribe to either side because A) such arguments are often fruitless seeing as we can't possibly know how a Communist society would organize itself in such fine detail and B) Civilization isn't going to collapse because some people had to wait for their fine wine or massage chair, people would work something out (a rotational order system perhaps?)

I don't think this is a minor detail, though, we aren't talking about what will be the title of the presiding member of the Central Soviet, but the basic Marxist position that socialism will be a society of abundance and free access.


Such an argument has no place in a discussion like this because it negates the entire discussion.

Honestly, if a good is luxury or not doesn't matter, what does matter is scarcity or not.

Just because I may want a wine that has been aged for 500 years in a barrel handcrafted by monastic monks does not mean that I can or should be allowed to have such a wine.

Some goods are scarce yet beneficial, ie. airline flights, others are scarce and highly impractical to produce, ie. 500 year old wine made from monastic monk blood and toil.

"Should be allowed"? By who?

In any case, I highly doubt there will be monks in socialism. At the same time, I am pretty sure that the socialist society will be able to produce wine chemically, physically etc. identical to that that has been aged for 500 years in hand-crafted barrels etc. And hopefully in the socialist society people will not fetishise something being "authentic", "hand-made" etc. (eugh).

[Red Star Rising]

In any case, I highly doubt there will be monks in socialism. At the same time, I am pretty sure that the socialist society will be able to produce wine chemically, physically etc. identical to that that has been aged for 500 years in hand-crafted barrels etc. And hopefully in the socialist society people will not fetishise something being "authentic", "hand-made" etc. (eugh).

There will probably always be fetishism in that sense. Wine made in a lab doesn't feel as romantic as wine from a vineyard in France. People will imagine a difference in taste, human psychology does that sometimes

[Slavic]

"Should be allowed"? By who?

In any case, I highly doubt there will be monks in socialism. At the same time, I am pretty sure that the socialist society will be able to produce wine chemically, physically etc. identical to that that has been aged for 500 years in hand-crafted barrels etc. And hopefully in the socialist society people will not fetishise something being "authentic", "hand-made" etc. (eugh).

Shouldn't be allowed by me, thats who. Ill shake my fist and shout dirty names at idiots who want ridiculous things that are implausible and wish to squander the socialized means of production on such things.

Ill surely not be voting for chemically aged 500 year old wine produce in soviet atheist monk handcrafted barrels at my next syndicate meeting. We are going to produce hairshirts, how god intended man to dress.

[The Modern Prometheus]

I think Kropotkin's idea is the most workable for a Communist society. Take care of peoples basic needs first then look after peoples wants.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

There will probably always be fetishism in that sense. Wine made in a lab doesn't feel as romantic as wine from a vineyard in France. People will imagine a difference in taste, human psychology does that sometimes

Yet oddly enough, this "always existing" fetishism did not exist in, for example, the feudal period. If you presented a modern textile loom and cheap Chinese labour to the Grand Duke of the West, he would undoubtedly be extremely pleased. As late as the fifties, things that are derided now, things like pre-sliced bread, inexpensive frozen food and so on, were all the rage.

[Slavic]

Yet oddly enough, this "always existing" fetishism did not exist in, for example, the feudal period. If you presented a modern textile loom and cheap Chinese labour to the Grand Duke of the West, he would undoubtedly be extremely pleased. As late as the fifties, things that are derided now, things like pre-sliced bread, inexpensive frozen food and so on, were all the rage.


You can't really related commodity fetishism with a system such as feudalism where commodities didn't exit, but then you could go on and state that in communism commodities wouldn't exist, so no fetishism.

[Redistribute the Rep]

You can't really related commodity fetishism with a system such as feudalism where commodities didn't exit, but then you could go on and state that in communism commodities wouldn't exist, so no fetishism.

I think his point is that culture can influence people's tastes. We aren't 'inherently' attracted to expensive wine it's really just a cultural thing that we place more value on it, which can be changed

[Red Star Rising]

You can't really related commodity fetishism with a system such as feudalism where commodities didn't exit, but then you could go on and state that in communism commodities wouldn't exist, so no fetishism.

People's illogical preferences are not necessarily connected to the fact that commodities are produced. Capitalism exacerbates fetishism certainly, but without capitalism it would not disappear completely.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

So i was wondering: in a planned economy, how would "luxuary goods" be produced? I know that things which is not worth producing will be stopped and be replaced with something usefull (for example food production) But who decides whats worth producing? It feels wierd to go to a workers council and demand a new TV, or a massaging chair. Surely not everyone would want a massaging chair, personal preferances are individual. But to start a massaging chair producing factory would need a majority vote. So... What to do?

(Massaging chairs is just an example, i doubt it will be the most demanded product ;) )

If robots could make said commodity like massaging chairs, who cares? Why would you need to vote? I also think "luxury," is like subjective because to me a hot shower, chocolate, weed, shelter, etc. are all luxuries as is my assortment of collectible and so on. I mean, someone could very well love massages so much they'd tots be down to run the chair making robot 'work' force. Just like I would want to work in a pet rescue or pet place with all the animals and such.

[cyu]

Note, this isn't going to answer your question, since my preferred type of anarchism will have an "unplanned" economy, but anyway, some things I'll try to stick to:

1. Property has been abolished.
2. No forced labor.
3. To each according to his need.

Luxury goods are obviously not needs, but (my kind of) anarchists will not be trying to stop you from producing them. Instead, you are free to try to recruit as many people as you'd like to help you produce whatever you want. After it's produced, since property has been abolished, you still have no more claim to whatever object than anyone else - however, one would assume the people who supported your production efforts are the ones who wanted the thing, and most others are simply not interested and will just leave you guys to your eccentricities.

The main exception to the abolition of property is #3 - those who need some object to survive deserve to use it more than those who do not need it to survive. Even if you disagree with this principle, in practice, people are more willing to use violence to meet their survival needs than they are willing to risk injury for non-essential things. However, in general nobody really needs luxury goods to survive, so there's much less of a reason to fight over them. What's more likely to be fought over, however, may be the means of production used to produce the luxury goods - for example, someone may need the factory or raw materials to produce life-saving medical supplies or something - in that case, those with the greater need would be more willing to fight for control, and in principle, they'd deserve control more than those who merely want to use it for luxury production.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

You can't really related commodity fetishism with a system such as feudalism where commodities didn't exit, but then you could go on and state that in communism commodities wouldn't exist, so no fetishism.

Commodities do exist in feudalism, although generalised commodity production, which is characteristic of capitalism, does not. In any case, I wasn't talking about what Marx calls "commodity fetishism", but the fetishism of the "authentic", the "hand-made" and so on. In fact, if such fetishism existed in the mediaeval period, there would be no Champagne as we know it today, as the region of Champagne traditionally produced red wines. This wine, however, faded in popularity compared to rivaling Burgundian wines (Burgundy, apparently, being the ducal equivalent of the kid who always starts fights on the playground). And the winemakers of Champagne didn't ask for a DOC or whatever the French equivalent is, they didn't bemoan "authentic" Champagne wine being lost, but simply started producing white and similar wines.

[ckaihatsu]

So i was wondering: in a planned economy, how would "luxuary goods" be produced?


I'll suggest that everyone's mass demands could be self-prioritized (on a ranking of 1 through infinity), and then also *cumulatively* mass-prioritized:





[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.





Possible solutions and some examples:

1) Public massaging chairs, public yatchts, etc


Yes.





2) Some kind of "rent" system (not based on money though), for jewelry and other small luxury items


'Timeshare':





One possible option might be a calendar-year timesharing, if the requesters are open to that.





3) Enter a line, first come, first serve - for fine wine





[T]he quick, administrative answer might be basically 'first come, first served' -- even if it has to measured to a microsecond-point accuracy.





4) Instead of mansions and luxury private apartments, more nice hotels, where anyone could spend some time if there's room


'Public', like with the items at 1).





Kropotkin's idea was that the communally planned work will be concerned only with necessities of life,


Even this can be controversial -- what kinds of food, exactly, and how will actual material realities -- local growing conditions vs. importing from afar -- be taken into account -- ?










[Y]ou consecrate 4 or 5 hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to existence.


I find this kind of blanket-prescription to be problematic, since the number is just arbitrary and disconnected from all other variables of the political economy. Really this reminds me of the 'resource-based economy' proposal, where everyone is just given a flat, fixed amount of raw energy to use, regardless of their actual, varying usage requirements.

So I mean to say that how would we know that everyone requires 'x' amount of energy, or 'y' amount of labor hours from all laborers -- ? If either number is off at all from actual realities then the consequence would be workers doing more work than necessary to produce more energy than what's actually required, or, working those flat 4-5 hours per day and overproducing in relation to society's needs, with their life-time wasted as a result.





Choose yourself the producing groups which you wish to join, or organize a new group,




provided that it will undertake to produce necessaries."


How would this be determined, exactly -- ?





When the community agrees upon the common plan of production,


I find this to be too locality-constrained -- why should today's world of *global* economics settle for a mere *patchwork* of 'productive communities' that may or *may not* be able to generalize production at broader scales, across localities -- ?





[H]ow do people then acquire things that are not considered necessities by the community, and are thus not part of the common plan of production? Answer- productive affinity groups.


I think this would probably be the *emergent* reality, but it's still not a one-size-fits-all solution, since non-necessity goods and services may be in *far greater* demand than what a local interest group would be able to actually fulfill with its limited numbers of self-selected, inherently-interested members. There's the intrinsic problem of having this constrained bunch be able to produce sufficient quantities, *and* be satisfied with whatever they're getting in return, *and* not need any 'outside' help -- which may not share the group's culture.

Here's from a past post regarding this 'strictly-internal' problematic:





[E]ven though it's moneyless, in practice it would tend to be too *inflexible* and *restrictive* for the participants since they would be "stuck" both economically and politically in it, due to the economic aspects and political aspects being *fused together* as one and the same.

(In other words, if everyone in the work-role rotation basically approved of its 'politics' -- what it's producing -- they may *not necessarily* like its *economics*, meaning what they're getting from that production, in regards to their own personal needs. And, obversely, if a participant happened to like the work-role rotation *economically*, meaning what they're getting personally from the group's collective production, they may not also like it *politically*, in terms of that same output for the greater public good. Either way they'd basically be stuck having to "like" the output both on a societal level *and* on a personal level, due to its inherent inflexibility.)




Rotation system of work roles

http://s6.postimg.org/96tf7ovld/2403306060046342459_Gtc_Sd_P_fs.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/6pho0fbot/full/)





In the case of Marxism, I think there is an ideological change is how people define what they want;
under capitalism, as a sovereign individual, you get to demand what ever you want because we are alienated from the process of production (and just walk into a shop expecting things to be there);
whereas under communism: I think people are (supposed) to be more collectivist and recognize that people actually have to produce it- so the sense of entitlement shouldn't be a strong.
So I think it would be discussed amongst people and democratically voted on based on what they think they can do. But the important thing here- is that it is subject to a collective decision, and cannot just be individualistic instant gratification. There is kind of a process of negotiation involved.


Generally I'd agree with the *spirit* of all of this, but one could raise the specter of 'bureaucratic wrangling' -- people might say that it's *sane* to just walk into a shop and expect (regular) things to be there, since that's what's most convenient to the consumer.

Should a person have to submit forms in triplicate to the local commissar deputy's bureau, then have to wait 3-4 weeks, and provide proof of sufficient "honor badges" for their everyday common request to be considered and fulfilled -- ?





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

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




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





I don't see the problem, to be honest. The need for massage chairs is assessed by the planning bodies, a plan is drawn up that includes X units of massage chairs being produced in the next period, and that plan is either accepted or voted down.


The only thing with this is that a democratic / popular vote is *arbitrary* in relation to the actual supply of available and willing liberated-labor. So while there may be an overwhelming 100% popular vote to ensure that all people have diamonds -- (after all, why not?) -- those who would be able to carry out such a plan might very well just give a resounding 'meh' to such a popular objective.





Though, I don't see a communist society as focused on material goods as a capitalist one,


If this is the case then such a society won't be able to *transcend* a capitalist one, arguably, since it would be qualitatively and quantitatively *lesser* than it.





should limits be imposed to ensure nobody abuses the hard work of producers?


Abuse of liberated labor wouldn't be acceptable, by definition -- the more-realistic possibility is that there would be a lack of *complex-enough* production, at least to match today's output under capitalism.





[M]aybe we have 1000 citizens, and the group decides to create 1000 bottles of vodka per week. Naturally, a good portion of these citizens wouldn't be interested, and some would be extremely interested, so the group decides to impose a limit of 3 bottles per person per week. At the end of the week, whatever is left over is up for grabs.
Is this a viable/reasonable idea? Do you think it could lead to problems? Let me know because I'm new to these forums and my only socialist friend to discuss this stuff with has been my brother :ohmy:


I'd say that there needs to be a more flexible dynamic here -- if there's outstanding demand for *more* than 1000 bottles per week then there should be a process by which production can be appropriately increased so that the society doesn't have to *resort* to rationing.

A real economy could generalize over several / an *infinite* number of goods and services, so that economic participation extends over-to and through the industry of alcohol production, through to everything else, as we're used to having with the commodity-currency system.





I think the question is more about how luxury goods/indulgences would be organised in a moneyless system of free access. In which case the problem is that luxury commodities would have to be unequally distributed if they are scarce.


This is evened-out by bulk physical limits on consumption -- how much vodka or wine could an entire population actually ingest in the course of a day, and of a year -- and also by interest / demand, since not everyone would *want* to drink, even if there were zero limitations to doing so.





things like paintings and fine wine etc. will always be scarce.





Fine Champagne can't be mass produced and people prefer originals.





I would say that *no one* can *guarantee* abundance for *all* items -- the domains of up-and-coming technologies ('flying car') and time-requiring goods ('truffles', 'fine wine', etc.) would be examples of items that could *not* be readily mass-produced, and so could very well be 'scarce' in relation to extant demand.


---





I don't necessarily, I am just pointing out that that is the key issue of debate here. I am providing the alternative view though I don't really subscribe to either side because A) such arguments are often fruitless seeing as we can't possibly know how a Communist society would organize itself in such fine detail and B) Civilization isn't going to collapse because some people had to wait for their fine wine or massage chair, people would work something out




(a rotational order system perhaps?)


( Again: )





[E]ven though it's moneyless, in practice it would tend to be too *inflexible* and *restrictive* for the participants since they would be "stuck" both economically and politically in it, due to the economic aspects and political aspects being *fused together* as one and the same.

(In other words, if everyone in the work-role rotation basically approved of its 'politics' -- what it's producing -- they may *not necessarily* like its *economics*, meaning what they're getting from that production, in regards to their own personal needs. And, obversely, if a participant happened to like the work-role rotation *economically*, meaning what they're getting personally from the group's collective production, they may not also like it *politically*, in terms of that same output for the greater public good. Either way they'd basically be stuck having to "like" the output both on a societal level *and* on a personal level, due to its inherent inflexibility.)


Rotation system of work roles

http://s6.postimg.org/96tf7ovld/2403306060046342459_Gtc_Sd_P_fs.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/6pho0fbot/full/)





Some goods are scarce yet beneficial, ie. airline flights, others are scarce and highly impractical to produce, ie. 500 year old wine made from monastic monk blood and toil.


But what if such goods *already exist* -- ? What should be done with them -- ? Who should be able to consume them, if anyone, and who not -- ?





i didn't say the discussion is pointless, I said that i don't subscribe to either side of the debate seeing as it is impossible to come to a final conclusion. Not every discussion has to be resolved you know.


In a very real sense it *does* have to be resolved, because certain materials already exist and if we don't take stewardship over such -- as over the natural world, for example, then there's no point to politics or any sense of common interest whatsoever. Everything would be ad-hoc at best, and socially chaotic and destructive at worst.





"Should be allowed"? By who?

In any case, I highly doubt there will be monks in socialism. At the same time, I am pretty sure that the socialist society will be able to produce wine chemically, physically etc. identical to that that has been aged for 500 years in hand-crafted barrels etc. And hopefully in the socialist society people will not fetishise something being "authentic", "hand-made" etc. (eugh).


Would actual, already-existing 500-year-old wine be only of *historical* interest, then -- ? Would it only be displayed in a museum -- ?





I think Kropotkin's idea is the most workable for a Communist society. Take care of peoples basic needs first then look after peoples wants.


[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/)





You can't really related commodity fetishism with a system such as feudalism where commodities didn't exit, but then you could go on and state that in communism commodities wouldn't exist, so no fetishism.


This could very well be the case -- that an empowered-hobbyist-type of material culture would prevail, with interest-based styles and trends, certainly, but not to the point of any kind of fevered fetishism.





People's illogical preferences are not necessarily connected to the fact that commodities are produced. Capitalism exacerbates fetishism certainly, but without capitalism it would not disappear completely.


It would, in terms of overproduction of goods and services due to those commodities being seen as ripe for speculative investment -- there would no longer be 'the next big thing' as determined by *financial* fashion.





If robots could make said commodity like massaging chairs, who cares? Why would you need to vote?


Agreed. Voting / political representation is a relic of *bourgeois* norms and is no longer logistically required, as for the crucial matters of (a liberated) mass production.





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




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




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

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

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

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

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




tinyurl.com/ckaihatsu-concise-communism





I also think "luxury," is like subjective





[If] 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.

[ckaihatsu]

I think the question is more about how luxury goods/indulgences would be organised in a moneyless system of free access. In which case the problem is that luxury commodities would have to be unequally distributed if they are scarce.





This is evened-out by bulk physical limits on consumption -- how much vodka or wine could an entire population actually ingest in the course of a day, and of a year -- and also by interest / demand, since not everyone would *want* to drink, even if there were zero limitations to doing so.


Sorry, I realized this response is lacking, on the topic -- a post-capitalist political economy would have to have some *other* means of determining relative intensities of demand, coarsely described as 'rationing'. The capitalist system uses degrees of ownership of money, or 'prices', to determine prioritization over scarce commodities, but a communistic method would have to have an even-handed, egalitarian ethos as a baseline politics, while at the same time any resorting to any *economic* considerations for measuring demand would just be backsliding to a *commodity*-based basis of measurement (as with who's 'working harder' or 'earning more').

I've already mentioned one potential approach to the question, but it's only a quick-and-dirty *mechanical* treatment that avoids any politicization:





[T]he quick, administrative answer might be basically 'first come, first served' -- even if it has to [be] measured to a microsecond-point accuracy.


The obvious downside is what the social consequences would be if, in one scenario, tens or hundreds of millions of people happened to all 'click in' with their demand within the same small window of time -- say half a day or so. In this case the microsecond-point slices of ordering wouldn't be *politically* adequate, since 12 hours divided by 100 million demanders leaves less than half of a thousandth of a second on average to differentiate among all the responders.

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

[ckaihatsu]

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.

[Red Star Rising]

Sorry, I realized this response is lacking, on the topic -- a post-capitalist political economy would have to have some *other* means of determining relative intensities of demand, coarsely described as 'rationing'. The capitalist system uses degrees of ownership of money, or 'prices', to determine prioritization over scarce commodities, but a communistic method would have to have an even-handed, egalitarian ethos as a baseline politics, while at the same time any resorting to any *economic* considerations for measuring demand would just be backsliding to a *commodity*-based basis of measurement (as with who's 'working harder' or 'earning more').
Agreed.

[GanzEgal]

who decides whats worth producing?
In a moneyless society would be difficult to assess what is " worth producing",or to manage the macroeconomy in any detailed way.

If money exists, or credits and quotas that act in the role of money, then it is quite straightforward: An item is worth producing, if people exist who are willing to buy it for its price. In case of new products, the product concept can be premarketed, to find out how many buyers are interested in the product. When we know the expected size of production, we know how much the product would cost per item. (Mass-production is significantly cheaper per item than handmade unique objects.) Then the initially interested buyers would make the final decision to order the product or not, when they know the exact final price of the product.

A more typical way of running the show is that an industrial leader has the power to make investment and production decisions, so the market potential of a product is estimated, production is started, and the products are delivered to retail shops, before consumers ever know that the new product is coming. This method has its risks, sometimes the investment decision succeeds, and sometimes it fails and causes losses. A positive thing for consumers is that you get the product as soon as you learn about the existence of the product, there is no heartbreaking half-year wait biting your fingernails.

[ckaihatsu]

In a moneyless society would be difficult to assess what is " worth producing",or to manage the macroeconomy in any detailed way.


Not at all -- only two posts prior (#34) is a thorough treatment of this topic.





If money exists, or credits and quotas that act in the role of money, then it is quite straightforward: An item is worth producing, if people exist who are willing to buy it for its price. In case of new products, the product concept can be premarketed, to find out how many buyers are interested in the product. When we know the expected size of production, we know how much the product would cost per item. (Mass-production is significantly cheaper per item than handmade unique objects.) Then the initially interested buyers would make the final decision to order the product or not, when they know the exact final price of the product.


And any such 'pricing' system implies the *independence* of exchange values, meaning that -- as you're pointing out -- there's a *disconnect*-by-design, of pre-planning, from the final 'purchase' and receipt of goods.

This is essentially a *backsliding* from the whole premise of a planned economy, by introducing this disconnect, and by the use of pricing / currency / exchange values.





A more typical way of running the show is that an industrial leader has the power to make investment and production decisions, so the market potential of a product is estimated, production is started, and the products are delivered to retail shops, before consumers ever know that the new product is coming. This method has its risks, sometimes the investment decision succeeds, and sometimes it fails and causes losses. A positive thing for consumers is that you get the product as soon as you learn about the existence of the product, there is no heartbreaking half-year wait biting your fingernails.


'Market potential' implies *markets*, which implies commodified labor.

[GanzEgal]

Not at all -- only two posts prior (#34) is a thorough treatment of this topic.
In post #34 you discuss how to assess and prioritize demand, but not equally much how to assess, prioritize and schedule raw materials and working time. Most notably in the context of luxury goods, we would easily run out of raw materials and working time. Manufacturing a cheap watch Hong Kong style takes a small amount of plastics and electronic components, and a few minutes of human working time. Price ticket in market economy: 5 USD. Manufacturing a high-end luxury watch Swiss style takes some gold, platinum and maybe diamonds, and one year of human working time (yes, per watch). Price ticket in market economy can exceed 100,000 USD. We just cannot afford that for each citizen of the society, neither the raw materials nor the working time.


'Market potential' implies *markets*, which implies commodified labor.
Market of goods and market of labour need not have anything to do with each other. One is possible without the other. But it is true that I assume the existence of both.

[ckaihatsu]

In post #34 you discuss how to assess and prioritize demand, but not equally much how to assess, prioritize and schedule raw materials and working time.


All would be possible through the same process -- raw materials and working time ('liberated labor') *are* 'demand', just of different sorts, in different social contexts.





Most notably in the context of luxury goods, we would easily run out of raw materials and working time. Manufacturing a cheap watch Hong Kong style takes a small amount of plastics and electronic components, and a few minutes of human working time. Price ticket in market economy: 5 USD. Manufacturing a high-end luxury watch Swiss style takes some gold, platinum and maybe diamonds, and one year of human working time (yes, per watch). Price ticket in market economy can exceed 100,000 USD. We just cannot afford that for each citizen of the society, neither the raw materials nor the working time.


Fortunately not everyone in society *is* demanding that, and, if they were, then such demand would obviously be constrained by available and willing liberated labor, and by raw materials.

(Regarding how to equitably *differentiate* among a flood of requests ('demand') for unavoidably-limited production, see post 34.)





Market of goods and market of labour need not have anything to do with each other.


Hmmmmm, I would think that there *is* a positive correlation there, since *everything* meaningful to people necessarily derives from labor effort. (I'm not sure if I got your meaning, though -- you may want to elaborate.)





One is possible without the other.


This part is *definitely* vague, and I'm not getting whatever meaning you're intending.





But it is true that I assume the existence of both.


Okay -- my whole 'thing' here at RevLeft is to show, through that framework / model, that a revolutionary world *can* feasibly logistically do without the market mechanism.

[GanzEgal]

I would think that there *is* a positive correlation there, since *everything* meaningful to people necessarily derives from labor effort.
A market for goods can exist without a market for labour, if no labour credits are used, all work is voluntary. But all citizens receive monthly an equal amount of money, or rationing coupons, or buying credits, or whatever. So money or its equivalent exists, goods have a price, but labour not.


a revolutionary world *can* feasibly logistically do without the market mechanism.
In post #34 you introduce an algorithm for prioritizing the production of goods. It is a mathematical model, with its own measuring units. Your model could well be described as a market, even though its measuring unit is not called "money". Even more so because your units are tradeable, or more exactly, donable in an indirect way.

As for practical ease of use, money is easy to use. It is easy to understand that you have 200 EUR in pocket, and this product costs 150 EUR, so you can have it if you really want, but then you would have to miss many other things that you might also want. Money causes citizens to reasonably and modestly self-ration their own consumption.

But your proposal of a system where people would not calculate the pennies in their wallet or bank account, but rather would rank a million products and wishes in life from most wanted to millionth most wanted, doesn't sound anywhere so easy and comfortable to use as money. Take ten books, and organize them in alphabetical order, by the name of the book. This can be done in a minute. But when the number of items to rank in order grows to tens of thousands (modern large supermarkets have some 50,000 different items on shelf), ranking them all in a meaningful order of priority becomes an overwhelmingly heavy task, which citizens will simply not want to undertake. Not even once, not to speak of once per month. People will ask if any easier solution exists. They will ask to quit this heavy system, and go back to using money.

[Creative Destruction]

I think the idea of "luxury" needs to be interrogated itself. The way we know "luxury" right now, it tends to be "luxurious" in part because of its exclusivity, and I'd say that is a detrimental part to the concept itself. Aside from that, it's highly subjective. Some people think that fine furniture is luxurious, while I think luxury is having a small seaside home. If you take away the exclusivity aspect of it, aren't you just left with a collection of wants as you would anyway? It doesn't seem to me that "luxury" would be a terribly important concept under a planned economy.

[ckaihatsu]

A market for goods can exist without a market for labour, if no labour credits are used, all work is voluntary. But all citizens receive monthly an equal amount of money, or rationing coupons, or buying credits, or whatever. So money or its equivalent exists, goods have a price, but labour not.


Right -- this is the classic 'labor vouchers' concept, and I happen to be very critical of it for its inability to address how labor inputs are supposed to balance-out with actual demand, *and* with material realities. Here's an excerpt from a blog-entry introduction to the 'labor credits' model, and a graphic illustration of this critique follows that.





We can do better than the market system, obviously, since it is zombie-like and continuously, automatically, calls for endless profit-making -- even past the point of primitive accumulation, through to overproduction and world wars, not to mention its intrinsic exploitation and oppression.

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




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


Pies Must Line Up

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


---





In post #34 you introduce an algorithm for prioritizing the production of goods.


It's *barely* an algorithm....

Given an individually-ranked list of items (#1, #2, #3, etc.), all that would have to be done would be to take the *inverse* (1/1, 1/2, 1/3, etc.), to arrive at number-values (100, 50, 33-1/3, etc.) that could be sorted-by, with any existing sorting method, as on a spreadsheet. (And, for *that* matter, the '1, 2, 3' values *could* remain untouched, and the sort could simply favor *lower* values -- an inversion of the *meaning* instead of doing an arithmetic step.)

A diagram for the prioritization process follows here. I'll note that the mass collation of individually-prioritized demand lists, as over a locality, wouldn't be treated as 'live data' for production, but rather would be a 'grand to-do list' that informs liberated labor, for its consideration.


[17] Prioritization Chart

http://s6.postimg.org/8yk8c84xd/17_Prioritization_Chart.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/jy5fntvcd/full/)


---





It is a mathematical model, with its own measuring units.


No, it's *not* a mathematical model -- it's a simple prioritization list, or the collation of many of them, with the measuring units simply being relative ranking order for any item. (In the mass-collated version there'd be a tally of each discrete item-and-unique-rank-position, over all of the submitted demand lists.)





Your model could well be described as a market, even though its measuring unit is not called "money".


No, it's not a market in any way, because the production and distribution of mass-produced materials and goods would be on the volition of liberated labor, to eliminate scarcity on a per-item basis in a particular area.

So since it's direct-distribution, that implies free-access, and there's no exchangeability of currency of any kind for materials or goods. No currency means no markets.





Even more so because your units are tradeable, or more exactly, donable in an indirect way.


If you're talking about the prioritization-list slots (#1, #2, #3, etc.), those *are* negotiable and donable, as in political-type ways, but they're *not* tradeable. Everyone always has a daily demand list that is their own.





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




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174





As for practical ease of use, money is easy to use. It is easy to understand that you have 200 EUR in pocket, and this product costs 150 EUR, so you can have it if you really want, but then you would have to miss many other things that you might also want. Money causes citizens to reasonably and modestly self-ration their own consumption.


The problem with this, of course, is that the currency amount *does not indicate* what proportion of value that product contains in relation to all other production in existence. The currency circulation system is a myth even by its own standards and *certainly* can't indicate anything about proportions of labor inputs as a certain part of the face value.





But your proposal of a system where people would not calculate the pennies in their wallet or bank account, but rather would rank a million products and wishes in life from most wanted to millionth most wanted, doesn't sound anywhere so easy and comfortable to use as money. Take ten books, and organize them in alphabetical order, by the name of the book. This can be done in a minute. But when the number of items to rank in order grows to tens of thousands (modern large supermarkets have some 50,000 different items on shelf), ranking them all in a meaningful order of priority becomes an overwhelmingly heavy task, which citizens will simply not want to undertake. Not even once, not to speak of once per month. People will ask if any easier solution exists. They will ask to quit this heavy system, and go back to using money.


It's downright humorous that you would think, based on the component of the model above, that each person is *expected* to create a ranked listing that goes through to an 'infinite' number of items, every day, day after day.

The 'one-through-infinity' part just means that each person's daily demands list can be as lengthy as they like.

[GanzEgal]

this is the classic 'labor vouchers' concept
Not sure what labor vouchers concept is, but I assume that it means labour credits, a kind of labour market. What I mentioned was a setting without a labour market, no labour credits. Only purchasing vouchers, or money if you tolerate the term, which people get regardless of their work input.


The currency amount *does not indicate* what proportion of value that product contains in relation to all other production in existence. The currency circulation system is a myth even by its own standards and *certainly* can't indicate anything about proportions of labor inputs as a certain part of the face value.
I am quite pleased with the informativeness of the prices that products and services have on the market. The price of a product usually gives a relatively good idea of how much (and how rare) raw materials are needed, and how much human work is needed, and how much design or innovation work is needed.

Of course there are problems and anomalies in pricing, when it is done by Capitalists. A Capitalist may behave opportunistically, asking as high a price as people are ready to pay, seeking a maximal profit. In Socialism the prices would be set without opportunism, based on straightforward calculations.

Money is a useful tool for measuring the value of labour input too, because the price (salary) of a worker is equal to the amount of goods that he should be able to buy with his salary. So there is a very tangible and meaningful connection between the price of goods and the price of work.

[Lord Testicles]

Of course there are problems and anomalies in pricing, when it is done by Capitalists. A Capitalist may behave opportunistically, asking as high a price as people are ready to pay, seeking a maximal profit. In Socialism the prices would be set without opportunism, based on straightforward calculations.

You don't seem to understand socialism. The idea that anything would have a financial price in socialism is ridiculous.

[ckaihatsu]

Not sure what labor vouchers concept is, but I assume that it means labour credits, a kind of labour market.


It's basically what you described previously:





A market for goods can exist without a market for labour, if no labour credits are used, all work is voluntary. But all citizens receive monthly an equal amount of money, or rationing coupons, or buying credits, or whatever. So money or its equivalent exists, goods have a price, but labour not.


The 'equal amount' of 'rationing coupons' are conventionally referred to as 'labor vouchers', or 'points'. Here's my critique of that:





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....


---





What I mentioned was a setting without a labour market, no labour credits. Only purchasing vouchers, or money if you tolerate the term, which people get regardless of their work input.


Under *current* conditions this would be a 'universally guaranteed basic income', which would be a positive *reformist* measure, especially compared to the vagaries of the labor market under present-day conditions of economic stagnation.

But this is *not* revolution, and it's not workers control of the means of mass (industrial) production.





I am quite pleased with the informativeness of the prices that products and services have on the market. The price of a product usually gives a relatively good idea of how much (and how rare) raw materials are needed, and how much human work is needed, and how much design or innovation work is needed.

Of course there are problems and anomalies in pricing, when it is done by Capitalists. A Capitalist may behave opportunistically, asking as high a price as people are ready to pay, seeking a maximal profit. In Socialism the prices would be set without opportunism, based on straightforward calculations.

Money is a useful tool for measuring the value of labour input too, because the price (salary) of a worker is equal to the amount of goods that he should be able to buy with his salary. So there is a very tangible and meaningful connection between the price of goods and the price of work.


It's downright incredible to hear you put forth a 'this-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds' line right here, since we only have to think of income inequality -- which you've mentioned -- not to mention all the other endemic social ills like poverty, racism, sexism, illiteracy, and so on, that all have economic-based roots because of the class divide.

I think the fundamental economic dynamic of *speculation* is enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that the pricing system, as it is (based in capital ownership and capitalism), is in any way accurate in representing so-called 'intrinsic' exchange values.

Here's the classic example of a speculative asset bubble:





Tulip mania or tulipomania (Dutch names include: tulpenmanie, tulpomanie, tulpenwoede, tulpengekte and bollengekte) was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.[2]

At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble (or economic bubble),[3] although some researchers have noted that the Kipper- und Wipperzeit episode in 1619–22, a Europe-wide chain of debasement of the metal content of coins to fund warfare, featured mania-like similarities to a bubble.[4] The term "tulip mania" is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble (when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values).[5]




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

[ckaihatsu]

I think the idea of "luxury" needs to be interrogated itself. The way we know "luxury" right now, it tends to be "luxurious" in part because of its exclusivity, and I'd say that is a detrimental part to the concept itself. Aside from that, it's highly subjective. Some people think that fine furniture is luxurious, while I think luxury is having a small seaside home. If you take away the exclusivity aspect of it, aren't you just left with a collection of wants as you would anyway? It doesn't seem to me that "luxury" would be a terribly important concept under a planned economy.


I respectfully disagree here, only because of *material* considerations.

There *will* be some instances where the available raw materials or liberated labor for whatever desired production simply won't be adequate for actual demand -- we have the 'Swiss watch for everyone' scenario from this thread, for example.

The negative potential in such a situation is that -- since there's no money-units measurement of demand -- a post-capitalist society wouldn't be able to distinguish, or differentiate, from among everyone's claims to the limited pool of (relatively) scarce goods or materials.

This is the motivation for my 'additive prioritizations' portion at post #34. It basically says that people would have to socially *organize* and secure commitments in the form of other people's slots, from their daily demand lists.

(If a large group of people made 'Product X' their #1 request / demand, for a continuous number of days from when it first became available, and there wasn't enough supply of the product to fulfill everyone's request, then who *should* the available units go to -- ? 'First-come first-served' is usually suggested here, but that may be too time-sensitive / time-dependent to really be workable from a *political* standpoint.)

[GanzEgal]

If it's on a strictly across-the-board consistent basis (...) it would be an overall (societal) *disincentive* towards new efforts at greater social coordination and experimental / speculative advancements in research and development.
This is the main point in Capitalist critique of Socialism. I never believed it when it came from a Capitalist source. The same claim coming from a Socialist source is a bit surprising, but does not make me immediately convinced.

The claim is that in the absence of materialistic carrots, humans will not work diligently and creatively. I don't buy this claim, I believe that people have social and personal ambition to reach a status and reputation as a highly skilled and respected professional. People will want to try their best and climb up the stairs of professional expertise and professional status, it gives them a variety of personal gratification and meaning of life, even in the absence of any materialistic carrots whatsoever.


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.
You see an imaginary "too close" argument. For me personally, a thing such as "too close" does not exist. What matters for me is how efficiently the system serves the purpose of evenly distributing well-being across the entire population.


Under *current* conditions this would be a 'universally guaranteed basic income', which would be a positive *reformist* measure, especially compared to the vagaries of the labor market under present-day conditions of economic stagnation.

But this is *not* revolution, and it's not workers control of the means of mass (industrial) production.
You don't stay focused, you throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to say. Workers controlling the means of mass production is a different topic than universal basic income. One can exist regardless of the other, so it is off topic to mention these two in the same phrase.

There are people who suggest that we should have universal basic income _and_ we should maintain the Capitalist ownership structures unchanged. If someone makes these two suggestions together, then it is reasonable to criticize it as non-Socialism. But I never suggested that the structures of Capitalist ownership should be maintained.


It's downright incredible to hear you put forth a 'this-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds' line right here, since we only have to think of income inequality -- which you've mentioned -- not to mention all the other endemic social ills like poverty, racism, sexism, illiteracy, and so on, that all have economic-based roots because of the class divide.

I think the fundamental economic dynamic of *speculation* is enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that the pricing system, as it is (based in capital ownership and capitalism), is in any way accurate in representing so-called 'intrinsic' exchange values.
Again you don't stay focused, you throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Income equality does not exist in my suggestions afore. Neither does poverty, racism, sexism, illiteracy, or speculation (my term was "opportunistic pricing"). You are debating past me, boxing with shadows which are not my shadows, they are not included in what I have suggested in this discussion.

[ckaihatsu]

This is the main point in Capitalist critique of Socialism. I never believed it when it came from a Capitalist source. The same claim coming from a Socialist source is a bit surprising, but does not make me immediately convinced.

The claim is that in the absence of materialistic carrots, humans will not work diligently and creatively. I don't buy this claim, I believe that people have social and personal ambition to reach a status and reputation as a highly skilled and respected professional. People will want to try their best and climb up the stairs of professional expertise and professional status, it gives them a variety of personal gratification and meaning of life, even in the absence of any materialistic carrots whatsoever.


None of us have to make any changes here on this one -- what you're describing has to do with *personal* / individual volition, and I have no differences on that point.

An evenly distributed 'points' allowance is problematic because [1] it doesn't contain enough information about *material supplies*, relative to the total number of points issued -- is each point supposed to be a direct proportional fraction of *all available goods and services* -- ? That would be impossible, because quantities are constantly changing and that makes their 'valuation', in the form of points, very difficult, to put it generously.

(An example here would be if some item quickly became popular and a surge of people was willing to put forth practically all of their points for it -- what does each point in that situation *mean* regarding the good itself and its back-supplies -- ? It's not necessarily that the *materials* themselves are particularly scarce or socially valuable -- the points are only indicating *demand-side* information, leaving matters of logistical *supplies* to have to be considered in other, non-point, ways.)

And [2], my standing critique about the vouchers / points system is about incentives on a *societal* scale -- these days, under capitalism, large-scale economic organization has been / is accomplished through the profit motive, with pooled (joint-stock) capital accumulations. But with that pushed aside society would not have anything 'more-macro' to find a common denominator for, if everyone can do just fine in their local environs and even enjoy their *personal* volitions. The *material* risk of saying 'Hey, let's go colonize Mars' -- or anything similarly ambitious -- would be *socially prohibitive* because of the lack of a large-scale social-material basis for its organization. This is where the 'labor credits' framework could come in, since it provides a socially objective verification of *past labor efforts*, regardless of its setting or social context.

This formalization and standardization of liberated labor would provide an economic 'language' and system of material accounting for the same -- it could lend a uniform approach to the provisioning of liberated labor that would fit into any locality- (geographically-) constrained planning, all the way up to any global-level centralized planning.


---





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.





You see an imaginary "too close" argument. For me personally, a thing such as "too close" does not exist. What matters for me is how efficiently the system serves the purpose of evenly distributing well-being across the entire population.


Well we already know that a *market* for labor just sucks -- that's partly why you advocate a gift-economy for labor and a vouchers system for consumption, I'm sure.

As soon as people see increased material compensation for increased work efforts then the labor is no longer about the work itself, and Marx's 'alienation' kicks in.

Here's another way of putting it, btw....





Would this compensation be decided-on in relation to the labor contributed, or would it be decided-on in relation to the 'value' / worth of the compensation-value itself, meaning the range of goods and services that could be obtained with it -- ?

- If the subsidies are in relation to the *labor inputs*, then that effectively *commodifies* labor, since workers will be looking to see the relative *levels* of compensation given for whatever work inputs, over time. People will know what kinds of work are rewarded more than others and that will be a labor *market* of sorts.

- If the subsidies are in relation to the *compensation value* (goods and services exchangeable for it), then that's effectively *market socialism* since the subsidies now function as cash and will circulate at-will, independently of any and all pre-planning.


---





You don't stay focused, you throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to say. Workers controlling the means of mass production is a different topic than universal basic income. One can exist regardless of the other, so it is off topic to mention these two in the same phrase.

There are people who suggest that we should have universal basic income _and_ we should maintain the Capitalist ownership structures unchanged. If someone makes these two suggestions together, then it is reasonable to criticize it as non-Socialism. But I never suggested that the structures of Capitalist ownership should be maintained.


Okay, given this your point reverts back to the labor-vouchers proposal, which I've already addressed.





Again you don't stay focused, you throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Income equality does not exist in my suggestions afore. Neither does poverty, racism, sexism, illiteracy, or speculation (my term was "opportunistic pricing"). You are debating past me, boxing with shadows which are not my shadows, they are not included in what I have suggested in this discussion.


I'll suggest, then, that you take only my input / critique of capitalist market *speculation* -- as it pertains to pricing -- and go from there, if you like.

[GanzEgal]

Well we already know that a *market* for labor just sucks -- that's partly why you advocate a gift-economy for labor and a vouchers system for consumption
I don't advocate gift economy for labour. I mentioned that it is possible (and then followed some debate whether it actually is possible or not), but my actual preference is to have a labour market (where salary per hour is equal for different professions, but it is possible to earn more by working extra long hours), and also a market for goods and services exists (where prices are set with democratically agreed mathematical formulas, without opportunism).


take only my input / critique of capitalist market *speculation* -- as it pertains to pricing -- and go from there, if you like.
Capitalist market speculation needs to be prevented and prohibited. Any form of opportunism in pricing is undesirable and harmful. Instead, prices of everything should be set by an unchanging universal mathematical algorithm, so that the price of a product or service is the cost of production + the universal profit margin + taxes.

A profit margin is necessary for future R&D and investments of the production unit: the factory building and machinery are not eternal, new ones will need to be built in future, so the production must be profitable enough to maintain the production without state subsidies. (Or then other production units must be yet more productive, to pay for the maintenance of themselves _and_ of subsidized unprofitable production units.) Of course it is possible to omit the concept of profit margin in this sense, and simply include it in the concept of "production costs".

Taxes are needed for paying the income of persons who are not workers: home mothers, children, students, pensioners, the sick, the unfit for work. Even if your theory is moneyless, some 35%-40% of production by workers would go to non-workers, if we assume that everyone in the society would enjoy the same relative standard of living, regardless of work status.

By "relative standard of living" I refer to the fact that babies and young children need less money, goods or services than working age people, to be equally happy about the material circumstances in their life. So a small baby would not consume the same amount of goods and services as an adult, yet we can speak of (and try to design) relative, perceived equality in their standard of living.

[ckaihatsu]

I don't advocate gift economy for labour. I mentioned that it is possible (and then followed some debate whether it actually is possible or not),


Here's your presentation of it:





A market for goods can exist without a market for labour, if no labour credits are used, all work is voluntary. But all citizens receive monthly an equal amount of money, or rationing coupons, or buying credits, or whatever. So money or its equivalent exists, goods have a price, but labour not.


It's unclear what capacity you're introducing it in -- certainly it sounds like you're presenting it as a distinct *possibility*, if not advocating for it outright.





but my actual preference is to have a labour market (where salary per hour is equal for different professions, but it is possible to earn more by working extra long hours), and also a market for goods and services exists (where prices are set with democratically agreed mathematical formulas, without opportunism).


The problem with *any* democratically (or otherwise) derived system of values -- as with labor vouchers -- is that there's no guarantee that such valuations will actually match-up to available quantities. If the prices / vouchers / points don't represent real-world economic information then their use is meaningless, a rote exercise for the sake of social convention, at best, and almost certainly a shell game being run by those in control of the whole apparatus.





Capitalist market speculation needs to be prevented and prohibited. Any form of opportunism in pricing is undesirable and harmful. Instead, prices of everything should be set by an unchanging universal mathematical algorithm, so that the price of a product or service is the cost of production + the universal profit margin + taxes.

A profit margin is necessary for future R&D and investments of the production unit: the factory building and machinery are not eternal, new ones will need to be built in future, so the production must be profitable enough to maintain the production without state subsidies. (Or then other production units must be yet more productive, to pay for the maintenance of themselves _and_ of subsidized unprofitable production units.) Of course it is possible to omit the concept of profit margin in this sense, and simply include it in the concept of "production costs".

Taxes are needed for paying the income of persons who are not workers: home mothers, children, students, pensioners, the sick, the unfit for work. Even if your theory is moneyless, some 35%-40% of production by workers would go to non-workers, if we assume that everyone in the society would enjoy the same relative standard of living, regardless of work status.

By "relative standard of living" I refer to the fact that babies and young children need less money, goods or services than working age people, to be equally happy about the material circumstances in their life. So a small baby would not consume the same amount of goods and services as an adult, yet we can speak of (and try to design) relative, perceived equality in their standard of living.


This is archetypal libertarianism / liberalism, with a dash of technocracy.

[Dave B]

Bloody hell is that our example Swiss watches!

It is just about the worse one I could have thought off.

Watches, as a use value can be produced in abundance for 'next to nothing' and they are much more useful or more accurate than they used to be.

In fact I doubt they even make clockwork Swiss watches anymore.

If things can’t be or are deliberately not produced in abundance (and I would like to see some sensible examples of what they might be) there are a variety of solutions ; I am sure their may be some.

It could be done by lottery.

Time dependent and restricted access like borrowing library books as opposed to the commodity fetishism people have now of buying them and reading them once, if at all, to have them put on your bookshelves to make you look like an intellectual when people come round.

Or ‘renting’ inland pleasure boat cruisers etc as opposed to having one sat in your boat house whilst you are flashing around your Swiss watch in a restaurant or whatever.

Free internet café’s or as they have them now in libraries.

Or even as regards washing machines; (free) public laundrettes, they used to have loads of laundrettes in the kind of places I have lived in and never more than a few minutes walk away, before they became affordable for the likes of people who live in areas where I live in.

I struggle with this kind of thing because I honestly can’t think of anything that I would exclusively like to personally possess or consume that can’t be produced in abundance.

Although I did want a microwave and mobile phone sometime before they were produced in such abundance (or became cheap enough) for me to buy them.


You could also only make some commodities only available in abundance in certain geographical locations.

Thus if you have a fixation with Canadian ice wine then move to British Columbia; or see a shrink.



It is an indication of the bourgeois self absorbed first world conciousness that we are even talking about crocodile shoes and ‘swiss watches’ or what next?



Although perhaps I wouldn’t mind a bigger screen so I could read these fonts.

Mine is about 6 inches.

[ckaihatsu]

Okay, big shot, I got a couple for ya -- admittedly these are more like 'brain teasers', internally to the revolutionary left, but they're worth grappling-with....





[H]ow would organic mass demand be ascertained, exactly, and how much of an impetus would it be on liberated labor, exactly, since the workers would be self-determining over their own labor, and might not always *want* to be responsive to what people are calling-for in terms of production.

Planning -- on both the 'demand' side and on the 'production' side -- should always seek to *generalize*, so as to cover more area with less effort, but much is conventionally left unaddressed in terms of how mass-population dynamics might be handled equitably, so that there are no gray areas or lack of policy to cover new situations.

(For example, what if there's suddenly a large demand from a major region of the globe for warm furs, for a turn of winter weather that leaves many people abnormally cold in their daily out-and-about activities -- ? Would the available and willing liberated laborers of the world automatically shift their efforts to fulfill this call, or would there be some nuance involved, and how might it be handled for such a situation -- ?) (Etc.)


---





My favorite illustrative scenario for this -- if you'll entertain it -- is that of a landscape artist in such a post-commodity world.

They make public their artistic endeavor to drape a prominent extended length of cliffs with their creation, and they'll require a custom-made fabric that is enormous and must be made with a blending of precious and rare metals formed as long threads.

Who is to deny them? (Or, how exactly would be this treated, politically?)

[Ledur]

I don't advocate gift economy for labour. I mentioned that it is possible (and then followed some debate whether it actually is possible or not), but my actual preference is to have a labour market (where salary per hour is equal for different professions, but it is possible to earn more by working extra long hours), and also a market for goods and services exists (where prices are set with democratically agreed mathematical formulas, without opportunism).

In an economy where all property is common, you can't have exchange. If you had exchange, you'd have private property, market and prices, and I don't think we need all of this in a post-capitalist society (unless you're an individualist anarchist).


Capitalist market speculation needs to be prevented and prohibited. Any form of opportunism in pricing is undesirable and harmful. Instead, prices of everything should be set by an unchanging universal mathematical algorithm, so that the price of a product or service is the cost of production + the universal profit margin + taxes.

You're not considering the market supply/demand that floats prices, and if you actually want to keep prices, you'd have a market, even for labour.


A profit margin is necessary for future R&D and investments of the production unit: the factory building and machinery are not eternal, new ones will need to be built in future, so the production must be profitable enough to maintain the production without state subsidies. (Or then other production units must be yet more productive, to pay for the maintenance of themselves _and_ of subsidized unprofitable production units.) Of course it is possible to omit the concept of profit margin in this sense, and simply include it in the concept of "production costs".

R&D could be open-source, collaborative, spread through society. Full-time R&D workers would have access to all that society produces like any other worker.

You talk about "profit", and this word alone is a right-wing thing. Production, in a post-capitalist society, would be prioritized, and for direct-use, not for profit.


Taxes are needed for paying the income of persons who are not workers: home mothers, children, students, pensioners, the sick, the unfit for work. Even if your theory is moneyless, some 35%-40% of production by workers would go to non-workers, if we assume that everyone in the society would enjoy the same relative standard of living, regardless of work status.

Why not giving everyone free access? Taxes aren't necessary in a communist or anarchist society.


By "relative standard of living" I refer to the fact that babies and young children need less money, goods or services than working age people, to be equally happy about the material circumstances in their life. So a small baby would not consume the same amount of goods and services as an adult, yet we can speak of (and try to design) relative, perceived equality in their standard of living.

Everyone has different needs, regardless of age, and every need should be fulfilled according to society's material conditions.

[GanzEgal]

In an economy where all property is common, you can't have exchange. If you had exchange, you'd have private property, market and prices, and I don't think we need all of this in a post-capitalist society
Property needs to be privately _possessed_, you cannot share the same apartment with a thousand others, or the same car. Persons will want to change the apartment, the car, or anything.

Limited existence of material goods forces us to ration, limit people's access. But people want to possess very different things, one wants pears, another wants apples. You cannot compare pears with apples, you need a neutral measuring unit to compare things possessed by individuals with the rationed total that the individual is entitled to possess. Even if all property is commonly _owned_, you need a market for deciding who should have the right to _possess_ in his personal use the things that exist in the society.


You're not considering the market supply/demand that floats prices, and if you actually want to keep prices, you'd have a market, even for labour.
Market/supply demand floats prices, if the pricing is opportunistic, asking a price as high as someone is willing to pay right here and now. A Socialist state would simply ban the practice of tweaking the price from the universal norms of how to price a product or service.


You talk about "profit", and this word alone is a right-wing thing.
If the state or a state-owned factory makes profit, for common good, the right wing hates it because it is a missed opportunity for the owning class to own the business and get the profit.

I don't think it is straightforwardly logical to hand-pick one word out of economical vocabulary and be allergic to it, out of a Capitalist context.


Taxes aren't necessary in a communist or anarchist society.
Some 35% of the population are non-workers, even in the best case where all working age men and women have full-time employment. You can close your eyes and hope that the products of labour end up also in the hands of non-workers, or then you can legally ensure it, for example by taxing lthe products of labour. I don't believe in blind hopes, I only believe in legally guaranteed rights.

[GanzEgal]

The problem with *any* democratically (or otherwise) derived system of values -- as with labor vouchers -- is that there's no guarantee that such valuations will actually match-up to available quantities. If the prices / vouchers / points don't represent real-world economic information then their use is meaningless
This is not a significant problem. Even in the relatively decentralized market economy, where the state government does not directly run the businesses and therefore gets only limited and delayed information about their production plans, the treasurer of a state knows with sufficient precision, how the inflation will develop in the near future -- i.e. how much people will actually get goods for the value of the money in the economy.

In Socialism the state treasury should know yet much more precisely and better in real-time, how much will be produced in the near future, and what will be the total sum of the prices of everything what is produced. When the total price of production is known, we know how much money can be released to citizens, so they will have enough money to consume everything what gets produced.

Quantities of goods require careful research and planning, so the shop shelves will have enough but not wastefully too much of what people daily want and need. Having a market economy or moneyless society would not differ here, the problem of predicting people's needs and answering to the demand would be quite similar in any case, mo matter if people give cash at the shop exit or go free without paying anything.

[ckaihatsu]

A profit margin is necessary for future R&D and investments of the production unit: the factory building and machinery are not eternal, new ones will need to be built in future, so the production must be profitable enough to maintain the production without state subsidies.





If the state or a state-owned factory makes profit, for common good, the right wing hates it because it is a missed opportunity for the owning class to own the business and get the profit.





Taxes are needed for paying the income of persons who are not workers: home mothers, children, students, pensioners, the sick, the unfit for work.


Based on the above it sounds like you're advocating some kind of private- and state-run *enterprise* system in which *both* kinds of entities are motivated by profit-making, but where the state is somehow *separate* from business interests. Additionally the state would be collecting taxes for the sake of general welfare.

I guess I'd now call this some kind of state capitalism, or Stalinism.

Just out of curiosity what's your conception of how the officials of this state would derive their power to be in office?

[ckaihatsu]

The problem with *any* democratically (or otherwise) derived system of values -- as with labor vouchers -- is that there's no guarantee that such valuations will actually match-up to available quantities. If the prices / vouchers / points don't represent real-world economic information then their use is meaningless





This is not a significant problem. Even in the relatively decentralized market economy, where the state government does not directly run the businesses and therefore gets only limited and delayed information about their production plans, the treasurer of a state knows with sufficient precision, how the inflation will develop in the near future -- i.e. how much people will actually get goods for the value of the money in the economy.

In Socialism the state treasury should know yet much more precisely and better in real-time, how much will be produced in the near future, and what will be the total sum of the prices of everything what is produced. When the total price of production is known, we know how much money can be released to citizens, so they will have enough money to consume everything what gets produced.

Quantities of goods require careful research and planning, so the shop shelves will have enough but not wastefully too much of what people daily want and need. Having a market economy or moneyless society would not differ here, the problem of predicting people's needs and answering to the demand would be quite similar in any case, mo matter if people give cash at the shop exit or go free without paying anything.


The difference between a market-based economy and a state-run one is that prices, and the whole economy, will *fluctuate* according to prevailing market movements, while a state-run economy is ostensibly controlled by an administration so that it's *insulated* from market fluctuations.

You can't have *both*, because they're *contradictory* -- either mass / popular demand leads economic production (demand-side economics), with state support, or else private-profit interests do, by speculating with capital, without any kind of (state) planning -- so-called 'supply-side' economics.

[Dave B]

Well I don’t deny that artists are a potential problem which often stems from their own self aggrandising and narcissistic concepts of the use-value of their own products as ‘art’.

And they certainly could bath in asses milk or orange juice and make bonfires out of crocodile shoes in the name of art.

Now it is true enough that if these things eg asses milk and crocodile shoes are freely available at community stores it is possible for people to abuse the effort that went into making them.

Maybe kick shit out them or even better send them to a place that makes that kind of stuff.

There was a interesting series on BBC a few years ago on food and where it comes from. They sent these typical bods who like their chicken Macnuggets and tuna to the third world factories etc where they were produced.

The salutary effect was more than any free access communist could even hope for.

I was brought up on the labour theory of value by factory working parents who had never even heard of it.

Stuff like don’t abuse that or this because a load of somebody else’s work/effort/labour time had ‘gone into it’.

The kind of ‘dickhead stupid non intellectual morality’ of the working class.

Intermediate raw materials as a separate category from consumption goods is another well, category.

If I am working down a gold mine for gold for high conductivity electronics that don’t corrode and are not subject to variations in resistance and electrical contact etc etc or whatever.

And a lorry turns up to supply the toilet seat factory; well they can go down in the cage and get it for themselves.

On winter furs?

Even the fascists in Germany gave up their winter furs in 1942.

So is that it then, fur coats and Swiss Watches?

Motorbikes would be a better example, I still know guys who love them more than their own children.

But that is all they do, ride about on the bloody same thing.


Although even that is more decadent now than it used to be.

Where most of the fun was taking them to bits and putting them back together again.


You can’t do that anymore.

I was sort of part of the rocker biking culture in my teens.

[ckaihatsu]

Well I don’t deny that artists are a potential problem which often stems from their own self aggrandising and narcissistic concepts of the use-value of their own products as ‘art’.

And they certainly could bath in asses milk or orange juice and make bonfires out of crocodile shoes in the name of art.

Now it is true enough that if these things eg asses milk and crocodile shoes are freely available at community stores it is possible for people to abuse the effort that went into making them.

Maybe kick shit out them or even better send them to a place that makes that kind of stuff.


Well, thanks for the reply, Dave -- the thought-exercise is meant to get a response, and it certainly did in your case.

For the sake of discussion, I think this kind of social-political issue -- the relationship of the post-capitalism 'community' to the artist, in terms of material usage -- will be a very tangible one, given the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, in part for the reason you're giving here.

If milk, orange juice, and crocodile shoes happened to become plentiful to the point of surplus, and *effortless* to produce in such a society, perhaps such uses of them as you've given, for the sake of 'art', would not cause anyone to even bat an eye under such conditions. It would be comparable to being shocked by someone today who uses a lot of *fire* in their art, on the grounds that it's 'abuse' of air.





There was a interesting series on BBC a few years ago on food and where it comes from. They sent these typical bods who like their chicken Macnuggets and tuna to the third world factories etc where they were produced.

The salutary effect was more than any free access communist could even hope for.

I was brought up on the labour theory of value by factory working parents who had never even heard of it.

Stuff like don’t abuse that or this because a load of somebody else’s work/effort/labour time had ‘gone into it’.

The kind of ‘dickhead stupid non intellectual morality’ of the working class.

Intermediate raw materials as a separate category from consumption goods is another well, category.

If I am working down a gold mine for gold for high conductivity electronics that don’t corrode and are not subject to variations in resistance and electrical contact etc etc or whatever.

And a lorry turns up to supply the toilet seat factory; well they can go down in the cage and get it for themselves.


Fair enough -- sounds like a mass-d.i.y. landscape, from you and your conceptions.





On winter furs?

Even the fascists in Germany gave up their winter furs in 1942.

So is that it then, fur coats and Swiss Watches?


Yup -- we're done now. Thanks for showing up, refreshments are on the back table by the entrance. (grin)

Really, though, the idea with both fur coats and Swiss watches is that they're both more *labor-intensive*, and it could be somewhat tricky if there's an arbitrarily large demand for such, post-capitalism, while they're not exactly *necessities*.

Perhaps there *is* enough skilled liberated-labor to go ahead and fulfill the mass demand for both. Or, maybe there *isn't*, but it wouldn't take much to *train* an incoming batch of people to *become* skilled, to fulfill the demand.





Motorbikes would be a better example, I still know guys who love them more than their own children.

But that is all they do, ride about on the bloody same thing.


Although even that is more decadent now than it used to be.

Where most of the fun was taking them to bits and putting them back together again.


You can’t do that anymore.

I was sort of part of the rocker biking culture in my teens.


Huh! Interesting. Feel free to run with this, if you'd like to politicize it in some way....

[GanzEgal]

Based on the above it sounds like you're advocating some kind of private- and state-run *enterprise* system in which *both* kinds of entities are motivated by profit-making, but where the state is somehow *separate* from business interests. Additionally the state would be collecting taxes for the sake of general welfare.

I guess I'd now call this some kind of state capitalism, or Stalinism.
Profit and taxes are concepts for budgeting purposes. really it is money from one pocket of the state to another pocket of the state. But the money (or goods, if you want to omit money from the equation) _must_ move, some 35% of production must go to others than the workers themselves. For this reason it is necessary to use these concepts which as terms sound like we are talking of the state taxing someone else than the state itself. But as the businesses are state-owned, the profit margin and taxes mean the state takes from itself, i.e. reserves a statistical share of the produced goods for purposes other than gratifying the workers who produced them.


Just out of curiosity what's your conception of how the officials of this state would derive their power to be in office?
In case of politicians: elections. In case of production unit managers, there needs to be proven track record of professional expertise, so really the choice could be based on documented professional expertise only, without any elections, or then elections between a few of the best qualified applicants only.

PS: Several things in your proposed economic system worry me much more than using money as the unit of exchange. Your system does not seem to ration the use of production labour and raw materials with sufficient statistical precision, which would lead to inequality between citizens. Also you don't sufficiently address the fact that modern efficient production is actually a market in itself. A worker does not make a television alone from scratch. He _buys_ a thousand components for the machine, and then he assembles it. Budgeting the expected cost, or price, of a new designed television would be a blind shot in the dark, a blind guess, if you plan to order a thousand components but you have no clear idea of how much the components cost. In terms of money, or raw materials, or labour for producing and transporting them to near you.

[ckaihatsu]

Profit and taxes are concepts for budgeting purposes. really it is money from one pocket of the state to another pocket of the state. But the money (or goods, if you want to omit money from the equation) _must_ move, some 35% of production must go to others than the workers themselves. For this reason it is necessary to use these concepts which as terms sound like we are talking of the state taxing someone else than the state itself. But as the businesses are state-owned, the profit margin and taxes mean the state takes from itself, i.e. reserves a statistical share of the produced goods for purposes other than gratifying the workers who produced them.


If all businesses are state-owned then all economics is essentially *internal* to the state itself -- any 'business' on the part of businesses / enterprises would just be for show since all investments and infrastructure are underwritten by the state. This is called 'market socialism' since the means of production is collectivized and controlled by the state.





In case of politicians: elections. In case of production unit managers, there needs to be proven track record of professional expertise, so really the choice could be based on documented professional expertise only, without any elections, or then elections between a few of the best qualified applicants only.


Would the elections for the production unit managers be only from the population of professionals, or would it be from the general public?

If the ranks of the professionals are internally self-selecting, then this is basically a hierarchical *caste* system, which is a technocracy and/or Stalinism, since these 'professionals' are insulated from public political sentiment and, arguably, from working-class participation as well.

If the state officials *and* key manager positions of industry are *both* determined by public elections then this is more like a *syndicalist* type of political economy, and would be closer to representing working class interests than the other set-up.





PS: Several things in your proposed economic system worry me much more than using money as the unit of exchange. Your system does not seem to ration the use of production labour and raw materials with sufficient statistical precision, which would lead to inequality between citizens.


Any 'statistical precision', as over the selection of liberated labor and sourcing of raw materials, would be matters for active *liberated laborers* only -- it would be entirely in their hands. Here's from the model:





labor [supply] -- Only active workers may control communist property -- no private accumulations are allowed and any proceeds from work that cannot be used or consumed by persons themselves will revert to collectivized communist property




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174


The *purpose* of moving beyond capitalism would be to *eliminate scarcity*, not necessarily to regulate 'inequality' out of existence.





Also you don't sufficiently address the fact that modern efficient production is actually a market in itself. A worker does not make a television alone from scratch. He _buys_ a thousand components for the machine, and then he assembles it. Budgeting the expected cost, or price, of a new designed television would be a blind shot in the dark, a blind guess, if you plan to order a thousand components but you have no clear idea of how much the components cost. In terms of money, or raw materials, or labour for producing and transporting them to near you.


Sure, I understand what it means to work with materials, and to make plans for provisioning. But, once scarcity is *eliminated* for any given item in any given area, that material no longer has 'value' in the sense of 'having to be sought-after'. It becomes as easy as finding the sunrise, and all the rest is just the routine formula for getting the task done.

Getting a thousand components from a practically abundant supply means that you can use just one, all thousand, or even go back for more, and you wouldn't have to concern yourself in the least about it. Anything you didn't use you would just put back, for others to use. No 'value', no markets needed.

[GanzEgal]

Would the elections for the production unit managers be only from the population of professionals, or would it be from the general public?

If the ranks of the professionals are internally self-selecting, then this is basically a hierarchical *caste* system, which is a technocracy and/or Stalinism, since these 'professionals' are insulated from public political sentiment and, arguably, from working-class participation as well.
There was a case in my home country some time ago, that a person with the education level of a nurse was elected as the highest manager of a large university hospital. Several of the best doctors resigned in protest, and eventually the hospital had no other choice than cancel the appointment of the nurse as manager, and select a person whom the doctors (and general population) respect and trust as the professionally best qualified possible person for the position.

Production and its management needs profound understanding of the type of business, its products and production technologies, everything from top to bottom. Just like the doctors at this above-mentioned hospital (and many people in the general public too), I would not want to entrust the managerial position of important and complex business (such as a hospital, or a computer factory, or a car factory, or a ship factory) with anyone else than the most experienced and highest skilled applicant who is available for the position. This is a matter of production quality, public safety, and also of the personal ambition and motivation of the professionals involved in the business. People have personal ambitions in professional life, also unrelated to material gains, and it hurts the feelings of highly skilled professionals, if the most challenging and respected managerial profession in the business is given to anyone else than the person whom everyone understands to be the most skilled and experienced possible choice for the position.

If the managerial positions in hospitals are reserved to medical doctors, and the managerial positions in ship industry are reserved to experienced ship engineers, you can call it technocracy if you want, but I call it common reason.


once scarcity is *eliminated* for any given item in any given area, that material no longer has 'value' in the sense of 'having to be sought-after'. (...) Getting a thousand components from a practically abundant supply means that you can use just one, all thousand, or even go back for more, and you wouldn't have to concern yourself in the least about it.
This doesn't function in reality, it is a sheer statistical and physical impossibility. The amount of goods will always be too limited for the economy to function as you describe. There will never be "practically abundant supply" of anything more complex and expensive than a toothstick. The planet doesn't even have toilet paper for everyone, people in Africa and Asia poo in the bushes without paper, and if you take a calculator and count how much forest would need to be cut to supply toilet paper to all persons on the planet, that would be an immediate environmental catastrophe.

By assuming practically abundant supply of anything what a production worker or consumer may need, you hugely underestimate the limitedness of raw materials and production labour on the planet. This is not a small underestimation, so that there would be some doubt whether your theory might function or not. To me it looks like your plan is completely detached from the physical reality of our materially limited planet vs. the huge number of population to serve.

[ckaihatsu]

There was a case in my home country some time ago, that a person with the education level of a nurse was elected as the highest manager of a large university hospital. Several of the best doctors resigned in protest, and eventually the hospital had no other choice than cancel the appointment of the nurse as manager, and select a person whom the doctors (and general population) respect and trust as the professionally best qualified possible person for the position.

Production and its management needs profound understanding of the type of business, its products and production technologies, everything from top to bottom. Just like the doctors at this above-mentioned hospital (and many people in the general public too), I would not want to entrust the managerial position of important and complex business (such as a hospital, or a computer factory, or a car factory, or a ship factory) with anyone else than the most experienced and highest skilled applicant who is available for the position. This is a matter of production quality, public safety, and also of the personal ambition and motivation of the professionals involved in the business. People have personal ambitions in professional life, also unrelated to material gains, and it hurts the feelings of highly skilled professionals, if the most challenging and respected managerial profession in the business is given to anyone else than the person whom everyone understands to be the most skilled and experienced possible choice for the position.

If the managerial positions in hospitals are reserved to medical doctors, and the managerial positions in ship industry are reserved to experienced ship engineers, you can call it technocracy if you want, but I call it common reason.


Certainly -- I hear you. This is all understandable, especially under the material constraints we all know of, under capitalism.

The only thing I'll add is that perhaps the conventional, typical hierarchical structure of management and oversight could be improved-on, conceivably. Often too much responsibility is placed on the shoulders of higher-ups while those of the rank-and-file feel passed-over on routine day-to-day decisions that they're regularly experiencing on-the-ground, anyway.

The hierarchy, while conferring a certain efficiency over decision-making, is usually too top-heavy and authoritarian -- and that's often for the sake of the power structure's continued existence, and may not necessarily even have anything to do with the practical issues at hand.

Here's a good treatment of the topic (from my favorite political essay):





With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art. In action, we never have. Caesar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect man. But how tragically insecure was Caesar! Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. Caesar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road. Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan. Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man. But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him! He staggered under the burden of the empire. He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb. What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger. Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction.




https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/





This doesn't function in reality, it is a sheer statistical and physical impossibility. The amount of goods will always be too limited for the economy to function as you describe. There will never be "practically abundant supply" of anything more complex and expensive than a toothstick. The planet doesn't even have toilet paper for everyone, people in Africa and Asia poo in the bushes without paper, and if you take a calculator and count how much forest would need to be cut to supply toilet paper to all persons on the planet, that would be an immediate environmental catastrophe.

By assuming practically abundant supply of anything what a production worker or consumer may need, you hugely underestimate the limitedness of raw materials and production labour on the planet. This is not a small underestimation, so that there would be some doubt whether your theory might function or not. To me it looks like your plan is completely detached from the physical reality of our materially limited planet vs. the huge number of population to serve.


Unfortunately you seem to think that present-day quantities would somehow just stay *static* and only be *depleted*, once a worldwide workers control got underway. I have to reiterate that the whole *purpose* of revolution, etc., is to *eliminate scarcity*. This is done, practically, by *increasing capacities*. For any shortfalls anywhere the question has to be asked, 'How do we get or make more of it so that there is no longer any human need for it -- ?'

Many current production techniques are woefully outdated or artificially crippled in their implementation, and it may even be *common knowledge* on how to improve these techniques for better output. Yet it isn't *done better*, because those who are making profits will continue to make profits regardless of the qualities and quantities of production, and their knock-on effects on human lives.

[GanzEgal]

The hierarchy, while conferring a certain efficiency over decision-making, is usually too top-heavy and authoritarian
Because the boss gets paid more than others, there is a material motive for the boss to prevent other workers from sharing his duties, and potentially prove themselves even better at management than the current job. Rotation in managerial positions of all kind, from small shops to state leadership or International Olympic Committee, is nearly everywhere unnaturally and frustratingly slow, and should be improved. The privilege of working in a managerial position should be shared more equally, among highly skilled professionals.


*eliminate scarcity*. This is done, practically, by *increasing capacities*. For any shortfalls anywhere the question has to be asked, 'How do we get or make more of it so that there is no longer any human need for it
I have understood this all the way along the discussion, that your system expects this to happen, and requires this to happen, to be functional at all. But my criticism is that the quantities needed would be impossible (and wasteful, from an environmental viewpoint) to produce, we would run out of natural resources, raw materials, and production work force.

[Ledur]

Property needs to be privately _possessed_, you cannot share the same apartment with a thousand others, or the same car. Persons will want to change the apartment, the car, or anything.

I was talking about property of the means of production, not personal possessions. I insist, there's no exchange when all property is common.


Limited existence of material goods forces us to ration, limit people's access. But people want to possess very different things, one wants pears, another wants apples. You cannot compare pears with apples, you need a neutral measuring unit to compare things possessed by individuals with the rationed total that the individual is entitled to possess. Even if all property is commonly _owned_, you need a market for deciding who should have the right to _possess_ in his personal use the things that exist in the society.

No, you don't need a market, because a market implies exchange. Final goods are distributed, either by free-access or rationing.


If the state or a state-owned factory makes profit, for common good, the right wing hates it because it is a missed opportunity for the owning class to own the business and get the profit.

I don't think it is straightforwardly logical to hand-pick one word out of economical vocabulary and be allergic to it, out of a Capitalist context.

(...)

Some 35% of the population are non-workers, even in the best case where all working age men and women have full-time employment. You can close your eyes and hope that the products of labour end up also in the hands of non-workers, or then you can legally ensure it, for example by taxing lthe products of labour. I don't believe in blind hopes, I only believe in legally guaranteed rights.

Well, you're describing a state-capitalist society. It's OK. However, IMHO, a socialist mode of production would be close to communism: without money, for direct-use instead of profit.

[ckaihatsu]

Because the boss gets paid more than others, there is a material motive for the boss to prevent other workers from sharing his duties, and potentially prove themselves even better at management than the current job. Rotation in managerial positions of all kind, from small shops to state leadership or International Olympic Committee, is nearly everywhere unnaturally and frustratingly, and should be improved. The privilege of working in a managerial position should be shared more equally, among highly skilled professionals.


This is still *reformist* in nature, leaving the overall hierarchy and the social norm of it, intact.

I'd say what's more to the point is the *production* itself -- we might go so far as to look at any given workplace generically, as a series of *situations* (events), through time, with corresponding *issues* from the same. Nowadays it would be entirely feasible to address the *issues* themselves, from a broad-based participation (even bringing in input from arbitrary persons who are so interested and relevant to the situation, over the Internet). The overhead of a hierarchical social relations can be obviated entirely, leaving a 'prevailing informed sentiment' (for lack of a better term) that would be the deciding / determining direction for any given issue.

Obviously this is more suited to a *post*-class-structured societal norm, but it's *logistically* doable, conceivably, at least.





I have understood this all the way along the discussion, that your system expects this to happen, and requires this to happen, to be functional at all. But my criticism is that the quantities needed would be impossible (and wasteful, from an environmental viewpoint) to produce, we would run out of natural resources, raw materials, and production work force.


Well, given your lack of any supporting reasoning on this, your point is coming off very much as an unfounded assertion, and so is more *philosophical* (ideological) than anything else.

I can only repeat that the *processes* of production could very well change dramatically, for much greater efficiencies and lesser environmental impact. The status quo does not have to be retained -- it can be improved-on.

[Dave B]

I do appreciate Ckaihatsu that this is a thought experiment and thus it might seem a little bit unfair of me to ridicule ‘an’ example.


But what I would say as a kind of other paradigm is that it is impossible now for anyone to consume more than they can easily produce measured in their own labour time.

[That is not just a throwaway comment it is a fundamental part of the theoretical framework of Karl’s theory. Eg the famous realm of freedom quote in Volume III.]

People can certainly possess a lot more than they can produce; but even they can only use over any period of time a fraction of it.

Eg Immelda Marcos may have had 7000 pairs of shoes but still had one pair of feet.

How many shoes do you think she could wear out in a lifetime?

Less than me I suspect but I will do a twenty mile hike every other weekend.

I mean as a thought experiment a bit like that film about someone spending a million in a week or whatever.

How much money could a person spend through pure consumption in a week without destroying stuff and with the value of bought commodities offset against the spend; even at their second-hand value?

And ruling out pure bling any paying servants to wipe your arse etc.

I think some people might like luxury goods as a personal and exclusive possession but that is OK I think if they spend nearly all of their leisure time using them.

It could be a snooker table or a £15,000 motorbike, and some of those people otherwise live like ascetic tramps on baked beans on toast old jeans and never even shower more than once a month.

Bikers I mean.

You can spend a lot on travel I suppose and it is a youthful fetish.

I am almost bored with it now and have to badgered to go on holiday to see yet another pile of ancient rubble and pile of stones.

I appreciate that scientists invent new genuinely useful products and they can’t suddenly start producing them all at once in abundance.



And its probably no a good idea anyway as you might end up being stuck with loads of factories making mobile phones the size of house bricks etc without touch screens camera’s and GPS etc etc.

I am pretty close to the daft end of things where the twisted and sick minds of New Product Development constantly generate new products like banana strawberry and rhubarb juice.

Along with all the passing paraphernalia of packaging and ancillary material.

It’s a real pain in the arse for the likes of me in the job I do

[GanzEgal]

given your lack of any supporting reasoning on this, your point is coming off very much as an unfounded assertion, and so is more *philosophical* (ideological) than anything else.
Funny that you should say so, when it is me who advocates a system which already exists (but is run by wrong kind of people, with wrong motives), with responsible rationing of the amount of goods, raw materials and production capacity which currently is known to exist. While it is you who advocates a new untested method of production, with abundance of raw materials and production capacity which does not seem to exist now.

There is another thread going on about the finiteness of natural resources. There could be an active writer or two, who have something to say about your prospect of practically infinite abundance of everything. Who will take your mere word that the material abundance that you describe is physically possible, if you don't back your claims with some hard data? To get any wind under the wings of your theory, you need to present a mathematical calculation of how much of everything would actually exist, per person, multiplied by 7 billion persons, and how much work and raw materials would be needed for it, versus how much work 2 or 3 billion working age persons can actually perform (not all working age people work in production), and how much raw materials exist on the planet, and how much energy would be needed and how it would be produced, and what the environmental consequences of taking the said raw materials from the nature would be. People don't like jumping headlong into the dark unknown. They want to see more than promises, they want to see hard facts.

[ckaihatsu]

I do appreciate Ckaihatsu


Please. It's Chris.





that this is a thought experiment and thus it might seem a little bit unfair of me to ridicule ‘an’ example.


But what I would say as a kind of other paradigm is that it is impossible now for anyone to consume more than they can easily produce measured in their own labour time.


Yup. Well-said. Agreed.





[That is not just a throwaway comment it is a fundamental part of the theoretical framework of Karl’s theory. Eg the famous realm of freedom quote in Volume III.]

People can certainly possess a lot more than they can produce; but even they can only use over any period of time a fraction of it.

Eg Immelda Marcos may have had 7000 pairs of shoes but still had one pair of feet.

How many shoes do you think she could wear out in a lifetime?

Less than me I suspect but I will do a twenty mile hike every other weekend.

I mean as a thought experiment a bit like that film about someone spending a million in a week or whatever.

How much money could a person spend through pure consumption in a week without destroying stuff and with the value of bought commodities offset against the spend; even at their second-hand value?

And ruling out pure bling any paying servants to wipe your arse etc.

I think some people might like luxury goods as a personal and exclusive possession but that is OK I think if they spend nearly all of their leisure time using them.


Right -- in *social* terms they may as well be off in a *cave* someplace, detached from the rest of society and its goings-on.





It could be a snooker table or a £15,000 motorbike, and some of those people otherwise live like ascetic tramps on baked beans on toast old jeans and never even shower more than once a month.

Bikers I mean.


(Heh.)





You can spend a lot on travel I suppose and it is a youthful fetish.

I am almost bored with it now and have to badgered to go on holiday to see yet another pile of ancient rubble and pile of stones.


Sounds like much of your past travel wasn't from your own volition.





I appreciate that scientists invent new genuinely useful products and they can’t suddenly start producing them all at once in abundance.



And its probably no a good idea anyway as you might end up being stuck with loads of factories making mobile phones the size of house bricks etc without touch screens camera’s and GPS etc etc.


Hmmmmm, I don't quite follow -- it sounds like some throwaway / rote pessimism....





I am pretty close to the daft end of things where the twisted and sick minds of New Product Development constantly generate new products like banana strawberry and rhubarb juice.

Along with all the passing paraphernalia of packaging and ancillary material.

It’s a real pain in the arse for the likes of me in the job I do


Well, it's a *job*, I suppose....

This is partly why I'm suspicious of post-capitalist proposals that constrain everyone and their lives to the same, fixed work environment in a set work-role rotation -- the vagaries of breathing life into material development don't make for any kind of fun life experience, and, production-wise, things of that sort could very well stay the same or be similar for a *post*-capitalist production environment. It's all of the *social* conditions around such that we have some control over, as with worker-based politics, revolution, etc.

[ckaihatsu]

Funny that you should say so, when it is me who advocates a system which already exists (but is run by wrong kind of people, with wrong motives), with responsible rationing of the amount of goods, raw materials and production capacity which currently is known to exist. While it is you who advocates a new untested method of production, with abundance of raw materials and production capacity which does not seem to exist now.


It's *hardly* "untested" -- the point of a revolutionary politics, in case you haven't yet noticed where you are, is to put *workers* in control of the tasks that they already know and are already doing. That's it -- nothing elaborate.





There is another thread going on about the finiteness of natural resources. There could be an active writer or two, who have something to say about your prospect of practically infinite abundance of everything. Who will take your mere word that the material abundance that you describe is physically possible, if you don't back your claims with some hard data? To get any wind under the wings of your theory, you need to present a mathematical calculation of how much of everything would actually exist, per person, multiplied by 7 billion persons, and how much work and raw materials would be needed for it, versus how much work 2 or 3 billion working age persons can actually perform (not all working age people work in production), and how much raw materials exist on the planet, and how much energy would be needed and how it would be produced, and what the environmental consequences of taking the said raw materials from the nature would be. People don't like jumping headlong into the dark unknown. They want to see more than promises, they want to see hard facts.


Nice try.

Again, you're missing the point, to put it generously. The question in front of humanity right now is 'Why haven't we ended basic privation and want?' -- the *means* for doing so, as for providing food and shelter, etc., already *exist*.

So instead of looking at this in a contrived, fill-in-all-the-spaces-in-this-spreadsheet kind of way, think of it as a matter of *prioritizations*, but across-the-board, for everyone. What comes first? (Food and shelter.) What comes next? How do we all get to the next plateau....

Here's a diagram for it, and the one after it is just for illustrative purposes only, and not for content.


[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/)




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/)

[GanzEgal]

It's *hardly* "untested" -- the point of a revolutionary politics, in case you haven't yet noticed where you are, is to put *workers* in control of the tasks that they already know and are already doing. That's it -- nothing elaborate.
Many people are unemployed or even uneducated, so the jobs are not in place yet. Neither are people in their dream jobs, the very theory of Socialism criticizes Capitalism of forcing people into jobs that are not interesting for them. Many people would want to immediately change their job.


The question in front of humanity right now is 'Why haven't we ended basic privation and want?'
To meet a person's basic needs only, such as food, a room to sleep in, and a set of clothes on, I agree that your model does not need much testing or mathematical proofing.

But people want a much higher standard of living than this, and it is unclear how your system would manage to get anywhere so high where the western societies are currently, for example.

[ckaihatsu]

Many people are unemployed or even uneducated, so the jobs are not in place yet. Neither are people in their dream jobs, the very theory of Socialism criticizes Capitalism of forcing people into jobs that are not interesting for them. Many people would want to immediately change their job.


If this is your *only* concern here -- wouldn't it be better / preferable to be trained and coached into a job role by someone who's actually part of *running* the workplace, as part of a *collectivized enterprise*, than by someone who is entirely disempowered (no offense to anyone) and there because of having to work for a wage?

And for those looking for their 'dream job' -- wouldn't it be preferable to be able to go on that journey and allow it to take however long it takes, *without* having to be worried about paying the bills, putting food on the table, etc. -- ? A socialist social order would certainly be more concerned with the health and welfare of the individual than the same under *current* conditions of *commodified* labor.





To meet a person's basic needs only, such as food, a room to sleep in, and a set of clothes on, I agree that your model does not need much testing or mathematical proofing.


Okay, good to hear.





But people want a much higher standard of living than this, and it is unclear how your system would manage to get anywhere so high where the western societies are currently, for example.


Well then I don't know the right combination of words that will satisfy you in this regard, and I do apologize for that. If you can agree that a basic-human-needs 'gift economy' would be doable, through proletarian revolution, then I -- at least -- will be satisfied with that, and would point you to my blog for a consideration of societal potentials beyond that, at that point.

[GanzEgal]

In a gift economy I am not concerned about whether the system is able to produce _statistically_ enough food and other basic necessities of life for the total population on the planet. The world already does that, but the current system does not distribute the food equally.

I am concerned about people getting equally much of the basic necessities -- or indeed anything at all -- if no rationing of the produced goods is enforced.

As for higher standard of living, well beyond the basic necessities of life, the same concern as above applies, plus the concern of easily running out of raw materials and/or production labour input, if the system aims to achieve practical abundance of everything in a very limited world with a rather huge population. Which would again lead to the need to ration what we have, because we don't have infinite amounts, so the last ones in queue easily get nothing if the first ones in queue get unrationed amounts.

Creating a gift economy sounds challenging enough, if you add on top of it also the philosophy of refraining from rationing the production or output in any centralized way, the challenge only gets tougher and tougher.

[ckaihatsu]

In a gift economy I am not concerned about whether the system is able to produce _statistically_ enough food and other basic necessities of life for the total population on the planet. The world already does that, but the current system does not distribute the food equally.


Yes, agreed.





I am concerned about people getting equally much of the basic necessities -- or indeed anything at all -- if no rationing of the produced goods is enforced.


Then that would be where the 'gift economy' would apply, since a world without commodity-based values would be able to achieve what you've just described.





As for higher standard of living, well beyond the basic necessities of life, the same concern as above applies, plus the concern of easily running out of raw materials and/or production labour input, if the system aims to achieve practical abundance of everything in a very limited world with a rather huge population. Which would again lead to the need to ration what we have, because we don't have infinite amounts, so the last ones in queue easily get nothing if the first ones in queue get unrationed amounts.


I think the conventional 'queue' as a method of distribution is both outdated and lacking -- I'll again invite you to consider the approach I have outlined at post #34, 'additive prioritizations'.





Creating a gift economy sounds challenging enough, if you add on top of it also the philosophy of refraining from rationing the production or output in any centralized way, the challenge only gets tougher and tougher.


No, I soundly disagree and will point you back to this part of the ground we've covered:





[T]he production and distribution of mass-produced materials and goods would be on the volition of liberated labor, to eliminate scarcity on a per-item basis in a particular area.

So since it's direct-distribution, that implies free-access, and there's no exchangeability of currency of any kind for materials or goods. No currency means no markets.

[cyu]

Creating a gift economy sounds challenging enough The less human motivation you understand, the more challenging it will be to motivate people =]

What motivates you?


...and is that the only motivation? If not, what else? Do they motivate you equally?

[ckaihatsu]

The less human motivation you understand, the more challenging it will be to motivate people =]


What's that, cyu, the *forced-smile* emoticon -- ??

Is that even *listed* at Wikipedia -- ?


= D

[ckaihatsu]

Or, more appropriately, the 'knowing smile'....


>B^ )

[GanzEgal]

What motivates you?
The pursuit of equality among humans, mainly. The concept of equality implies statistical awareness of, and plannedly even distiribution of, the existing material well-being.

[Dave B]

Hi Chris

Talking about myself probably too much.

I am not actually a throw away person by nature and I am closer to a commodity miser which just so happens to also conveniently fit into by political beliefs.

I am on my second mobile phone which is now over 5 years old and cost me £20 from Argos and kept my first until it packed in, and it was an object of ridicule.

I do it at work as well when it is not even my money.

I recently bought an 25 year old pulsed amperometric detector for $200 on ebay to replace an old one that stopped working cos some chips had burned out.

New ones cost about $15,000 although it would have been a ball ache raising a minor capex and reading the new manual, that’s always the worse bit.

Technology evolves I mean who is using a 15 year old PC or can even.

Mine is throw-away second hand.

I think job rotation in the workplace is really important, especially in factories and in fact makes things more efficient. It is easier to anticipate the effects and impact of your own decisions on processes elsewhere in the chain.

Working in QC on its own is good for that as you can tend to end up poking your nose in everybody’s business and get a good overview of the whole process.

When I worked on the shop floor I always liked to try and do other peoples jobs in between my own just to see what it was like even if it was just stacking cases on a pallet.

I do appreciate that lots of people are unemployed and are in crap call centre employment and I am lucky at the moment.

I was unemployed for two years in my youth in the early 1980’s and I think things were actually worse then.

It can be interesting to look at typical examples of the even better off workers now.

I have a friend who works as a conductor on trains and she does a 60 hour week for about £35,000 say.

Takes home just over £2000 a month or something

She has a £200,000 of still negative equity mortgage on a fairly modest dwelling with interest only payments being something like £1000K.

Interest is surplus value so she is ‘exploited’ twice.

Or even three times for students with a loan to pay as well as mortgage interest.

£250 a week spends as a single parent with two kids isn’t much.

A lot of fuel bills is itself surplus profit from differential ground rent theory.

It goes to the Gulf landowning aristocracy and pays for the bombing of 'Muslims' through the petro dollar racket.

I have been extremely lucky I bought my house at a good time for £35,000 paid it off which was helped when granny left be £17,000 in her will.

So I probably have double the disposable income of most people in my £25,000 PA pay bracket.

And I am not a bling person; not even a DVD or flat screen TV.


Without wanting to start sound to much like a factory working class snob you have to go into a modern factory these days to appreciate how productive labour can be with the right equipment or fixed capital.

Although the raw material (and fixed capital) that we process already has it own intrinsic value etc we produce something like 1KG of finished product per person every 6 seconds or something.


I had a debate a few years ago of the feasibility of working out labour time value of ‘commodities’ in socialism; as I think that should be on the label along with other stuff like nutritional data.

Actually it was very easy to get the data, it took me about 20 minutes, I only had to ask a couple of people for the relevant spreadsheets.

They were surprisingly quite interested when I told them why I was interested eg how long it took in time to make the stuff.

Another friend who works in similar industry did the same and came up with an amazingly similar figure differing by a couple of seconds.

It sort of gives you a ballpark figure of what goes on outside sweatshop labour and peasant agriculture.

I am extremely sensitive to the eco terrorism of unsustainable consumption.

[ckaihatsu]

Hi Chris

Talking about myself probably too much.


Heya, Dave...!

No biggie, but you may want to bring it to private messaging....





I am not actually a throw away person by nature and I am closer to a commodity miser which just so happens to also conveniently fit into by political beliefs.

I am on my second mobile phone which is now over 5 years old and cost me £20 from Argos and kept my first until it packed in, and it was an object of ridicule.

I do it at work as well when it is not even my money.

I recently bought an 25 year old pulsed amperometric detector for $200 on ebay to replace an old one that stopped working cos some chips had burned out.

New ones cost about $15,000 although it would have been a ball ache raising a minor capex and reading the new manual, that’s always the worse bit.

Technology evolves I mean who is using a 15 year old PC or can even.

Mine is throw-away second hand.


Maybe try this:

http://puppylinuxnews.org/





I think job rotation in the workplace is really important, especially in factories and in fact makes things more efficient. It is easier to anticipate the effects and impact of your own decisions on processes elsewhere in the chain.

Working in QC on its own is good for that as you can tend to end up poking your nose in everybody’s business and get a good overview of the whole process.

When I worked on the shop floor I always liked to try and do other peoples jobs in between my own just to see what it was like even if it was just stacking cases on a pallet.

I do appreciate that lots of people are unemployed and are in crap call centre employment and I am lucky at the moment.

I was unemployed for two years in my youth in the early 1980’s and I think things were actually worse then.

It can be interesting to look at typical examples of the even better off workers now.

I have a friend who works as a conductor on trains and she does a 60 hour week for about £35,000 say.

Takes home just over £2000 a month or something

She has a £200,000 of still negative equity mortgage on a fairly modest dwelling with interest only payments being something like £1000K.

Interest is surplus value so she is ‘exploited’ twice.

Or even three times for students with a loan to pay as well as mortgage interest.

£250 a week spends as a single parent with two kids isn’t much.

A lot of fuel bills is itself surplus profit from differential ground rent theory.

It goes to the Gulf landowning aristocracy and pays for the bombing of 'Muslims' through the petro dollar racket.

I have been extremely lucky I bought my house at a good time for £35,000 paid it off which was helped when granny left be £17,000 in her will.

So I probably have double the disposable income of most people in my £25,000 PA pay bracket.

And I am not a bling person; not even a DVD or flat screen TV.


Even those things are now commonplace at thrift stores....





Without wanting to start sound to much like a factory working class snob you have to go into a modern factory these days to appreciate how productive labour can be with the right equipment or fixed capital.

Although the raw material (and fixed capital) that we process already has it own intrinsic value etc we produce something like 1KG of finished product per person every 6 seconds or something.


Yup.





I had a debate a few years ago of the feasibility of working out labour time value of ‘commodities’ in socialism; as I think that should be on the label along with other stuff like nutritional data.


I've always found that kind of extension of economics into the post-commodity realm as being a dead-end since it doesn't take *use* values into account in any systematic way.





Actually it was very easy to get the data, it took me about 20 minutes, I only had to ask a couple of people for the relevant spreadsheets.

They were surprisingly quite interested when I told them why I was interested eg how long it took in time to make the stuff.

Another friend who works in similar industry did the same and came up with an amazingly similar figure differing by a couple of seconds.

It sort of gives you a ballpark figure of what goes on outside sweatshop labour and peasant agriculture.


Interesting, definitely.





I am extremely sensitive to the eco terrorism of unsustainable consumption.


Yeah, there's someone else around here who goes off on that a lot, too....

[cyu]

The pursuit of equality among humans, mainly.

If everyone had motivation like this, can we create a gift economy? If a gift economy is hard because you believe others have different motivations, what are the typical motivations you expect out of other people?

[Illegalitarian]

What's that, cyu, the *forced-smile* emoticon -- ??

Is that even *listed* at Wikipedia -- ?


= D

Funny, since wikipedia is a pretty great example of a gift economy :lol:


My problem with Kropotkin's idea of affinity groups for the production of goods that go beyond the scope of need is the fact that's it's so localist.

What if I live in some backwater rural town in TN, as I do, and I want a piano, but no one else in my area is willing to enter into such an agreement to produce pianos?



Also, what about the problem of infinite wants in a world of finite resources? If everyone in the world is technically able to access any good they want, would this not deplete the world's resources at an alarming rate? I don't see how we're supposed to magically reach post-scarcity.



There's also the matter of distribution. Without price signals, how do we know where to distribute these goods, or how much of them to produce etc?

[ckaihatsu]

Funny, since wikipedia is a pretty great example of a gift economy :lol:


Yup. So is RevLeft, for that matter....





My problem with Kropotkin's idea of affinity groups for the production of goods that go beyond the scope of need is the fact that's it's so localist.


I'll take your word for it -- I'm unfamiliar. But I'll also say 'not necessarily', since the *scale* of an affinity group could conceivably be *any* size, all the way up to the world's total population, perhaps. That may even be synonymous for 'full communism'.





What if I live in some backwater rural town in TN, as I do, and I want a piano, but no one else in my area is willing to enter into such an agreement to produce pianos?


Obviously they need to be brought in from outside somehow, unless one would want to take on the hassle of learning how to build pianos and tune them, etc., oneself, which is quite separate from the activity of *playing* a piano.

If the larger, possibly world, society was truly post-capitalist and material conditions weren't so bad after whatever it took to defeat the bourgeoisie, then it's quite possible that some not-too-far-off urban center has a piano-production facility and would probably have a regular supply of extras on hand as well. Then it would just be a matter of securing the transport for such from that point to where you are. Social connections would be made and you might return the favor (of the facility's past liberated-labor for the completion of the piano) somehow, in some capacity.

These days some would undoubtedly chirp in '3D printers', so there you go with that as an option.

Here's *another* treatment, f.y.i., that's more suited for items from *mass* production, and *without* returning the favor:







'How would an individual obtain goods in a feasible post-capitalist social order, in a socially acceptable way, without having to work.'




And, to address this, my conception of such a social order *would* readily allow individuals to receive goods *without* providing work themselves, *because of* the existence of machinery that doesn't require much work-effort input to produce mass quantities of manufactured goods.

Here's the "proof", in steps:





Material function

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




Determination of material values

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




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




Propagation

labor [supply] -- Workers with past accumulated labor credits are the funders of new work positions and incoming laborers -- labor credits are handed over at the completion of work hours -- underfunded projects and production runs are debt-based and will be noted as such against the issuing locality




http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174





So, in brief, this means that any one person's demands would only be their own, but, depending on what's demanded, they may resonate with the same, or similar, demands of many others.

If the goods that someone wanted were commonly demanded and routinely produced then it would just be a matter of making sure that the number of units produced would be adequate to satisfy one's own personal requirements -- I'd imagine this would simply be an administrative matter of contacting those whose policy package it is that's actively in use, to have production bumped-up accordingly. I doubt that additional labor credits would have to be considered for this, since you're only one person, and the additional production to cover one person would be negligible.

So we can see that the key variable here is 'which goods'. If the request / demand can be satisfied with already-existing mass production, then there you have it -- no work needed on your part, and you get what you want, subject to the real-world political process.

The downside is that it *would* still require you to be part of a *social-political* process, since the context is a *political economy*, unless regular practices included producing significant surpluses of whatever, for those like yourself to just find and take from.

At *worst* you might have to deal in a more-involved way with those whose policy package is being used, to have it favorably amended, and/or to deal with the liberated laborers themselves, to ask them to run a larger batch, for your personal benefit.





Also, what about the problem of infinite wants in a world of finite resources? If everyone in the world is technically able to access any good they want, would this not deplete the world's resources at an alarming rate? I don't see how we're supposed to magically reach post-scarcity.


I can't speak to *regulation* directly -- in my conception and model / framework of things, all actions would necessarily derive from aggregated / collective inputs, so a civil-society-type social *discussion* for the political economy is definitely implied. Everything would be pre-planned and nothing would be economically speculative, so I'd imagine that's where larger concerns about dwindling supplies, either natural or otherwise, would be brought up.

True to the title of this thread any goods that are *not* abundant and readily available should be considered 'luxury' goods for the purposes of definition.


[EDIT:]




So this approach addresses material scarcity through socially-sanctioned incentives for the liberated labor that *alleviates* such material scarcity. Work roles that are more-difficult, more-hazardous, and/or more-demanded would see increasing rates of labor credits offered per hour of liberated labor, and those who *earn* such labor credits would realize an increasing share of control over *future* uses of liberated labor, limited to the actual amount of labor credits earned.





[If] 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.


In those cases [where additional production isn't possible or wouldn't be sufficient] my 'additive prioritizations' portion would apply, which is at post #34.





There's also the matter of distribution. Without price signals, how do we know where to distribute these goods, or how much of them to produce etc?


Everything would be pre-planned, so it would be like ordering online and that order being the tangible impetus for initiating production of that item so that it can be produced and made available to you. Of course in practice there would be aggregate information already and there'd be a 'buffer', or slight surplus, of inventory of the most common and numerous goods so that orders can actually be quickly responded-to for a quick turnaround. Less-common = more-d.i.y. and/or see my blog entry about 'labor credits'.

[GanzEgal]

If everyone had motivation like this, can we create a gift economy? If a gift economy is hard because you believe others have different motivations, what are the typical motivations you expect out of other people?
Gift economy requires absence of greed as a motivation in life, and therefore meets ideological resistance from the upper class. But greed is not the only reason why a thinking person might feel uncomfortable about the idea of gift economy. Another reason can be what I mentioned as my main motive in life: the wish to guarantee that the existing finite material resources are distributed equally among the vast population. Effectively it is lack of faith in the distribution becoming statistically equal among a vast population without careful planning and proactive rationing. Gaussian curve tends to become reality, when no control and rationing mechanisms are in place. Even if people would not specifically want to be greedy and take more than is the statistical average, an individual has no way of being aware that he took more than is statistically possible per citizen, it the statistics don't even exist.

[GanzEgal]

I see that Illegalitarian is nearly my clone in this discussion, what comes to the arguments he presents and defends. I swear to Marx that I didn't create a second username for myself, it is another person.

We are essentially involved in what is known as "the Socialist calculation debate". Nothing new under the sun, these concerns and major arguments for and against have been on the table for one hundred years already. Some very smart peope have tackled the topic, without reaching a generally accepted conclusion in the merciless peer review of fellow Leftists.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate

[Lord Testicles]

Also, what about the problem of infinite wants in a world of finite resources? If everyone in the world is technically able to access any good they want, would this not deplete the world's resources at an alarming rate? I don't see how we're supposed to magically reach post-scarcity.


We currently live in a system where outrageous amounts of resources are literally wasted everyday.

I knew a guy who used to drive a truck full of "damaged" goods from an Amazon warehouse to a landfill, these damaged good ranged from DVD collections to wide-screen TVs and anything in between. The one thing all of these had in common most of the time was that the actual product wasn't damaged but the packaging was.

Bare in mind that he was one of many drivers for one warehouse and they all did multiple trips each day for five days a week. Throwing perfectly good products away because the cardboard or plastic that surrounded them was damaged.

I don't think people quite grasp the sheer amount of raw material to work with on this planet and that's just this planet. I think we are going to be fine, resource wise.

[cyu]

Gift economy requires absence of greed as a motivation in life, and therefore meets ideological resistance from the upper class.
Do you think there is a cause for the greed of the upper class? Is it in their DNA? If not, were does it come from?


it is lack of faith in the distribution becoming statistically equal Must everyone have the same number of peanuts, even those who don't want peanuts (due to peanut allergies for example)? If not, then what does equal distribution mean to you?

[Illegalitarian]

Do you think there is a cause for the greed of the upper class? Is it in their DNA? If not, were does it come from?

Must everyone have the same number of peanuts, even those who don't want peanuts (due to peanut allergies for example)? If not, then what does equal distribution mean to you?



Well there is the issue of there being no upper-class after a revolution so successful that it has implemented a system of gift economics, but let's just go ahead and, for the sake of discussion, say yes! People with political and philosophical bourgeois worldviews who say that greed is an inherent part of man are correct, and greed is a motivating factor for our actions.


Why, then, would anyone want to engage in any other economic activity other than gift giving (that is, the notion of working and in exchange for the fruits of your labor, gaining access to that which is produced from the labor of everyone else)?

Money exists as a barrier, between the working class and what they need and desire. With that barrier gone, then, the vast majority of working class people, that is to say, the vast majority of people on earth, then gain access to whatever it is they could possibly want (which is not to say everyone could live in giant mansions with huge pools and new Ferrari's, as most people on earth do not desire such extravagance).

Sounds like the perfect arrangement for someone stricken with greed, the availability of the things they couldn't get before.

[cyu]

People with political and philosophical bourgeois worldviews who say that greed is an inherent part of man are correct
It seems you imply it is in their DNA. So it is in their nature to collect things? What kinds of things? Why prefer to collect cars or yellow rocks, and not, say, dried yak poop? Why prefer a large number in a bank account, and not, say, a large number in credit card debt?


whatever it is they could possibly want What do you believe determines what people want? Do you believe it is in their DNA? Do you want a Ferrari because you have DNA that makes you salivate over a Ferrari? Do people who think miniskirts are attractive on women, but not men, have DNA that says they should prefer miniskirts on women?

[ckaihatsu]

It seems you imply it is in their DNA. So it is in their nature to collect things?


It's hardly controversial to say that we human beings -- along with many other higher-order animals -- tend to indulge our curiosity, to explore new environments and things. Having ready access to the things that sustain our interest over the longer-term would be the next step after raw exploration.





What kinds of things? Why prefer to collect cars or yellow rocks, and not, say, dried yak poop?


Contrary to your hyper-relativism, materials actually *vary* in their inherent organic qualities (gold vs. yak poop), and can be imbued with meaningful complexity and function through human design / engineering (cars of varying quality).

It shouldn't be surprising that people will tend to prefer those organic or engineered materials that have greater functional and aesthetic properties -- in economic terms these tend to be higher valued.





Why prefer a large number in a bank account, and not, say, a large number in credit card debt?


Because a large number in a bank account is *liquid*, whereas credit card debt has to be *underwritten* by another party.





What do you believe determines what people want?


I'll go with functionality and aesthetic qualities on this one.





Do you believe it is in their DNA? Do you want a Ferrari because you have DNA that makes you salivate over a Ferrari?


Yes, in *my* case it's been medically verified. (Yeesh.)





Do people who think miniskirts are attractive on women, but not men, have DNA that says they should prefer miniskirts on women?


Nature vs. nurture, re: gender identity. Fun.

Go for it.

[cyu]

Nature vs. nurture


This is what I think is important. There's a difference between what comes naturally to an organism raised outside society, and what comes to individuals indoctrinated by the society they were raised in.

For example, children have no concept of property. It has to be taught to them. Otherwise, they'd just throw aside whatever they "owned" after they get bored, and pick up something that "belongs to" someone else because they fancied it. They also feel no disgust when confronted by urine or feces - that disgust has to be indoctrinated into them by society (usually through their parents).

Likewise, any medium of exchange has no value outside of a social context. If you were the last person in the world, or lived alone on an island, money would be absolutely no help to you. Mediums of exchange are only valuable socially - that is, they only have value when they can be used to change the behavior of other people. And this is the weakness that wealthy capitalists have to face - if the working class refuse to accept their money, then the "wealthy" are in effect poor.

[ckaihatsu]

Likewise, any medium of exchange has no value outside of a social context. If you were the last person in the world, or lived alone on an island, money would be absolutely no help to you. Mediums of exchange are only valuable socially - that is, they only have value when they can be used to change the behavior of other people.


I'm sorry, cyu, but this is an ultra-'social reality' interpretation of the mediums of exchange.

Here's a graphic, btw:


Worldview Diagram

http://s6.postimg.org/qjdaikuwh/120824_Worldview_Diagram.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/axvyymiy5/full/)


The 'last person in the world' / 'living alone on an island' could possibly find *use value* in money, as for using in a fire, or as building material for a dwelling, perhaps.

Likewise, while mediums of exchange do have to have social sanction and common acceptance, as you're pointing out, there's still inherent value in many *items* whether there's a larger money system in place or not. In the absence of abundance and/or a gift economy, people may revert to this-for-that types of exchange and may use *any* items as a makeshift kind of currency to represent abstracted values.





And this is the weakness that wealthy capitalists have to face - if the working class refuse to accept their money, then the "wealthy" are in effect poor.


I *wish* this was the case, and it could very well *turn out* to be the case, but I don't think it's a *given* -- if some people have stuff while in conditions where other people *need* that stuff (as with the means of production today), then they will effectively be the ones dictating terms.

While I appreciate your emphasis on the social-subjective dynamic, I think you're missing the material-reality component, which is a common oversight in the revolutionary left, unfortunately.

[cyu]

I *wish* this was the case, and it could very well *turn out* to be the case, but I don't think it's a *given*


Agreed - when there's propaganda from pro-capitalists and anti-capitalists, nothing's a given, assuming you believe that propaganda can be used to convince people to do just about anything (even genocide).

So yeah, you can't guarantee that what you want to happen will happen if pro-capitalist mass media overwhelms your ideas.

Still, there are many strategies to overcoming the "power" of the wealthy. One among them is refusing to accept whatever they're trying to push as the medium of exchange. If Wall Street, London, or whatever financial capitals of the world claim to have amassed all the "wealth" of the world, they really haven't. That's just propaganda. Just about all the raw materials, means of production, and people making real things necessary for survival happens far away from those so-called centers of wealth, so if the people doing the real work decide they are being too oppressive, they can simply ignore them, stop accepting their paper and numbers, and they would basically have nothing. Would take some logistical changes, of course.

[ckaihatsu]

Agreed - when there's propaganda from pro-capitalists and anti-capitalists, nothing's a given, assuming you believe that propaganda can be used to convince people to do just about anything (even genocide).


It's unclear as to *who* is assuming that 'propaganda can be used to convince people to do just about anything', 'even genocide' -- this really sounds more like *your* kind of line, than anyone else's.

And, this line, whoever's it is, is actually *ahistorical* and based in idealism, since it's *material conditions* and the unfolding of historical material contradictions that brings us to periods of genocide, not mere propaganda.





So yeah, you can't guarantee that what you want to happen will happen if pro-capitalist mass media overwhelms your ideas.

Still, there are many strategies to overcoming the "power" of the wealthy. One among them is refusing to accept whatever they're trying to push as the medium of exchange. If Wall Street, London, or whatever financial capitals of the world claim to have amassed all the "wealth" of the world, they really haven't. That's just propaganda. Just about all the raw materials, means of production, and people making real things necessary for survival happens far away from those so-called centers of wealth, so if the people doing the real work decide they are being too oppressive, they can simply ignore them, stop accepting their paper and numbers, and they would basically have nothing. Would take some logistical changes, of course.


It's the 'logistical changes' that need to be carefully considered, or else everyone would be stuck in the woods, at *best*.

But ultimately this line, too, is fatally lacking since it's essentially separatist and escapist -- if the bourgeoisie shouldn't have access to all the raw materials and means of production, then *who should* -- ? I guarantee that there's no realistic scenario in which such material resources would just be *abandoned* and sit there, *unused*.

[cyu]

this really sounds more like *your* kind of line, than anyone else's.
it's *material conditions* and the unfolding of historical material contradictions that brings us to periods of genocide, not mere propaganda.



I'm not sure what you mean by "material conditions" but apparently you don't believe propaganda counts?


if the bourgeoisie shouldn't have access to all the raw materials and means of production, then *who should* -- ? I guarantee that there's no realistic scenario in which such material resources would just be *abandoned* and sit there, *unused*.

In fact, it is not unused. They are being used right now. By who? By the employees of course. The working class is already using it to produce things. Of course, under capitalist conditions, the working class / employees are forced to give up control of their products, and let the capitalist do as they please with whatever widgets were produced, but when anarchists encourage employees to seize the means of production, that in fact includes "seizing" the tools they already use in their daily jobs. There is no real change of hands in terms of who is using the tools and means of production - what does change, however, is who the employees are forced to obey (or liberated from obeying).

[ckaihatsu]

I'm not sure what you mean by "material conditions" but apparently you don't believe propaganda counts?


Many, if not all, periods of genocide, and world wars, can be explained as resulting from inter-imperialist rivalries -- *those* are the historical material conditions that objectively paved the way for mass slaughter and dehumanization / ethnic cleansing. Propaganda can be seen as a mere shift in the ideology of the ruling class, taking place *after the fact* of the objective conditions themselves.

I won't discount propaganda *entirely*, but will say that it's hardly primarily determining.





In fact, it is not unused. They are being used right now. By who? By the employees of course. The working class is already using it to produce things. Of course, under capitalist conditions, the working class / employees are forced to give up control of their products, and let the capitalist do as they please with whatever widgets were produced, but when anarchists encourage employees to seize the means of production, that in fact includes "seizing" the tools they already use in their daily jobs. There is no real change of hands in terms of who is using the tools and means of production - what does change, however, is who the employees are forced to obey (or liberated from obeying).


Okay, no point of contention here.

[cyu]

Many, if not all, periods of genocide, and world wars, can be explained as resulting from inter-imperialist rivalries -- *those* are the historical material conditions that objectively paved the way for mass slaughter and dehumanization / ethnic cleansing. Propaganda can be seen as a mere shift in the ideology of the ruling class, taking place *after the fact* of the objective conditions themselves.



Yes, I agree... or at least I think I agree. First the ruling class decides who they want to target (perhaps to distract attention away from their own malfeasance), then they use propaganda as a tool to get the general population to follow along, then they use weapons as a tool to finish the job.