Conversation Between Paul Cockshott and Tim Cornelis

  1. Tim Cornelis
    Do you conceive of a possibility for the existence of a higher phase of communism at all?
  2. Paul Cockshott
    Things that are to be distributed free have to be paid for in social labour, which means that the plan mix has to be decided politically, but this is only possible within broad categories. If you have information goods, or other goods with near zero marginal labour cost, for these it would work fine. There would have to be a social budget to provide the servers etc that people could upload music, documents etc, and downloads would all be free.
    But it is harder to do this for goods with a significant marginal labour cost.

    There have been replies to our stuff by some Hayekian economists.
  3. Tim Cornelis
    I've been meaning to ask, if we assume that consumers will moderate their consumption (as unrealistically as it may be), and we do not use prices for some/many goods (in other words, we are in a higher phase of communism), is your model of economic planning and calculation still applicable? Or will it kill efficiency/effectiveness? (I don't expect a long answer, I wouldn't be able to understand it anyway -- one sentence suffices).
    Also, has there been a challenge by academics against your proposals?
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