Coordination in an economically fragmented world

I asked this once before in a thread and no one answered so I'm raising the question openly. I'm taking for granted that a socialized world will retain divisions of 'economic areas', as Mises puts it, meaning different parts of the world naturally equipped, inclined and communised to produce different things, because of scattered resources, culture, language barriers, whatever. Basically, a global division of labor. That being so, and taking into account the inevitable disparity in productivity, who/what agency authorizes the flow of produce from more productive economic areas to less productive areas? Is it that there is a 'united communes', in the style of the UN, event every week/month/some time-frame where representatives share output data and input requirements? This appears to me to be the (only) democratic way to manage a fragmented global economy not reliant on price signals ( ala capitalism ). I suppose what I'm getting at is Economic Calculation on a global scale. But I'm trying to make the 'problem' less abstract. All that being said, please correct me if my premises are wrong or my conclusions don't flow from my premises.

I think that there will be NO ONE who control the flow of products, services etc. but instead everyone will independently control their needs.

Sounds far fetched?

Well, swarm intelligence has worked in nature and may work in human, in fact it has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

I remember some "tribes" in Africa and else that have no "leaders" so to speak an they got along just fine, until they were destroyed by colonizing powers. Why no leaders? Well when the colonizing powers asked about who was the "leader" they simply looked at each other and choose someone who was NOT a leader in the european sense: so a decentralized society.

Also note the desciption of the "Indians" when Columbus discovered America:

"They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality"

.......

The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...."

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

Same could be said of some "natives" around the world.

Ants, termites, and other social creatures, besides humans,also have no leaders, yet they are able to have complex societies and build complex structures and even manage defense and wage war.{I'm not suggesting we wage war, however, hopefully, war will be abolished;)} (For example certain species of ants will, at times, invade termite nests (and other ant nests) and highly specialized termite soldier types (as side note* in some termite species there are no soldiers but do have other defensive behaviors) will rush out to battle the invaders, all without a "leader" or even a "general":ohmy:)

Also there are leaderless resistance movements throughout history which are more or less sucessful depending on the movement in question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaderless_resistance

And it is all decentralized.

By having each persons individually control their needs and desires and acting responsibilily one can have a modern society work through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of any government or controlling body.

You confuse two Marxist phases of socialism.

In the first one economic calculation isn't needed. Free cooperatives can work with supply and demand and prices as present capitalist enterprises. The only difference is a property of them. In socialism they're owned by workers.
In second phase, there is such abundance of goods and such automation that work is done by small percentage of people. The money become obsolete.

I'll take xxxxxx666666's anarchist-style approach as the *furthest-right* that a post-capitalist society should go -- it might be seen as a starting point, to 'start from scratch', once the proletariat has overthrown the world's bourgeoisie.

*Structurally* it might be seen this way:


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

http://s6.postimage.org/ccfl07uy5/Mu...Consumptiv.jpg


My own critique, though, is that there would be no impetus *inherent* in this decentralized method towards *generalizing* social production -- I could easily see this kind of patchwork layout persisting for *centuries*, in a relatively low-level mode of technological development and usage.

Another hazard of decentralization is that it could easily backslide away from free-access direct distribution, into commodity-type implicit valuations based on final outputs, for exchanges. (In other words, a once-liberated-labor would increasingly be seen, and valuated, according to *what it produces*, for the sake of exchanges with other, similar communal-type localities. This would be tantamount to market socialism and would continue to backslide from there into full-blown commodity production.)

I think we should also keep in mind the *historical momentum* coming out of a world revolution, one that is presumably vanguardist and centralized / coordinated enough to defeat the bourgeoisie in its entirety. This 'vanguard legacy', if you will, would probably lend much to the post-revolution era in the way of a centralized / coordinated mass industrial production, for the common good.

Also:


[7] Syndicalism-Socialism-Communism Transition Diagram

http://s6.postimage.org/jy0ua35yl/7_...m_Transiti.jpg

I think the problem with "antism" is that ants are drones robotically controlled by the pheromones of their queen.

The observations about natives are interesting though. Why do you think they were so caviler with their possessions? Because they had no concept of private property?

I'm not assuming or confusing any phase of socialism. I'm asking about coordination of a globally fragmented economy. No matter how great the 'abundance', divisions of labor are still relevant.

Wrong!:mad: They may "hand over decisions to their colony" so to speak (and in most species, queen don't "robotically" control the workers; the workers control themselves as a giant colony or superorganism[for your information, drones are usually used to refer to male ants] while all the queen does is lay eggs) but individual (worker) ants can make their own decisions, more or less, see below:

“People usually think of ants as sort of stupid, that they can't really compare options, or that they don't have good cognition,” said Sasaki. “But actually, individual ants can compare options, and that's why they, too, experience cognitive overload – a well-documented phenomenon in human beings.” (emphasis mine;))

https://asunews.asu.edu/20120921_ants_decisionmaking

"The term "queen" is not particularly apt, as the queen ant has very little control over the colony as a whole. She has no known authority or decision-making control; instead her sole function is to reproduce. Therefore the queen is best understood as the reproductive element of a colony rather than a leader. Once a colony is established, the worker ants meet the queen's needs such as giving her food and disposing of her waste. Because ant social structure is very complex and individual ants are relatively simple, an ant colony can be thought of as a single organism, and the individual ants as cells or limbs of the organism, as the individuals can rarely survive on their own."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_ant


Yes, because they live in a anarchist (or semi anarchist) society where everyone cares for one another and there is an abundance (at least seemly abundance) of resources available, and no concept of private property as you've said.:)

Surely that kind of information could be uploaded as and when onto some kind of live database that's globally accessible via the internet? That way as soon as a hopper of freshly mined ore in Kazakhstan crosses the threshold of a mine and into a truck for transport, that fact could be registered on-site for record-keeping purposes and added to the database for the world to know. Well, I don't know for a fact that such a system could be so granular, but it certainly seems technologically possible even today.

Control of the output and input could thus be localised, while at the same time information awareness could be global and (almost?) total.

I suppose the meetings could be kept for less frequent eventualities that require a personal touch, as it were. Perhaps things like space programs and major infrastructural projects and so on.

ooh ooh ooh hand up I read something interesting about this recently, there were a couple of articles in some reading I did last month about what happened when Europeans made contact with the Amerindians and all the confusion over property (the Europeans having very strong ideas about it (nine tenths of the law and all that) and the natives having, well, none.) There were several big bust-ups in jamestown over apparent thefts of tools by natives - who had in fact come to view the settlers as allies (or at least as large, inconveniently helpless babies with really rad steel tools) and thus assumed that the settlers' property was now also their property (they had, after all, shared their most important resorce, maize, with the settlers which would have been regarded as a fairly significant offer of friendship)

The articles in question are:

1 - : Martin H. Quitt, ‘Trade and Acculturation at Jamestown, 1607 in '1609: The Limits of Understanding’, William and Mary Quarterly number 52 (1995)

2 - David Harris Sacks, ‘The True Temper of Empire: Dominion, Friendship and Exchange in the English Atlantic, c. 1575 - 1625’ in Renaissance Studies number 26 (2012)

I take this back, studies show that even when there is not an abundance of resources, people can still be generous. (Like with the natives mentioned here)

Study: Poor Are More Charitable Than The Wealthy
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=129068241

"Huge charity commitments often get headlines — like the ones Bill Gates and Warren Buffett collected for convincing 40 billionaires to donate at least half of their fortunes. But Paul Piff, a psychology researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, tells host Guy Raz about his studies, which show that poor people are actually more charitable than the rich."

..........................

And I think this is the most important, to quote from the above source:

"So it's really compassionate feelings that exist among the lower class that's seen to provoke these higher levels of altruism and generosity toward other people."

Not as relevant, as you assume that in the future almost all works will be done by machines regardless the political system dominating the earth. When scarcity of majority of products is non-existent, then money will become obsolete but distribution of goods will work on earlier found as best rules.

There is no distribution problem, per se, in the capitalist community. That is because goods are produced because they are needed, or perceived to be needed, somewhere by someone. As such, distribution, including transport, is part of the production and its calculations. So, in the capitalist community, those Kazaki iron ore workers could sell that ore to whomever is willing to pay the most so as to maximise their profit.

However, in the socialist community, distribution seems to be the vital problem. Goods need to shipped to where they are most needed, without use of profit in such calculations.
So, in the socialist community, when those Kazakh iron ore workers emerge with their product, they can't just ship it where THEY wish to do so, based upon THEIR criteria; it has to be shipped to whereever the greatest "need" as determined by... (well thats part the debate). Shipping that product also becomes a separate decision, since iron ore is not the only things which needs shipping, and the shippers also need to be allocated.

A, decentralised socialist vision does not seem realistic.

This is objectively false and cannot be taken as a general tendency across the capitalist (global) economy. Simply put, the capitalist system is anarchic and scattered by its nature. Food in point A is thrown away while people go hungry in point B doesn't make much sense, does it? That is the inherent problem (namely underproduction and overproduction) of production for profit, as opposed to production for use, that plagues the capitalist economy. As technical progress has chugged on, the severity of this problem has changed however the logic of said problem remains constant.


Why not? It sounds like the most realistic form of planning as decision-making is localized leading to accurate input from economic agents.

While I agree with this point objectively, my stance is to the *left* of it (regarding decentralization), while yours is from the right.



You're framing this question in such a way as to make it sound *unresolved* and *problematic* -- certainly, whether the layout was decentralized or more-centralized, there would be some mode of *cooperation* and *coordination* between the liberated iron ore workers and the larger public. Politically and logistically there's no issue here.

Reading what Columbus said I wonder if in a Communist society we should still keep a World military to defend us against possible Alien invasion so we don't end up like those natives.

I might as well plug this in for reference for reactionaries and such: predicting the future is against the Marxist method. I can't tell you how many pairs of shoes will be distributed per person in a Communist world or whether you'll eat filet mignon for lunch. What I can tell you is how capitalist society is structured, and a detailed analysis of history and social relations.

There's no crystal-ball in Marx's method. In fact, this is specifically why Marx took the time to completely annihilate Owen and Fourier -- they drew up a dream society in their minds. Marxism is based on interpreting the physical world and the implications the material has on society.

The note I responded to was a response to a post about the problem of distribution in the socialist community. A proposed solution was completely anarchical and incompatible with socialism.

As far as the note regarding capitalism: It completely misses the point and dodges the issue. The issue is production. The proposal by Noxion flunks on both production and distribution, as well as good socialist approach.

The entire claim of Marxism is that capitalism will collapse due to its alleged contradictions. It is absolutely an attempt at reading a crystal ball.

What it does not do, is, as was explained, to predict how many pair of shoes might be produced ext.
Of course, nobody is asking for such an explanation.

I think this subject has been discussed several times before, but regarding different things.

I don't think widespread globalization is possible. Technically, every continent is able to sustain itself, IF the resources it actually produces is returned to populace that creates them. For ones that are not able to produce a certain amount of a certain necessary product, it may derive from the surpluses of its neighbors. It is unrealistic, and frankly unnecessary to transport goods across the Earth because, "this city in China don't want no rice, they want dates from Mesopotamia!"

If we provide underdeveloped areas with the agricultural technology and methodologies to efficiently make their own off their land, we won't have to mix our goods around as much.

You have a great difficulty to understand a difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Marxism occupies mainly macroeconomics and you ask the question about microeconomics and you are surprised that you don't get any answer... If you understand the difference, you won't even expect such answers. :)