A possible alternative to centralized planning

[ckaihatsu]

I just meant 'entrepreneurial' in the sense of creating a project that combines labor and capital,

Well, sorry to be so detailed, but the model doesn't use 'capital' of any sort, either.

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

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

not in any profit-making sense. Profit is just the incentive for this activity in market economies.

I guess I do have some questions about your project for clarification.

Sure -- no prob. I welcome the peer review.

Let's say I want to make a new product, a new hiking shoe. Do I have to ask people to rank the shoe as a political priority, or are they able to just allocate labor credits to producing the shoe? (Thus prioritizing it indirectly.)

Both, actually -- production in this context requires both mass support for a political initiative as well as support from liberated labor, through its pooling of sufficient labor credits to initiate work. (If no one knows about your shoe project then how would cooperation even happen at all -- ? And who among the available liberated laborers would *want* to work on your shoe project if they aren't going to receive adequate labor credits for their labor -- ? So mass support and its raising of "funds" go hand-in-hand.)

I assume I'd be allowed to build a prototype of the shoe,

No one would be stopping you.

by getting my own materials by myself or the other people who wanted to build it.

Yes.

Not sure what would happen if something had to be developed, though, like a rubber blend for the sole. I suppose we could first try to make the sole development a political priority, knowing that it could be applied to a wide variety of shoes if it was useful.

Sure, and this also shows how things could / would be *nonlinear* -- your shoe might not *need* a new type of rubber blend, and so you might first work on a "1.0" (one-point-oh) version, which would be complete in design, but also modular, allowing the switching-in of other kinds of rubber soles.

You might *not* want to prioritize the new rubber blend, but instead pursue it *in tandem* with your overall shoe project. So if the rubber-blend sub-project was timely and successful then that would bring your shoe project to "2.0", incorporating the new type of rubber sole.

So, then I either have to ask for labor credits, or I have them already.

Either you have your own labor credits, representing past work of your own that you've done, or else you'd be "fundraising" -- coordinating with others who have labor credits of their own that they want to put forth for the sake of your project.

I can enlist other people as fellow laborers in creating the shoe, maybe people from my hiking club or something.

Here's where it gets a little tricky -- yes, if you happen to know shoe-producing liberated laborers already, *and* they want to just *volunteer* their efforts for the shoe project, then you're good to go. This is obviously not saying much because the same thing could happen today, or in any society.

But you would *not* be able to 'enlist' *anyone* for this outright, *unless* -- #1 -- they are fully willing under the terms of the formal policy package, and -- #2 -- you can show upfront that there is a sufficient number of labor credits ready to be transferred to them for their liberated labor.

*Also*, you might not the one who gets to choose the individuals -- it all depends on the labor credits involved. Those who have the labor credits have the labor-*organizing* power to pick-and-choose whoever they want, in proportion to their labor credits, since they have already earned those labor credits in possession, from past work done.

We can start trying to get the raw materials needed.

Yes -- I'm sure that areas of well-known resources would have their own wiki pages, so that people could easily see matters of scheduling about them, respectively.

Do we "use" the labor credits we've gotten to pay ourselves, or do we earn "new" labor credits for our efforts based on the new labor we put in?

Well, 'giving yourself money' in today's context makes no sense, so that part can be dispensed-with.

Whoever is chosen to do work on the project (by those on-board who are putting up their own labor credits) would be "paid" for their work on the project -- it may be by you, by yourself *and* others, or just by others, depending on where the labor credits are coming from.

Do we have to transfer all the credits people have allocated into raw materials and capital?

No -- there's *never* any exchangeability between labor credits and materials (assets, resources, goods). Also there's no existence of 'capital' whatsoever in this model.

Associated material values

communist administration -- Assets and resources have no quantifiable value -- are considered as attachments to the production process

What if we end up producing more or fewer shoes than were demanded then? I suppose extra shoes could become public property, but then who gets them?

If it's *less*, then I suppose your project would be over-schedule and that might have political consequences.

If it's *more*, then yes, those shoes would become part of the public domain, and it would take a new political initiative to request them -- first come, first served, I'd imagine.

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

Either way, what if we give up and never produce the shoe; e.g. we can't get the grippy rubber we want for the sole.

Then the project would be a bust.

In that case, haven't we earned labor credits for not producing anything?

If the work was put in then the labor credits are earned, and should be passed-along, regardless of the outcome of the project. (Otherwise it wouldn't be fair to those liberated laborers who did actual work.)

There might be political consequences for anyone who is a backer of that project, if it's a bust.

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

I suppose this could be an incentive (or lack of a disincentive at least) for making new projects, but isn't it a problem that you 'earn' labor credits anyway?

In this model those who spearhead new projects -- like yourself with the shoe product -- are taking on a political *responsibility* that is probably going to be uncompensated by labor credits, unless you are also going to take on a work *role* within the production process itself.

So, in other words, all politics around any project / production run is *not* considered 'work', and is not compensated with labor credits.

Maybe I'll start an unrealistic project just to acquire labor credits? Anybody want a colony on the moon, I swear my team of engineers can build it?

Sure -- got it.... But remember that labor credits don't just materialize the way dollars do today out of fractional reserve lending -- someone did actual work behind every single labor credit. So every potential "funder" is going to be asking themselves if they want to part with the work-effort they've done in the past by passing along their own earned labor credits.

Your team of engineers would be the ones you'd have to answer to, since they're the liberated laborers for that project.

The feasibility of the project is just a social judgment I assume, based on what I describe to the consumers. That makes the judgments of experts weigh less than it really should, not "deferring to the bootmaker" in the matter of making the boots.

All of this would be a matter of politics.

And speaking of bootmaker, what if the experts I need are busy doing other things. Say they have easier jobs, or are earning a labor credit differential where they currently are. Can I raise the multiplier at my project in order to encourage the labor to jump ship and go to my project?

I suppose so, as long as you can show that you have the sum total of labor credits for that upfront.

Is that a fair way to characterize the process though?

(I'll let you make your own conclusion based on my responses above.)

In which case, what is the incentive for generalizing the production of the shoe, rather than just getting the raw materials and building them for myself (the prototype is already mine, so why bother producing for anyone else).

All political initiatives would be based on personal (or group) initiative, and that could happen at various scales / magnitudes.

So if all you really wanted was to make your own new pair of shoes -- great! -- it's a d.i.y. project, then, and you probably don't need anyone else's support or labor.

If your larger shoe *project* was successful, and it fulfilled the pre-planned demand for it -- great
! -- there's now a new kind of shoe design, with a new kind of rubber sole, that's available to everyone, and someone else might decide to *generalize* production by leveraging even *greater* resources and willing liberated laborers, to fulfill an even-*larger* demand for that kind of shoe, perhaps elsewhere in the world.

Maybe my hiking buddies and I would just order the raw materials and take a few days off of work to manufacture a few pairs in our homes. It's just a couple of days, what harm can it possibly do?

It's your life -- (!) (grin)

What about incentives for starting the project in the first place? A shoe is complex to me right now, but other things are more complex. I might have to engage in a lot of work to even present the project, or build the prototypes, and there is no hope of material gain except for one or two copies of the product we make. In the meantime, I may be spending less time at work doing things that are already productive, so there is a dis-incentive in that I'm earning less as I take the time to make something new.

Yup -- again, it's up to you.

What about getting a designer to help with the project? I can't just pay a designer, I have to find one who is willing to give up their time elsewhere.

Sure. Or you might include a designer role in your shoe project, and that version of the plan would have to garner mass support, for political and funding purposes.

So, I think the positive aspects of "entrepreneurship" have to be dealt with also. It can't be a "dirty word" in a vibrant economy.

Yeah, I get where you're coming from, but the 'entrepreneur' role is also very *glorified* in today's world -- no matter who they are they're going to be dependent on their financial backers.

In a post-capitalist context *anyone* can be an "entrepreneur" in the sense of taking initiative over open-access assets, resources, and goods.

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And yeah, the SU was a state-capitalist monstrosity, so it's not really a model of any kind of socialism.

Yup -- 'ppreciate that.

[ckaihatsu]

^ Also, since it's all politicized, what if people who didn't start the project start clamoring to change the design,

Since your original initiative already has mass support -- enough to get it started -- those who aren't formally part of it really aren't a part of it.

You might suggest that they spin-off a similar project of their own.

such that my friends and I no longer want to work on the shoes in the first place. Then we just quit, and it's all been a waste of time.

Sorry to hear it.

Maybe I could only get the support to produce some "average" good, based on common denominators that are able to get support. Everybody wants a piece of my shoe; it's just not worth it to try to produce anything new.

Okay, that could certainly happen. Your 'new' shoe might be a side-project, until you can successfully develop the new kind of rubber sole, for a '2.0' version.

[reb]

Coming form an East European country I have been quite skeptical of the idea of central planning all my life. Everything I have learned about it so far seems to show that it was a very inefficient way of handling an economy in the long run. For this reason when my leftward drift intensified a few months back I rejected the idea of central planning from the start. So at the beginning I was a market socialist.

As I learned more about what Marxism really was I finally understood why it was so important that planning replace the market. While my opinion of central planning had not undergone any change, I was nonetheless forced to find some potentially functional alternative. My first stop was decentralized planning. The basic idea was that local communities know the objective circumstances under which they operate much better than a central government ever could, so they should do the planning themselves. However this model also suffered from some severe drawbacks. For starters it could lead to a fracturing of the economy as a whole, and as someone pointed out this fracture could even solidify along ethnic lines, which is even worse. So this was another possible model sent to the trash can.

Well yes, you should be wary of people advocating central planning as if it would to the end of capitalism. It won't and it didn't. Never asked is what the social relations behind this planning and in almost every single case it is just straight up capitalism with wage-laborers and a capitalist enterprise with the goal of value production. Planning, under a marxian sense, refers to a situation where wage-labor has been abolished, as well as property and means exclusively a situation where what is being made is decided on by the general population in regards to use, not to value production.

I think there should be found an equilibrium between central planing and market. There are people who are against market socialism but they don't understand that economy without market isn't possible at all. Even after abolishing of property there will be market still. If you want to exchange chocolate to sausage, then it is market. As well, in primitive communism when there is no property too, one exchanges duck for a chicken. Marketless economy is imposible as free market.

If you acknowledge that life without market is imposible, then there must be found an equilibrium between central planing and market to make economy the most efficient.

Why hardly no one calls you out on your shit, I have no idea. Economy refers to production of things. You can absolutely have economy without a market otherwise why the fuck would we be communists? You're talking about a perpetual continuation of capitalism. You don't know what either the word economy means or what a market is. The fact that you're talking about economy in this way shows how little you've passed the bourgeois understanding of economics where The Economy is this force of nature that is beyond human control.

If you abolish property then exchange is impossible because there is no property. You don't, or would not be able to, exchange one commodity for another commodity because a commodity requires alienated labor. This is the 21st century, the works of Marx are available online for anyone and yet this sort of bull still continues.

[argeiphontes]

Okay, that could certainly happen. Your 'new' shoe might be a side-project, until you can successfully develop the new kind of rubber sole, for a '2.0' version.

I don't think you have enough incentives for people to undertake these projects. They require a lot of activity to get off the ground. Right now, people are paid to develop new products, in your system they're not. I don't doubt that some projects would be developed, if they were socially useful enough, but there might be a lack of interesting consumer goods and low technological development.

There also seems to be a partial labor market, because projects can jack up the credits they give out to attract new and better workers. Maybe a partial market in general, because there would be incentives to collect a lot of labor credits for less output, just paying them out to everybody in the project. Since everybody put up the credits ahead of time, knowing how many would be distributed and to whom, they couldn't really be angry about it after the fact. So, a specialized team of people could earn more labor credits than anyone else because of the scarcity of their skills, or their unique designs, or whatever. Private (but informal) collectives of people making lots of credits on all their projects could arise, and they would be able to give lots of credits to other people, controlling more labor than anyone else.

(In any case, I'd like to see an empirical test of it.)

[tuwix]

You can absolutely have economy without a market otherwise why the fuck would we be communists?

It seems you aren't able to underestand my explanations how marketless economy imposible, because of lack of knowledge in economic terms. You shouldn't express your opinion about economics because you know nothing about it and yor disrespectful comments won't hide it.

[fear of a red planet]

Central planning can quite clearly work fairly efficiently for many goods and services - for example provision of healthcare and the construction of public transport, there's plenty of evidence for both.

It's also true that central planning is not inherently anti-capitalist and has been used to great effect around the world, whether in the US military-industrial complex or the Asian Tigers, or Western European social democracy.

Surely the real debate is not central planning Vs decentralised planning or market; but what works best, where and at what time?

So in a society attempting to transition towards something better (or simply deal with a capitalist crisis) you might see the mushrooming of workers and consumer coops, peer to peer micro finance, credit union business loans, more militant union activity, and workers fighting for an winning seats on boards, or workers councils (or infact works councils) etc. At the same time a government which supports those initiatives or some of them, or opposes all of them may identfiy that banks and utilities and major producers for example need to be nationalised or brought under stronger central control for one reason or another - even if at first it's with the desire to defend the continuity of the capitalist state and all that entails.

Meanwhile a society that is becoming post-capitalist with the broad consent of it's citizens may well see the process of cooperativisation and producer/consumer democracy coincide with the further centralising of essential production and distribution - which could be at local, regional, national, or bioregional level. Or a mish mash of all or some of those things may be happening.

[Remus Bleys]

It seems you aren't able to underestand my explanations how marketless economy imposible, because of lack of knowledge in economic terms. You shouldn't express your opinion about economics because you know nothing about it and yor disrespectful comments won't hide it.

lol

[ckaihatsu]

I don't think you have enough incentives for people to undertake these projects. They require a lot of activity to get off the ground. Right now, people are paid to develop new products, in your system they're not. I don't doubt that some projects would be developed, if they were socially useful enough, but there might be a lack of interesting consumer goods and low technological development.

Yeah, this is one critique of socialism in general, though I don't agree.

Consider that there would be plenty of 'incentive' for 'old' projects -- those for which the technology already exists today. This would include farming methods, urban infrastructure, etc. So anything that's happening today would be more-than-doable in a *post*-capitalist environment where private property and all of its demands on people's lives would be eliminated.

This means that -- no matter what your particular flavor of socialism -- we *know* that the operations and logistics for keeping everyone alive and healthy in a basic way would be absolutely possible given a worldwide proletarian revolution that overthrows the rule of capital.

Now, once this has happened, people would have a common, collective interest in routinizing and automating as many work processes as possible, so that they don't have to labor much, if at all, while still maintaining the same standard of living that would be considered 'decent' today.

Once *that's* been done people will necessarily have *lots* of free time on their hands because technology is finally harnessed *for* them, *by* them. This would be the "incentive" for more-elaborate projects that can launch developments in a new, societal-cooperative kind of way -- would people sit on their hands, lose themselves entirely in pleasurable pasttimes, or would some of that bulk time also be aimed at improving the human condition, wherever it happened to be -- ?

There also seems to be a partial labor market, because projects can jack up the credits they give out to attract new and better workers.

Perhaps, but there's also the *countervailing* dynamic that projects and their backers can't just create labor credits out of thin air (unless they go into debt for that, which is then a political issue since all information about these economic movements is entirely public).

So if new and better workers are called-for, with increased amounts of pooled labor credits, that necessarily indicates that those backers have *done the work* to gain a premium number of labor credits -- they have to be earned, remember -- ?

Maybe a partial market in general, because there would be incentives to collect a lot of labor credits for less output, just paying them out to everybody in the project.

Again, they have to come from *somewhere*.

Since everybody put up the credits ahead of time, knowing how many would be distributed and to whom, they couldn't really be angry about it after the fact.

Okay, you're acknowledging it here -- if anything, it sounds like you imagine the people of this society to be collectively *ambitious* -- (!)

So, a specialized team of people could earn more labor credits than anyone else because of the scarcity of their skills, or their unique designs, or whatever.

The countervailing dynamic to specialization is *cooperation* -- consider that already, today, we have tons of videos on YouTube that show how to do all kinds of things, thus bypassing many conventional 'specialists' from many fields for many tasks. While this sucks for employment under capitalism, in a fully cooperative communist-type society this would be 'cooperation-at-a-distance' and would even invite an automation of some sort.

Also consider that the more unique and customized something is, the more niche it is, and the less mass support it will attract.

Private (but informal) collectives of people making lots of credits on all their projects could arise, and they would be able to give lots of credits to other people, controlling more labor than anyone else.

(In any case, I'd like to see an empirical test of it.)

Okay, sure -- the model definitely allows-for and encourages labor-union-type groups of liberated laborers to organize themselves and act in their own group interests.

But, at some point, the equilibrium between liberated-labor *supply* and mass *demand* would tip, since the liberated-labor group would still have to exist within a larger society of more, possibly looser, liberated laborers.

The political organization ('solidarity') within the labor group could successfully, consistently hold out for better rates of labor credits for whatever the project may be, but mass demand would not put up with this indefinitely since they're the ones who have to *put forth* the labor credits for the project, to this group. Mass demand would have an interest in looking elsewhere for the liberated labor that the group does, and they could even become frustrated enough to just start their own group to take care of this labor shortage problem.

(The empirical test for all of this can only potentially occur after a successful worldwide proletarian revolution since there is no use of capital whatsoever -- thanks for the sentiment.)