Market socialism

Alright, what about the rest of what I said?

And how do you change the surrounding society? By changing all of the enterprises. Our society (the superstructure) is shaped fundamentally by the relationship between OWNERSHIP and labor. Transform that relationship and you transform society by default, and in ways that are thorough, and thoroughly unpredictable.

I answered all of what you said. Markets are not democratic. They do not empower people, quite the opposite. Planning can be done democratically. I don't give a rat's ass about what some petty bourg thinks, I care about what empowers the worker.

This.

But you have not changed the relationship, just the owner. The worker is still selling his labour.

In co-op types of organizations the workers and consumer members make the decisions. Not some council, some algorithm, or "some petty bourg".

Democratically.

Only within the firm, which does not mean much. Any firm is ultimately limited in the decisions it can make, since it must make actions that are profitable. This does not change whether the decisionmaker is an owner, a board of directors, or the workers. The workers will ultimately be forced to exploit themselves in order to compete.

Just wondering cause of your Yugo flag, is this how Tito ran things? I know very little about Titoism outside of his dealings with Stalin.

What does "selling your labour democratically" even mean? It's a pointless buzzword, and it doesn't address the fact the fundamental relations of production that define capitalism (labour as a commodity) still exist. Try reading Marx trying to argue about him.

Watch and read Cockshott.
youtube.com/watch?v=BQrEEdy_uwM

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Tito started as essentially a generic M-L and then implemented cooperative control over light industry and consumer sectors of the economy as time went on. But that's a footnote at best, I have the Yugo flag because there really isn't a flag that describes where I am ideologically. I'm somewhere between Proudhon, Tito, and DeLeon. Probably closest to DeLeon.

As for the ideological questions, in an economy with no capitalists, there can be no exploitation. Exploitation is the difference between the value of production and the value of wages. It is, as Marx defined it, the SURPLUS value which is not returned to workers. If the workers own the firm, then there is no value which is withheld, the only decision is which amount of value is returned in cash and which amount is retained under collective control, to be dedicated to increasing production. No surplus value, no exploitation.

As for the question of whether or not their labor power is still sold, no, it is not. Under capitalism, the worker does not retain the fruits of his or her production, the capitalist does. In exchange, the laborer receives a wage. The capitalist then sells whatever was produced. In a cooperative economy, the laborers are collectively selling whatever it is that they produced. Since they retain control of production all the way to the point of sale, THEY ARE SELLING THE PRODUCT. You cannot sell both your labor and the product that was made by that labor.

Without the profit motive of capitalism, the market's trend towards consolidation does not lead to increased exploitation, as it does under capitalism. Rather, the tendency towards consolidation is a tendency towards economic planning, since a single cooperative with control of all of production is, in form and function, no different from a state central planner.

Within market socialism, there is a profit motive. Because you have circulating currency, a profit motive will exist. And because of that, increasing consolidation leads back to monopoly capitalism, which is our current situation. The working class must take power as a class. A market socialist system would go against this idea, and would ultimately reverse any gains made during the revolution.

No surplus value = no profit = no capital accumulation

Hell, the very structure of a worker cooperative means that there is no capital accumulation through growth and consolidation, because a cooperative firm growing in size also grows in the number of owners it has, and increases the number of people who have a vote in production.

I think the problem is that you're unwilling to define capitalism as being separate from markets. But markets existed long before capitalism, and they'll continue to exist long after. The only way to define a mode of production is by defining the relationship between ownership and labor.

Slavery = laborers are property
Feudalism = laborers must work the owner's land for a portion of their time, and their own land for the remainder
Capitalism = laborers sell their labor power while ownership controls the tools
Socialism = laborers own the means of production directly

Nowhere in any of those is there a distinction between market and non-market. The Soviet Union was non-market Capitalism, for example. Hence, if there are market and non-market slave economies, and market and non-market capitalist economies, it's logical to reason that there are market and non-market forms of socialism. The existence of money does not negate the relationship.

Of course. But I am saying that market socialism as well as non-market capitalism will both lead dialectically back

You're repeating your assertion that consolidation of firms leads to a reversion to capitalism, but that is a function of the ownership structure.
When capitalist firms consolidate, you get more production in the control of fewer people. Company A's owners buy out company B, so B's owners no longer control any production, while A's owners control production from both A and B.

With cooperatives, the workers at each firm are the owners. So A's workers start out in control of A. When they merge with B, then the workers of A and B both control the production of both A and B. This consolidation of firms is not and can never be capital accumulation, since ownership does not concentrate into fewer hands.

Your example implies that the merger is under equal terms, but that is not the case. There is nothing stopping the workers of firm A from giving themselves massive bonuses at the expense of those in firm B, since they are the ones who own it. Market socialism in practice lead to massive unemployment, since workers would refuse to lower their pay by hiring more workers. Any attempt to alleviate this, such as by ownership by seniority or a system of ranked wages, will simply lead to the formation of a literal labour aristocracy with opposing class interests to the mass of workers.

I though that was market socialism was all about.

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But Jacque Fresco was against markets.

>>>/liberty/

My biggest question is how a non-market or competitive economy would foster innovation. In any case, how would a Market socialist economy generate capital for investment? This whole thing seems pretty half baked.

Market socialism is not socialism. In it is the seed of capitalism in the form of commodity production and competition, that over time germinates back into full fledged capitalism.

No, market socialism is a market economy with cooperatives. A "market-like" distribution of consumer goods is just a rationing system that changes how much stuff "costs" depending on the demand, it has free floating prices. These changes in prices do not gain or lose anyone anything, some enterprises will not make more or less money than others, all workers will keep making the same. This price information (expressed in labour time) is then used to change the production in society to try and get them closer to their true labour value (which is easily calculated, its basically given).

Y'all keep repeating this claim.

So your assertion is that mergers on equal terms can't happen? That's a hell of a stretch.

Does the cost of a product depends on the demand or does it depends of how much labour time it is require to be produced?

Workers of coops only make dicisions within their workplace, and consumers only make dicisions within their spending. Unlike actual socialism, they cannot collectively decide to scrap an industry or a certain production technique, they cannot decide to expand a certain industry at 10x the rate the industry could otherwise afford, etc. With an actual socialist economy, all of society has direct control over the economy, it is not dictated by markets, nor by spending. As capitalism show's us, what is the result of people making rational decisions for themselves in a competitive environment is not always the optimal outcome. Markets create prisoners dilemmas, where taking the shittier option is sometimes neccecary for an individual, because if they don't others will fuck them over, even though a collective dicisions not based on individual dicisions could get the most benefit.
A good example would be worktime. In a market socialist economy, people would be pushed to work more, because in competition that gives them the edge, even though all parties involved might want to work less. You can try to enforce a shorter workweek, but as all employees of a cooperative share directly in its profits, any cooperative can work secret unregistered hours, and still gain the benefits if that competitive edge. Markets incentivise decisions that benefit the few over the collective as well, like dumping toxic waste, using dangerous or illegal production methods. In an actual socialist economy, this would not happen, because any one individual or group of individuals does not benefit from the increase of the production of their particular factory. Them making 10 or 15 tshirts does not make a difference in their income, and thus they will not be incentivised to do things that damage the collective to their benefit.

Because it is true.

It depends entirely on its demand and its supply. Cost of the consumer price does not factor into it.
So you have the consumer price (in labour vouchers), which is the price consumer pay,
And you have the labour time, the total labour time it costs to produce it.
If consumer_price > labour_time, then make more of it,
if consumer_price < labour_time then make less of it.
If they are equal, you make precisely enough of it (in this very moment).

But why the consumer price (in labour vouchers) would be different of the labour time?

Marx said (I think in critique of the gotha programme?) that the mode of production does not change if you make the owner of the enterprise the worker. You only abolish surplus extraction (and even that is dubious according to some) but the enterprise itself now becomes a virtual capitalist, just like an entireprise is now. It does not matter if the shareholders are a single person, a group of people, or a group of workers. The goal of the company remains the same, its incentives remain the same, it will keep acting in largely the same manner because the market, the mode of production, forces it upon them.

Imagine you have a tiny economy of 2 products, bread and icecream.
Now imagine you spend of a total of 10 hours working. You spend 5 hours making bread and 5 hours making icecream, now we have 5h of bread, and 5h of icecream.
Now you distribute your products within the consumer "market". Turns out people want much more bread than icecream, so people will buy more bread, and less icecream. To make sure you sell exactly all bread to everyone equally, you raise the price. People spend 8 hours worth of vouchers on bread. There is 2 hours of vouchers left. So you sell the icecream for 2 hours total.
Now you have a disparity, the 5h of bread was sold for 8h, and the 5h of icecream was sold for 2h. 8:5 bread and 2:5 icecream. This is why they can be different.
Now the next time you distribute labour, you put less people where the ratio > 1 (the bread) and more where the ration < 1 (the icecream). You now make more bread and less icecream. Repeat this until all ratios are 1.

Oh right, now expand this from a tiny economy to a large economy, the method is the exact same.

Even in capitalism, the vast majority of innovation comes from the state sector. Society would simply fund the R&D for all of society.
You could also very easily create a thriving startup culture where people can produce whatever thing they think up, have a "crowdfund" system where people can vote on products they find interesting or promising, etc. A small or large company, small production or mass production, all fit within the socialist economy framework. You can easily have 4 big lines of cola and a thousand smaller ones.

Alright, so if I sum up the cost of a product is labour time+(or -)"supply and demand factor"?

>Now the next time you distribute labour, you put less people where the ratio > 1 (the bread) and more where the ration < 1 (the icecream).
The opposite, of course, sorry.

I dont quite understand what you mean.

Don't mind, I understood your explanation, it's just my personnal interpretation.

To do that you will need to know at anytime :
-the total of working time
-all the products and their quantities
-all the consumer demand
-all the prices

How do you manage to gather and update all that information for a large economy? What's the scale?

Which we do, since we assign the labour and pay the vouchers
Which we do, since we produced them and can count them
Which is expressed in consumer price
Which we know easily

All these 4 are piss easy to do.
The total working time is the total amount of vouchers we pay out
The total of all products is simply summing the quantities that all factories report
The consumer demand is captured in the price
The price is simply taking a weighted average of all the prices in the stores, which stores already keep track of.

Companies already keep track of this information, its not hard in any way whatsoever. A second year SE student could make this for you.

Who's the "we" exactly? What institution would do that? How this institution will be organized?

Also, if you adjust labour time, does that mean some workers would have to work more than others to keep the price ratio at 1?

Oh and before you ask:
You can capture the production of a product in a linear formula, where you have one constant that is the labour time per unit, and other variables which are units of other products.
Take all of the formulas, create an array with a labour value for each product, set all to zero. Then for each product, calculate the labour cost by looking up the value in the array for each ingredient, and set its labour cost in the array to what you calculated. Repeat to keep approximating the labour cost more precisely, in about 15ish iterations you should converge to where the changes are unnoticable.

A democratic body controlled by society. Fill in as you please.

People who work in factory A making toy cars can also work in factory B to make potato chips. You transfer labour time by transferring people.
Also people might work less or more, but their pay would change proportional to how much they work (an hour for an hour minus taxes to pay for social service workers). Just like today, these changes will not be very volatile (less volatile even as we dont have business cycles), and people could report how much they wish to work and in what area of employment (if they dont already have a job), after which you can provide them with employment offers (or they can find their own).

Sounds like state capitalism. Fight me.

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meant for

ok

How do we get from a market economy to this without a transition???