Cockshott General 2.0

researchgate.net/project/How-the-world-works

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Huh, that's strange user. I'll copypaste it for you
Maybe we should ask him on Youtube how the book is coming

So the book is just about HisMat and will not include his work about materialism in physics and how it relates to politics?

Still, there hasn't been a modern work about HisMat in ages AFAIK, so that's good.

Can someone ask him to read Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis
by John Smith?

Is that worth reading?

I'm reading it right now, my preliminary answer is yes. It promises to explain through actual economic data how the US and Europe are parasitic on the global South today. Hope it succeeds in doing so.

The reason I'd like the Shott to read it is cuz it could cure him of his revisionism.

okay turd world gang.

Read this paper too

Brewster's attack on TANS and Cockshott's response

Since czech translation of Towards A New Socialism is Kybersocializmus, I'll bet it's "just" TANS

Does anyone have the pdfs for Stafford beer's "Designing Freedom" about his work on Cybersyn in Chile? Ty.

I've been looking for classical econophysics. Thanks a bunch sweet comrade.

I actually don't know anything beyond the fact that he's writing it,, but I think it's a pretty reasonable guess that if materialism is the core of the book then his newest youtube series on materialism is most likely a collection of cliff notes from stuff that is going into the book. If you have a bunch of quality material it would make sense to use it.

Don't have access to it, but from reading the description, it sounds like it's just a Spanish translation of TANS.

Like a year ago I read TANS, and I've been reading the Lenin, Engels and Marx that I had not already read.
Now that I've done it, what do you recommend me from Cockshott, preferably a good book in the sense that you enjoy it whilst reading (such as TANS was IMO)

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media.8ch.net/file_store/7bff32a250987c61e3c672060d8dbb087b47455824b349a3a5416ea198b004ea.pdf

As far as I know Cockshott hasn't done any other full-length books besides TANS and Arguments for Socialism (which is a recollection of articles), There's a draft of the historical materialism book he's working on, which was posted above

Recognizing imperialism is not third-worldism, retard.

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bump

This book seems to represent what Paul already acknowledges as the contemporary consequence of comparative trade mechanisms.

Are their any documents that give a good overview of Cockshott’s views/critiques of Soviet economic planning and its failures?

What's his explanation? If the entire system of actual production of a t-shirt in the global south gets less than a fifth of the value, while the rest is distributed among various capitalists, rentiers, and some workers in the global north, how is that anything other than imperialism?

except i'm not sure that's exactly how it works, at least it doesn't look like it from the other side, i live in a country that's the equivalent of a dog to america, in that my governmentt obeys america's every command, to the point where they design themselves our foreign policy, and from my view it looks the opposite, from here it looks as if agriculture and national manufacturing companies get out competed by american companies, and what's left is extractive industries, and a bunch of shitty outsourced jobs in the service industry that are the equivalent of sweatshops, and i know for a fact that this also happens in former french colonies in africa, so idk, to what extent is imperialism about getting cheap labor in other countries and to what extent is it about breaking their every industry and turning them into the global equivalent of a gas station that sells snacks, THIS i would like a book about

Some imperialized countries are oriented primarily around extraction. The imperialists don't need loads of factories everywhere, concentrated in certain regions is goof for them.

OCCUPY TURTLE ISLAND BRO

Cockshott talks about it on pdf related, also on the introduction to TANS and a bunch of other articles. He also did a 20 minute video on the decline of the Union
m.youtube.com/watch?v=EE-kCZnlGZU

Anybody have a pdf of Computation and its Limits?

theres a pdf and epub on libgen

Oh wow, I missed it

I've been discussing Cockshotts proposal with a random right-libertarian somewhere online, and the conversation has made me wonder about two basic questions:
(1.) How does the "selling" and "renting" of personal property proceed under socialism? Take the example of a boat. I like fishing and want to have my own little boat, so I have to save up and compensate the labor content for it, right? Great, but what then if I decide I want to take a couple of tourists on my boat each year? Then they can enjoy offshore fishing without having to buy their own. What if I get sick of my boat and wish to transfer it to someone else?
Clearly they would have to return part of the labor content to me. How does this proceed? Do we allow a limited market for this?
(2.) Enterprises often require small services from other enterprises. Take you have a specific task to perform, and you need a computer programmer to implement some software that can do it for you. How does this proceed?
Some options I imagine for this: (a) We allow enterprises a limited labor-budget to compensate such expenses. I'm not quite sure what the macroeconomic implications here would be. (b) We have some external mechanism to prioritize such tasks. This would likely require some external bureaucracy, and could end up with significant waiting periods. That certainly isn't ideal. (c) Lay the responsibility with the programmer. He is regularly checked on whether his activities have been productive. This might be more flexible, but lack of adequate care could cause economic inefficiency, and too much surveillance would put stress on the worker. (d) Lay the responsibility with the enterprise. This could cause similar problems.
Some combination of these options might also be viable. What do you guys think? Is there some central idea that resolves this question?

For big purchases like a car or a boat, you can re-sell it to a licensed reseller who will asses the value of the item. Most likely it will just be calculated from the precalculated deprecation, barring any accidents.

or
You dont need to do any sort of payment or limitations. If an enterprise needs to have their electricity system redone because it got fried during a thunderstorm, limiting their productive ability by saying "no only x amount of vouchers can be spend on it" is going to be detrimental to society, and by giving them a budget of sorts you also incentivise them to spend it all just in case they come up short next year which means unnecessary costs are made.

also
also

(which you will need to take/get insurance for)

Gotta add:
Imagine it is a giant corporations, instead of disjucted enterprises, because thats essentially what it is.
Over the whole, you know roughly how much you need tech support and other kinds of maintenance guys for internal use. You just hire them and deploy them as needed. You can then add whatever additional costs they made to the production costs of the products for the next planning phase, assuming you smooth them out for irregularities.

HE'S COMING BUCKOS

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Consider that there are three kinds of "services" that enterprises purchase from each other.

I don't know how they do it, but just when I think I couldn't possibly despise ancaps any more, they go and prove me wrong.

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Yess, has he said wich publisher would it be?

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Why do you need the licensed reseller? Is it to prevent scams?
My one problem with this idea is that it would prevent the spontaneity of acts like this. Everything would need to happen through official channels, you can't just sell it to someone you come across. A boat or car can be a fairly personal object and you might want to conduct the selling process yourself.
I'm wondering if it isn't possible to minimize the need for "licensed resellers" by digitizing the process. If you want to sell the object, you and the purchaser would report key details on your phone, along with your assessment of the price, which is then retroactively checked by experts. (And perhaps made freely available online, to give others insight into this sector of the economy.) If anything's fishy or the purchaser complains afterwards, an investigation may be launched. Do you see any problems with this approach?
I imagine renting the thing out would go similarly, and there the need for flexibility is even more apparent.

I have some thoughts about these kinds of plans, again with regard to their flexibility. They're likely big enough to warrant a separate reply. That's what I'll do.
This is pretty much what I imagined.

Fair enough. I just meant it's not a huge operation. One man could do it over a number of days.
You can check whether he's doing what we're maintaining him to do.

About
and

I've been having my own thoughts about how this plan could be organized, so that workers play as much of a role in it as possible. One of the stated goals of socialism is to return the working place to the control of the people that work there. This seems to imply that the workplace can't be managed too top-down, with plans being issued from above. Plans need to be naturally determined among different workplaces alongside the wider society that maintains them. This will not only mean an increase in contentment among the workers, but also boost efficiency. Great innovations can done by people on the working-floor, and the spark for many more are found there. Thus I believe it's sensible to allow workers some agency in how they organize their affairs.

How can we "plan the economy" in a horizontal fashion? I think the key concept here is transparency and communication within the industry. Capitalism creates secrecy between competitors, who wish to use their expertise to gain an advantage over one another. Today, when information plays an increasing role in economic advancement, this is more obviously counterproductive than it has ever been. Instead new expertise needs to be communicated and implemented throughout the wider economy quickly and efficiently.

So my proposal is to organize a digital platform for members of an industry to communicate with one another. There they can report performance, share new ideas, pose questions, and compose economic plans. This is an absolutely essential component of the socialist order, and the means by which new kinds of freedom are going to be achieved for the population. Everyone is going to be able to make their contribution to the wider industry as they wish. They will be able to make suggestions and take insights from people throughout the entire economy. When a new way innovation proves to outperform others this will be immediately apparent on this online platform, and the approach should spread like wildfire. Immediate comparison of performance between workplaces will inspire natural competition, based on personal achievement, not on economic need. There would be a great satisfaction in trying to outdo your colleagues, climbing up the rankings in realtime. It would be a comradely battle of course, like that between athletes.

It's ultimately on this basis that I'd want to see socialism function. Improvements emerging from the natural involvement of workers in their industry, not from plans that are imposed from above. Is this a worthy ideal or am I being Utopian?

Because labour vouchers are non transferable, and if you allow people to transfer labour vouchers you just allow people to trade entirely.
Best way would be like trading in an old car, where you dont get your money back, just a discount on your new car.

Are you mentally ill? Its a fucking car, or a boat. Its a piece of metal and plastic.

You allow people to pay each other arbatrary amounts
Renting things out lays the foundation for capitalism. People with a boat use that boat to make money for more boats, to make money for more boats, without working. It defeats the entire idea of a labour voucher system. There is no large group of "individual boat owners" who own a single boat and rent it out for a week, they do not exist in the slightest. If you want to rent a boat, rent it from a renting cooperating that is owned by all of society rather than a capitalist cunt.

You really can't. Some programmers can get away with pretending to work for years. Some programmers look like they are going a lot of work when they are really just fucking everything up with shit code and others who do amazing work look lazy because they submit way less lines of code. Its not a quantitative product, and assessing individual competence of programmers is notoriously hard.

It doesn't.

That's capitalism.

False dichotomy. You put the idea against a horizontal orginazed cooperation in capitalism. In the latter case, the amount they can produce, and what they can produce, and what they can afford to change, is all dictated from above by the market. In socialism, the plan would dictate similar things, except that all workers would have control within their cooperation, and have a vote in creating the plan itself, which they do not have in a market.

Certainly. The plan proposed by cockshott (in his collective works) is not much more than big investment/overhauls of industries for efficiency, and production quotas. If workers want to try and improve efficiency, change roles, etc, they can do so.

All possible, but the central plan is for production quotas. They cannot just decide for all society how much they are going to produce, society as a whole should decide that (with the plan). Similarly, they cannot just choose to invest millions of hours of peoples time in something if the rest of society does not agree to do so.

Having an online forum and greater intra-societal communication and cooperation is in no way utopian. The degree of autonomy you think workplaces should have is (since their autonomy in your case extends to commanding others (or their labour) without their consent) and your "renting" idea is just plain and simple capitalism, you really should know that by now. I think you are trying to fit everything we do today in some form into the new society. Some things will not be possible or permittable. Similarly to how you might be trusted with weapons grade uranium for your hobby project, that doesn't mean we can just sell it to everyone, because at some point, someone will realize they can use it to make a bomb, or how they can use the renting system to keep making more money for themselves without working, to buy more boats to make more money without working.

In socialism, you may have a boat permanently assigned to you if your peers (ie: other workers) find it useful and/or find that you deserve it.

Or you can just buy a boat. Small boats are not that expensive. No more than a normal car.

Not in socialism you can't.

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Indeed.

Why are you even in this thread if you don't agree with the foundations of what we propose?
Go make your own thread about your autistic ideas instead of shitting up this thread.

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One can't shit up what's already shit.

Penispistol appeared on Tom O'Brien's latest episode of FA20 Podcast the other day, discussing his ideas in some very grounded and accessible ways, definitely a good interview

hooktube.com/U76472dXNVg

Seems he's already getting tarred with the Anti-LGBT brush

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Maybe you wouldn't own a boat, but just rent it. So these complications you mention wouldn't even arise.

I understand. We aren't certain that the transfer of labor vouchers is correlated to the value of the car, and not to some other commodity that is traded on the side. In that way, we're opening a potential loophole that black-marketeers can abuse. Something like that. Sorry that I didn't see it immediately.
This still poses a significant problem to me. I don't like the fact that I can't simply pass objects on to people I know in exchange for a bit of money. It would be preferable if we found some way for people to handle this themselves. Otherwise I'm afraid capitalist ideologues will use this as an example of socialism limiting ordinary people's personal freedom.
Is that true? I thought exploitation lays the foundation of capitalism. Is there a way simply renting things out can lead to exploitation? Sorry for not having read much Marx.
I agree that this is a problem. But I still hold to the principles that (1) it is a social good if people lend their personal property to other people, and (2) that people who use other's personal property should compensate some of the initial labor costs of the object concerned. So we need some system to make this possible.

You're right. My rationale is my belief that socialism will not limit ordinary people's everyday freedoms in any sense whatsoever. It will be a pure expansion of them. Disallowing something that is fairly common in our present society, such as the trading of second hand goods, goes against this principle. I would like to be able to assure the people I talk to that these things will remain possible in a manner similarly straightforward to capitalist society.
I don't see why second hand trading should be entirely disallowed. It must be checked on, I agree with that, but if I remember correctly, Marx insisted that the simple trading of goods couldn't be a source of capitalist profit. Then it can't be especially harmful in socialist society, right? We just have to ensure that it is what it's supposed to be, and that there aren't too many illegal practices going on beneath the surface. Maybe this is a wrong interpretation of Marx though.

I don't like that. People should be assured of their personal property. It gives a sense of comfort that's very important to us humans, certainly if we've lived most of our lives under capitalism. You don't want others to intrude on your personal space without warrant. So it's nice to have your own boat.

It doesn't matter what you "like" you fucking halfwit.
Irrelevant
All the more reason to do away with it.
"Personal space" and an actually existing boat aren't the same thing.

It doesn't.
You can't "save up" because the whole idea of capital accumulation has been abolished.
Why would they go on your boat when they could just get their own boat
They can't just "buy their own."
"here's your boat, enjoy"
Uh, why? You didn't build the boat. The labor is already done and in your example you "paid" for it, so what do they owe you for? Using a boat that you no longer want or wish to use?
It doesn't because you aren't owed anything for giving someone else your boat.
No.

Cockshott groupies in a nutshell.

If you spend days of your life on that boat it's definitely part of your personal space.
Thanks for demonstrating you don't have the slightest understanding of Marxist economics. Keeping labor tokens in your account =/= capital accumulation. This is really basic shit.
Your exerted labor went into maintaining the people who built that boat. So you might as well have built it.
Maintaining the people who were building that boat. Without you there wouldn't have been a boat.
You are owed a refund on some portion of the labor content you invested into that boat.

It's a small part of the freedoms ordinary people regularly enjoy within our current society. I'm not claiming there's anything profound about it.

(me)
I'm really just wondering how we can make socialism agreeable for people in practice. All I want is that:
(1) People get to own small boats as their personal property
(2) They may lend the boat to others as they please
(3) They get to pass the boat on as they please
(4) The people to whom the boat is passed on or lent out may be asked to compensate some part of the labor content invested in the boat to the (previous) owner

These are very basic acts people would want to perform. Not just for boats but for cars, computers, bikes, lawnmowers, furniture… just about everything. My question: How do we make this possible under socialism?

Wrong
Says the dipshit wanting to "buy" and "rent" shit in socialism.
You're a fucking idiot.
See above.
Kill yourself you capcuck moron.

The only answer is to kill dipshits like you who are too stupid to function in socialism.

Great, so you're completely fucking useless. What are you even doing here? Just taking up space?

It's not freedom when you don't have a choice.

What choice are you talking about exactly? Do you mean when people have to sell their belongings to pay off debt and survive? That's obviously horrible. Under socialism the point would just be to get some spending money back.

Well, socialism does have some limits that capitalism doesn't have. And current capitalism in the US has entrepreneurs that are also limited in some ways compared to the time when child labor and slavery were legal. It's always a package of freedoms and limits. Let's use a traffic metaphor. The way people who want capitalism with a minimalist state talk about the economy is like it's a world of empty roads in the desert where you drive forever and only see another car perhaps every two days or so, and they ask: "What do you need all those speed limits and traffic signs and lights and so on for? What a waste." But what's actually going on is that we are constantly weaving through very dense traffic.
An issue raised was that something is sold officially for a high price, and the real reason the price is so high is that something else changes hands alongside it. Suppose the state sets a price, but owners still retain freedom to decide whether to sell or not, and when and to whom. I think such a regulation is toothless, the owners can just ask the buyer for some thing or service added to the official low price and that bundle being the real payment. It would be different with forced selling whenever somebody pops up who is willing to pay the state-set price. But I think it's more elegant if people just rent durable stuff that is owned by society as a whole.

advocates for labour vouchers, which do not circulate. You know, if you actually read Cockshott before commenting on Cockshott in the official Cockshott thread, that would be great.

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Certainly, but most people aren't entrepreneurs. They have a simple wage job. It is their (perceived) freedoms in interacting with society that I want to retain and expand.
There are likely some points at which there is a trade-off, but I still think it's worthwhile to try and push the limits. To see how much we can retain without working against socialism.
Couldn't they then just drop the transaction and just trade things or services? They're just complicating matters, if I understand you correctly. The important point is that whatever they're doing cannot be transferred into labor certificates, and thereby have any impact on distribution within our socialist economy.

Really? Not even between me and the store I buy food from?

Not even. They are destroyed.

(me)
Or kept as proof of the transaction. Whatever. They'll be digital in our implementation anyway. The point is that they're taken out of circulation.

By who?

By the cashier. They stamp it or something and take it out of circulation. Not that it could circulate any further anyway, they're unique to the person that earns them.

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Today we see shift towards shared economy, in cases where ownership is not attainable by a person in modern capitalism. Carsharing offered by companies is the biggest example, or time-share apartments. Then there are models of carsharing that are more peer-to-peer ranging from Uber to BlaBlaCar. And for trading or lending like suggested above, ebay, craigslist, etsy and so on.

The point is, labour vouchers could be redeemed against those sharing platforms, where one could put up whatever they want to sell, rent, or otherwise share any of their personal property and be compensated. Such national electronic market platform also enables the information flow of labour vouchers back to the planning algorithm. In a sense, the redeeming of labour vouchers against a food distribution or goods distribution centre would be no different than redeeming it against the voucher-ebay or voucher-craigslist.

Who today even bothers to rent or second-hand trade without resorting to any information platform like ebay or craigslist. One can reach buyers or sellers, lenders or borrowers that one could never reach due to the limitations of communication technologies before the internet.

Every good produced by contains a history of all previous materials and labour being put into producing them. Socialist economy proposes to actually keep track of this table of materials and labour, instead of collapsing it into a single number. Ebay-like platform could allow to realize a free market without hiding of information about value. Since that would be known, people could decide whether to go for unfair transaction or have fair transaction.

For a buyer, it would be redeeming of vouchers against the ebay-like platform. For a seller, it would be compensation for the materials put into production that were bought with labour vouchers and the hours of work that were done.

But then again, today's experience with capitalism shows emergence of sharing economy platforms, so socialism might have library-of-things institutions that offer tools and objects for use that are not simple items for consumption. This would make the idea of personal ownership impractical for many things. And then in turn, it could mean that when one who whants to rent a boat for a weekend might decide between an individual boat owned by a person and risk possible unfair transaction either intentional or miscalculated, or have the library-of-things as a lender of a boat. If any fee is for borrowing a boat, then the amount might be exactly total value times fraction of the lifetime one actually borrows it. If this is not the freedom of consumer choice for the free market fundamentalists, then I don't know what is the freedom of choice. What freedom could there be if information is hidden, like today, in order to make a profit.

posting under a trip in case this discussion has any value

1. You will be able to legally possess consumer goods and personal property in socialism. Ownership might not be the right word, though.
2. You can obviously do what you want with this personal property - individual consumption, give it away, lend it to someone, destroy it, etc.
3. The one thing you won't be able to do is turn this personal property into an income-generating asset on some kind of market. By that I mean, since money won't exist you won't be able to give boat tours for spare cash since cash won't exist. You could give boat tours for labor tokens but those won't be transferred or accumulated. This means that your boat enterprise may create value but for you to be recognized as performing socially useful labor you'll need to have the enterprise registered and it will simply be one contributing part of the economy. The "means of production" utilized in this boat tour business would immediately be socialized if registered. So in that sense they would pass from your own personal possession into the possession of the business (or rather, society as a whole.)

The basic idea I want to emphasize is that the emergence of small markets in a (real) socialist system would be made extremely difficult due to lack of money and socially recognized forms of exchange. Only very simple forms of barter would take place in these emerging small markets unless there was some way of transferring value in a liquid and dependable way. The emergence of small markets would also be made more difficult by the simple fact that small enterprises would be at a huge competitive disadvantage against large socially-owned firms.

The legal definitions of personal possession (or property) will have to be revised tremendously in a socialist society. Personal possessions will exist and will need to be have legal recognition and protection, but they will also have to defined separate from the assets used to realize value in production which by very definition will belong to society as a whole.

Also posting this here:
Plan-Oriented Platform Economy - Chinese paper advocating cybernetic socialist reforms

What do you think of this? Please reply in this or that thread.

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So what's the point of giving them to the cashier in the first place?

I agree with your sentiment but not with your emotion

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Except it absolutely is different. Where you redeem the voucher in a distribution centre, the people working in a distribution centre do not gain anything or lose anything if you decide to or not to buy something. Your purchase has no impact on their personal wealth. If you rent an uber, you directly enrich the owner of the car, and the driver. Showing the costs of a car will not solve the issue of the emergence of a rentier class in society. People are notoriously bad at assessing if something is fair, and in a lot of cases people simply do not care if it is fair, if they just want to move on. They want to go somewhere so they rent a cab even if its an unfair deal, they wanna have a holiday so they rent a boat, even if its an unfair deal. We should not leave it up to individuals to decide what is and is not fair, as fairness is not a concern in many day to day transactions, convenience is. Fairness should be build into the system, unavoidable, non circumventable, without exceptions.

The cashier makes sure you dont take a banana without stamping/removing the required amount of labour time from your account.
The cashier does not hold or retain any labour vouchers, they are just like the doorman at a movie who checks and rips your ticket.

But with my ticket all I can do is go to the movie. What's the purpose of introducing a general equivalent of all the products?

With your labour voucher you can only redeem products in a distribution centre. You cannot trade them to others.

But I can redeem all sorts of products, right? What's the purpose of this general equivalent?

Correct
The rationing of all consumer goods produced by society dynamically. Additionally it gives the planners information about demand patterns in all sorts of ways, geographically, globally, etc. These are then used combined with the dynamic prices and the actual cost of the products to plan the economy to be closer to the optimal distribution of labour.

Just more "market socialist" bullshit.

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