The Market Question

this is the incorrect part

I mean Yugoslavia is normally the go-to example. Their system had a mixture of decentralise central planning (I.E: central planning purely within a firm), self-management, self-employment, and exchange goods in a market manner as opposed to price controls.
Not quite, state direction of the MoP can still be in the form of private property (for example in corporatism, like Putin's Russia), and non-private ownership of the MoP can occur without state ownership or directive (Cooperatives, Syndicates, Communes et al).

The crucial thing I think you are missing is that you are conceptualising property as either being public or private, which is a misunderstanding both socialists and anti-socialists make. Marx wrote of artisans in the CM, who are those that own their own means of production and exploit nobody's labour. Now this is more commonly referred as self-employment (although often erroneously in the case of the gig economy). So say a chair maker owns an artisanal workshop, where he makes his goods alone. He owns the land, and everything in the workshop. Now this is technically private property, no? Not quite. Is it personal property? Not really. This is what you could call socially owned property, it's just that the individual that owns it is one. Say three artisans own it with equal equity and all work it and split their earnings as a whole: that is exactly the same principle with multiple people. In effect these people have a coop, and this is an acceptable form of social relation under socialism. Now if one of the artisans owned everything and paid the other two wages, then it would be private property since an individual is exploiting the labour of others.

Markets require commodity production. Ultimately they need to go. That said I think the power dynamics need to change first, so getting rid of bosses and landlords will go a long way to fixing the bullshit of the world, also it is only once the proletariat are in control of the market that it can be abolished.

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Conditional concessions might and are likely to be necessary but are in no way good or desirable you triple nigger faggot.

If they are necessary during the process of and to ensure the survival of an actually-existing revolution, what makes them inherently bad and undesirable?

bump

Doesn't matter to me

This is pretty much the point I was attempting to make here . In general I think it's good to be pragmatic and discussions like these (market vs. no market, centralizion vs. decentralization, vanguard party vs. "bottom-up" organization) are mostly useless because they're too abstract and reality doesn't work like that. I believe the "direction" of an organization, government or political movement is more important than adherence to some predetermined perfect model. I'll support pretty much any organization or government that seems to be moving in the direction of egalitarianism, collective ownership of property and anti-imperialism while serving the working classes and prioritizing social good over profit.

stupid asses centralization is bad access to infinite dumb shit from halfway across the planet hasnt been good or sustainable.

The goal of socialism is not the "redistribute" resources
The goal is to make so much and be so efficient that the cost of tbe product and the cost to make drops to 0

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I see. However, wouldn't co-ops be in a way exploiting yourself? As you still are not getting the full value of your labour, it's just that now the value that would be taken by the singular capitalist is spread out more. On a macro scale, would this not just result in a society roughly identical to a capitalist one, where labour value is still determined by the market?

1/2

Markets, in the sense of the supply and demand mechanism, have been, so we're told, the only reliable way to set correct prices. It's not entirely wrong, in that of course it'll be considered so by the very system which revolves around it, so claiming its superiority based on this unfalsifiable claim alone is merely using capitalism as its own yardstick. Of course this trainwreck would judge this trainwreck to be perfect.

But back to the matter at hand. Marx had already said that socialism couldn't out-compete capitalism, because growth and its implied self-perpetuation is the whole point of the latter. A competing socialist economy might be more efficient in a number of different ways, but it can't out-produce a capitalist one, because the goal isn't growth, but maximizing what you might call social value or function. But somewhen between Engels' death and the Russian Revolution, someone got into their head that socialism would be more productive than capitalism, whose companies were "islands of order in a sea of chaos". This is a myth, of course, which Stalin had no intention of discrediting, and indeed, his administrative skill played no small part in the Soviet system of central planning. Up until some point, maybe in the latter Krushchev days, maybe during Brezhnev's, a planned, centralized was considered a perfectly viable alternative. Between the diminishing returns and incessant Western propaganda, it's now considered a joke, despite the fact that it turned a war-ravaged arctic wasteland into one of the world's only 2 superpowers in a mere 30 years. Still, tho it's proven to possibly work very well for industrialized a country, its management of an industrialized economy leaves a lot to be desired. Looking at the cause of this phenomenon, I can only conclude that the deciding factor is a mathematical one, as the more an economy advances, the number of factors interplaying amongst themselves increases exponentially. Imagine a network of X nodes connecting amongst each other, tho not all are connect to all others. This is an extremely simplistic representation of a system, but it's just for the sake of metaphor. Now imagine a network of 2X nodes. The amount of complexity, as indicated by the number of possible paths between 2 or more nodes, has increased far past simply doubling it, or even squaring it. Now imagine those node representing economic enterprises, all under control of a planning committee, and expand that network to the scale of a country the size of a continent. Now it's not a wonder that the Soviet economy was so unoptimized, is it?

So then, is there a third alternative? Well, for starters, it's not good to think of these as discrete economic structures. One can change its properties a lot, in all manner of ways. To that end, before Stalin steamrolled his way with his central planning, and while the USSR still had a few very limited markets, there was the hypothesis of a "decentralized planned economy", where all of society would, via companies, unions, guilds or whatever else, lay down a blueprint. But, as we all know, as the libertarian aspect of the Russian Revolution was ended by the civil war, and with the autonomy of of the soviets, so died the chance of a real people's plan. Whether or not Lenin had any intention of bringing more libertarianism back is anyone's guess, Stalin most definitely had no such doubts, and that was the end of it. Like just about all of Stalin's policies – and pathologies – central planning became a fundamental, undivisible part of the communism package, and none deviated from it aside from Yugoslavia, which was at times called "market socialism". It entailed collectivelly owned means of production, but with a limited free market for them to engage on. This is a massive topic in itself, but I won't get into it here, because my propossal is a different model.

2/2

If you have seen the 🅱ockshott 🅱ang meme, it's not farfetched some say. It consists in using both automation and telecommunication in order to handle the aforementioned mind-boggling complexity. See, back in Stalin's time, all they had to work with was those clunky mechanical calculators, which, really, weren't that much of an improvement over paper and pencil. They saved time, but enabled nothing new. However, the birth of electronics and computing presented a golden opportunity to crunch all those numbers far better than an army of planners. No matter how many people you have working on such complex calculations, there's still the inherent limitation that one single person's mind could only be so "big" and thus the process is disrupted by these people communicating with each other. As complexity grows, there's a point where a multitude of human minds has diminishing returns, as the greater complexity forces these people to communicate and more, thus slowing the process down, not to mention adding many errors. This is a task better solved by a smaller number of "bigger" minds. In comes the computer, which is nothing but a dumb machine capable of doing elementary calculation, but inconceivably fast, exactly what was needed. This is what the earliest Soviet cyberneticians proposed, and which would, later, be followed by proposals of a nationwide computer network, which would compliment the calculating machines perfectly, even if the engineers at the time couldn't predict the absurd degree of this improvement. But alas, computer calculation was killed off after promising early tests, and the network never got out of the paper. Soviet cybernetics is yet another massive topic in itself, and the topic of legendary threads here.

But I don't bring up cybernetics just as an alternative to supply and demand, because, as I said, these things are not discrete systems. Essentially, the cybernetwork economy wasn't alternative paradigm to the market, but merely its simulation. Nowadays, virtuality is a common concept, but it bears pointing out that any model of any existing system is a simulation, even the earliest shepherds in Mesopotamia using pebbles to keep track of the number of their livestock. So then, if the market is a decidedly non-optimal way to allocate resources when you want to maximize social function over growth, it makes sense that instead of using the market mechanism itself, you would simulate it in order to study how to get the best result by that parameter. Despite all the complex talk of engineering and political economy, it boils down to running a simulation over and over, and tweaking the system accordingly. But since the philosophy of simulation wasn't nearly as developed back then, its proponents put it into more immediate terms, the chief one being prices. Unless you want, for some insane reason, an economy consisted only of quotas, there will have to be transactions, and thus, prices. They are the keystone of an economy, as changing it affects its supply and demand. And the simulation would, presumably, revolve around finding the best prices to serve social function (and, I remind you, finding thse numbers only got harder as time went on and the economy grew) as opposed to a market in real life. Altho even back during the early Thaw, simply proposing a virtual market or shadow prices was enough to attract busybodies trying to take you down for reformism, counter-revolution and whatnot, and Stalin himself had dismissed cybernetics as "bourgeoisie". But these scientists were smart enough to know their Marx and Lenin quotes, and with Stalin out of the way, they managed to completely turn around the reputation of the nascnet discipline, even getting it recognized as a great tool for building socialism. Too good, in fact. These promising early tests were eventually nixed by bureaucrats who realized that an automated economic plan means their power would be reduced, and if it would improve the economy, well tough luck. And it really could have averted the dismantling of the country, since better material conditions means happier people means less unrest.

tl;dr: modern technology would allow us to automate economic planning and make a real rational economy by simulating the market, and render Porky's single social role as resource allocators obsolete

pick one

Cuba only has markets because their a tiny Island nation with little Industry. If a revolution were to occur in a developed nation, markets can and should be fully abolished. Money to.

Exactly. I do think study of different models and historical precedents is crucial but we need to return to Marx in our analysis of those precedents, at least in the sense of we need to make sure we're trying to address conditions as they exist, and not just addressing previous addresses ad infinitum, heading back into idealism. Communism is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things.

The opposition to markets is based on:

1) The inherent distribution of wealth it produces. Even in an economy where every company is a democratically run cooperative, the exchanges in the market will not be perfect equal exchanges. Meaning that in every exchange one side will loose a little and another will gain a little. So statistically speaking there will be a small number of people who will "win the lottery" of making a lot more exchanges were they gain at the expense of others. Meaning some cooperatives will be able to accumulate a lot of capital this way, and they would become money lenders and rent out capital, more or less reproducing most of the problems of capitalist economies. If you want to simplify this you could say that profit originates from money-circulation. Another way at looking at this is that money-market-schemes will-produce a hierarchy where people who won money that can boss around other people who lost money.

2) Markets are not good at organizing economies, the vast majority of economic transactions are based on recurring contracts. All successful economies are based on state planing and protectionism. Basically state planing and protectionism is used to develop an economy and free market is only advocated for plundering small less developed economies, for absorbing smaller competitors and for increasing labour competition, depressing wages.

3) the complexity argument speaks for planing not for markets. Because what ever problems a state-planer might have in dealing with complex systems, it is worsened by orders of magnitude when it comes to individuals trying to make rational choices in the market. You can compare the economies of The Soviet Union vs that of Brazil, or China vs Inda, if you have doubts. The gigantic global corporations basically are private planed economies, If markets were better at dealing with complexity they would have internal markets instead, while these corporations are usually horrible, you cannot complain about them being not effective at organizing production. When people say that socialist planed economies cannot grow as much as capitalist ones they usually are referring to socialists not be able to exploit workers as hard.

4) You can have all the nice parts of markets in a planed economy, for example you can have market mechanism for consumer choice when it comes to products. You can have competition between different product designs…

5) Markets are not open ended systems who ever wins the distribution lottery described in point 1 will kick off the ladder. And markets are

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A realistically existing Market Socialism basically is China after the reform and opening up By Deng Xiaoping. It needs a powerful state apparatus to function. It needs political organization that can override markets. Without that, well have a look at whan happened to people in Russia after they the dissolution of the Soviet Union. China will face problems in the future when the wealth that got concentrated in the market economy tries to become dynastic wealth that acts as "parasite" that drains it's "host-society".

You can make a case for market socialism to be a transitional stage. It worked much better in closing the technological gap than the Soviets trying to R&D everything them self's. But consider that socialism aims to abolish money, at minimum turning into labour-vouchers (one-way currency that doesn't circulate) and socialism aims to abolish commodity production that at minimum means no production for profit. And obviously no more billionaires, or other forms of private wealth concentrations. Wealth concentrations are the sources of "totalitarianism and authoritarianisms" (using the common interpretation of these words usually referring to a sense of disempowerment, and lack of self determination)

In order to not get lost in too much jargon, the aim is for the surplus produced by society to be redirected towards society, not be privatized.

Do you have a particular section of his texts in mind here?
But the number of possible pairwise connections isn't even half of the square of what it was, and the number of actual paths is a microscopic fraction of the number of possible paths and you cut out most of the possible paths by asking whether A enters B directly or indirectly as an input or vice versa or neither, giving you the actually existing paths, and the paths possible in the real world as opposed to the abstract diagram are those that describe possibilities of using material inputs to physically produce this or that.

>Essentially, the cybernetwork economy wasn't alternative paradigm to the market, but merely its simulation.
I wouldn't call every feedback system a market. For instance, I wouldn't call a thermostat a market. A cybernetics shill can be very close to a pro-capitalist mindset or very far from it. That's the big problem with cybernetics, not that it's wrong, but it's so general and abstract that it seems you can have any opinion in the world, add "cyber-" to it, and find some words that fit whatever you were going to do anyway. "I'm not like those other boring Catholics my dear, I'm a Cyber-Catholic."
Having some variable inside a program and calling that variable price or cost doesn't logically imply that these are connected to market transactions. If I want to go to a place I might reckon about different biking routes in terms of the "price" of time I "pay" for them. But it doesn't mean that in the act of me biking there a commodity is exchanged in a market.
A cyber-this or cyber-that proposal can get really close to that, it can get really far away from that. Skimming for certain words or phrases doesn't tell which way it goes.

Lets all agree for a split second that markets are an inefficient way to allocate and distribute resources and goods. What is the alternative?

I don't know maybe COMMUNISM?

What's the process of distribution like under gommunism?

Well in a capitalist market, you have a subject: the consumer that makes consumer choices. The consumer is directed by marketing, pushing subconscious buttons.

If you want ta have a communist planed economy you need to invent a new subject. You could call it: the plansumer, that submits what they plan on getting to the planing system. Information that is used to make plans should address the conscious mind.

Consider that it becomes much easier to make plans on what to produce when people tell you in advance.

Ideologically you could say the collective plan "emerges" from the individual plans.
Which practically could actually yield some bottom up decisions making, unlike consumerism that is more like involuntary force feeding.

Computerized management of resources. Track all goods in real time as they travel though the economy. Make this information fully transparent to the public. Maintain system theorists to seek out and correct inefficiencies in this system on a public platform. (Really what I'm proposing here is that we outsource planning from individual capitalist enterprises into a single publicly maintained peer-to-peer community.)

The criteria defining efficiency would be dependent on the consumption rates of various goods by the general population. This population receives labor vouchers for their work or alternatively a pension if they are deemed deserving of this. With these vouchers (which will also be digital) they will be able to choose their optimal basketcase of goods, ideally by selecting the items via some digital platform.
Measures will be taken to ensure privacy in personal consumption while also giving the general population deep insight into aggregate consumption patterns. Much of the planning process will be done through algorithms prioritizing production according to projected demand.

The general public will also be given the option to democratically intervene in this demand-based planning, prioritizing production for other purposes. There will also be a general process of decommodification (if we can still call these goods commodities), where goods and services are provided to people without mediation through labor vouchers, and instead directly dependent on their employment status (people who have a job or a justified exemption receive the service, others not), or entirely free of charge.

There's something to this. I'm certainly in favor of pushing consumers to plan their consumption more carefully, at least to an extent. Still, I believe we should start by basing production on projected consumption, and then allow the public to invent new modes of planning as socialism evolves.

What I've been thinking about is whether we can operate a purposefully diverse set of planning procedures to allow for flexible experimentation. All enterprises will ultimately be answerable to a couple of authorities (the laborers, the commune, the consumers), but the mechanisms through which these authorities expect to be answered will be manifold.
Like, to put it very concretely, every cooperative will have to maintain legitimacy in order to keep ownership over their location, keep resources coming in and products coming out, and keep its cooperands fed by the wider community. To obtain this legitimacy, they need to be granted it by some authority. But there are many of these authorities, and they have the choice to pick any one of them (or even multiple, in order to make their position more stable). They can go to the local council and ask for them to support them. They can go onto some kind of online Patreon-like platform. They can go to the local university. They can go to some organization that will have a very hands-on approach to ensure productivity. They can go to one that will let them operate themselves, but sets more strict conditions. And so on… These different mechanisms are then judged by the worker democracy on whether they perform their intended purpose. If they don't, their funds will be cut until they manage to improve. You'd get a very dynamic system of economy management that fits the needs of every enterprise.
And that's the ultimate intention. There should be some mechanism that fits everyone. If you want to start a coffeeshop but have no idea how to go about it, some organization should be there to take a lot of the work out of your hands, and just allow you to take the very concrete steps. If you do know how to go about it, some other mechanism will be there to allow you to do it mostly by yourself. If the goal is that this coffeeshop just gets coffee to as many people as possible, some mechanism will be able to accommodate this social purpose. If it's rather to provide some kind of hub for your community, some other mechanism will give you legitimacy for that. Whoever you are, whatever goal you have, you will be able to do it, as long as you approach the right organization to help you.
Similarly, if some enterprise gets into trouble, and no longer manages to meet its criteria to maintain legitimacy, it might step into a new relation with another organization to get it on its feet again. There's a safety net for failing cooperatives. When a cooperative proves to be too much of a hassle to maintain any longer, the workers will be helped to another useful job, maybe even in the same location with the same coworkers. They could be retrained in group!

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Just explaining the kind of basis I'd imagine seeing a socialist society operate on.

Its a necessary evil until you have bullet proof theory on how to make planned economy work efficiently. Slowly implementing planned economy on key sectors and reversing back to markets if they fail. Last thing where you want to do social experiments is food production.

Very good posts user.

mfw

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I know no amount of evidence will be able to rid you of your cultish love of commerce but planning isn't just some social experiment. It's been a reality of day-to-day life for decades and we have concrete evidence of it working. Most notably in the CCCP.
lol you really are so fucking hopped up on ideology that you think modern economies are just a few misjudged inputs away from mass starvation don't you? Even if we had a monkey plan the economy in-detail the thing wouldn't be able to reproduce something like the Bengal famine. We're not farmers living off rice and potatoes anymore.

Burn in hell Titoist scum. Go brag about your favorite strongman's unemployment rates and IMF loans somewhere else.

Well who is this "we" exactly ? I think for the sake of consistency, there needs be experience that actually creates a consciousness for planing ahead. Maybe even consider the personal planing as a sort of training that creates a pool of people that are good at it, from where you can recruit the planers for the economy at large.

You are seem to be recreating the sub-entrepreneur that opens a St_arbucks-chain-restaurant.

This sounds like St_arbucks closing a restaurant that doesn't meet it's sales target.

You might be unwittingly reproducing current ruling ideology, in some reduced fashion. My criticism is that if you want to have a planed economy than you have to learn from the neo-liberals who managed to reorient almost every aspect of society to be "market compatible". You cannot just install a planning authority somewhere in the background, you will get too much friction. You have to see this a monumental task of shifting general thinking from the neoliberal thought-pattern where people react to present choices in the market towards thinking that is about acting with the future in mind. This isn't just some ideological jibber jabber, this requires moving away from instant gratification towards delayed reward. This entail significant biological changes in the brain, which could be described as reducing the consumption-zombification.

can you give a verbose version why you don't like "the plansumer", i'm picturing the word consumer to mean a "sumer" that is being "conned". There are also other "sumers" like the "prosumer" where goods that are being exchanged are half-way in between product and capital.

Gonna need a sauce on that chief. If its true, then why bother at all? You're basically Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill that is just going to roll back down. We might as well just accept reformist capitalism.

because the point is not to outcompete it in terms of pure profit,even in our current era,states are way better at providing quality services for example,but shittier in terms of profit,because it litterally doesn't matter.Read the god damn post before spouting a dumb gotcha for one single sentence.

Its not le gotcha sentence. It was a genuine concern, and I kind of misread your post. I assumed you meant socialist nations can't outcompete in terms of production and stuff like militarily instead of profits.

We socialists, we the people, we rational planners, whatever. I'm using it in the sense that a mathematician would say "If we substitute this equation into the other, then we see…"
I would start with a campaign to replace supermarkets with general good retrieval points. You go there to set an order (or set this order online) and they make sure you get those goods next week. This would be a gradual change and framed as a way to reduce wasted resources and protect the environment.

Maybe that's because what they're doing is effective. We shouldn't be afraid to learn from capitalist planning. There needs to be some form of dynamic subcontracting where new projects move up and down the chain.
Except that targets under our system could be set to be whatever we determine to be socially useful, not just profitability. Like I said, the coffee shop could end up not selling all that much coffee, and still be considered a valuable investment by the community because people get to hang out.

There are some elements to neoliberal ideology that we should pay attention to. They are the ones actually running a post-industrial economy, after all. Modern communism should start as a critique, not a dismissal, of their ideological project.
I'm all in favor of this, except that these new modes of living need to be invented first. The day after the transition we need to have a way to keep production going while also implementing socialist reform at the deepest level. Then we can start experimentation with delayed reward and everything.

I support paying for social programmes with a mixed market economy.

I don't understand what this means, can you describe how a good retrieval point differs from a supermarket.

oh come on how is what the neo-liberals are doing effective ? They calculate in "money-cost" and then decide it's viable for kids in Africa to mine a with a pick-axe and shovel instead of teaching operators to use high tech excavation equipment. Because wages as low enough. It should be obvious that pick axes and shovels are less effective then sophisticated machinery. I don't quite understand why you want to replicate "entrepreneurs", they are the offspring of the bourgeoisie, and the only reason they usually are involved is because they hold the money necessary to get past the paywall the capitalist use to block create people from bypassing them. Subcontracting usually means abolishing labour protections, why on earth do you want that ?

why does it have to be profitable at all ?
Anyway if it's supposed to be a "communal space" first and a "coffee dispensary" second, why is it considered a coffee shop ? Is it really necessary to do this inversion ? It seems like doublespeak.

the neo-liberal "post-industrial" economy is absolutely horrid, everybody is alienated, it produced a giant service sector that is turning people into serfs, large parts of that are about ridicules luxury that is not only utterly unproductive but also taking away resources and labour-power from vital stuff.

Ok but i don't want to recreate a structure that can be re-privatized, basically the neo-liberal strategy where they send people as trojan horse into organizations to redirect resource flows, should not be possible.

Yeah well we need to do a conversion process of production, because quite a lot of what we do now cannot continue anyway.

I watched the interview of one of those the super-rich people conferences, where somebody suggested to have state directed economy and the reaction to that suggestion was incoherent ramblings about charities. This included rejection of facts, which solidified my previous judgement that these people cannot be included in decision making. They are incapable of accepting reality that contradicts their special interests, that is a recipe for disaster.

Markets are a tool to structure the economy just as planning is, proof for this is, that there is lots of planning in capitalist countries taking place, equating planning to socialism and markets to capitalism is adressing the question in a black and white manner.

Markets can be very benefitful to a socialist society as can be private property. They boost the productive forces in an extreme manner, driving them to their hights, with no forces ever matching their speed. This can help building the basis for socialim in one country since the transitions to a higher developed stage of socialism and communism are bound to high productive forces (how should a communist society distribute good, when there are shortages? One should certainly need high productive forces to distribute evengily and eliminate currency)

This is completly in line with marxism and has been tried multiple times in history:

Deng Xiaoping:

productive forces and speed up economic growth.

(dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/there-is-no-fundamental-contradiction-between-socialism-and-a-market-economy/)

Engels wrote in Capital volume 3, Chapter 27

Marx:

Lenin:

in addition

"Zelda exists on the Sega Genesis just like Street Fighter, proof for this is, that there is Street Fighter on Super Nintendo."
I suppose it's this passage in the original:
It's about the development of productive forces and the establishment of a world market. My impression is that old Marx and Engels thought of this as something already at 90 % completion while they were still alive. I don't think one can just silently add one or two centuries of necessary waiting time to that expectation. If you do add that much time, you may be justified in doing so, but you should admit that it is a big modification.