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.
The Market Question
Nathaniel Torres
Samuel Ward
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.
Asher Allen
I support paying for social programmes with a mixed market economy.
Carson Reed
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.
Ryan Cox
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.
Engels wrote in Capital volume 3, Chapter 27
Marx:
Lenin:
in addition
Jonathan Ross
"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.