Why are you for or against central planning?
My view: Central planning [works tremendously for developing nations(see: Cuba, China, Vietnam, the USSR), however an already developed economy requires markets for more efficient production of luxury goods, such as Titoist Yugoslavia.
For.
Without central planning capitalism could reemerge
Whats the point of luxury goods?
By its very nature, a planned economy can better control carbon emissions and other factors leading to climate change. With the state representing the interests of the working-class rather than the capitalist class, research won't be beholden to corporate grants and objectives.
China today, even though it obviously has a large capitalist sector, is taking the lead on the subject of addressing climate change. No serious "denial" movement in the country has been able to form. To quote one article:
(Source: foreignpolicy.com
ok al gore
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People like stuff. By luxury good I mean anything other than food, water, healthcare and housing. Because there's always going to be a demand for that stuff, and its going to be filled one way or another.
thats a meme
Ok, but what incentive would the working class have today to address this issue over the Capitalist class. This seems like a non argument, because the incentive to expand economically and get more stuff is and always will be there.
It's true.
There's a new book out there from Verso called "The People's Republic of Walmart" that argues that capitalism is more or less heavily planned right now – which is ironic because a lot of this involves consumer commodities which liberal economists believe you can't plan. "Free markets" in the classical sense only really exist anymore in select sectors such as oil and currency markets.
There's still a market framework for, say, Amazon – but to get the stuff to your door requires a great deal of planning, algorithms, regular deliveries involving the same customers and suppliers (on large) scales. There's so much data now on what consumers want that these corporations know what we want before we even buy it. And they can set their own prices which – when the Soviets did it – were considered "market distorting price fixes." One of the paradoxes of the Cold War is that a lot of the technology and engineering that was designed to help guide ICBMs over the north pole and create military communications systems ended up leading to this semi-planned capitalism. Now wonder Alex Jones is pissed.
There's a difference between the strictly economist logic of planning and social planning, though. I've known people who've worked as Amazon delivery drivers and it's just grueling work, with every second accounted for and calculated – you're basically a robot. And there are all these environmental concerns. So socialism to me is how do we use all this stuff so we can reduce hours worked, and without the profit motive turning us all into the equivalent of Matrix pod people.
you know what is more important than luxuries
building socialism
OP seems interested to know in which way would this interest the working class, so socialism being more important than luxuries according to you isn't an argument for him.
I don't see how what people want is relevant when you have a centrally planned economy
This is a very common brainlet view based on blind faith and nothing else, it isn't how the real world works. If you think Yugoslavia is a model of efficiency you probably hate books to much to be saved but I'll direct you to this post who basically said 90% of what I wanted to say ITT anyway
All I have to add is we drop the term "central planning." There is no exact measurement we can use when planning becomes "central." It is a term that became popular in the 20th century to strawman communism and make it look bad. The issue is simply that of organization vs anarchy, nothing else.
More developed countries use more economics planning.
OP here, I'm in no way in favor 100% of deregulated markets. And even currency markets are very much planned, take for example the fixed yuan vs the floating dollar. My point is that the Government is not very good at actually managing all these different industries all at once, it can very quickly lead to a winding bureaucracy and massive amounts of corruption, as happened in the later USSR. Rather, I think a better alternative would be worker owned natural monopolies, similar to com-ed, but cooperatives. That way they are still under rigid surveillance and regulation by the government, but it's not cluttered.>>2872559
Worked owned under capitalism is still capitalism
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There are some things that can be centrally planned. Some things that can't be. We can't centrally plan the personal lives every individual and the way how they use their personal property. However that being said, some things do need central planning so that it doesn't fall for corruption or serve petty bourgeious interests.
Water vapor and CO2 causes the earth to heat up. Facts don't care about your feelings.
Everyone ignore this retard; they're a reactionary who constantly ban evades with VPN and posts climate change denialism in every relevant thread
Central planning is necessary to prevent a climate change induced environmental apocalypse. Who gives a shit about luxury goods. Besides, we'll probably figure it out with all the computational power we have now.
>Why are you for or against central planning?
The usefulness of data isn't just something that scales in proportion with size, seeing the connections between sets of data becomes possible by having it all in one place. Having a consumer market is not some logical opposite to having centralized data processing.
Advice to everybody: Don't buy it, you can find a free version online if you know where to look. It's also really meh (8ch.net
Everyone does. Even the anarkiddie Kropotkin understood the necessity of luxuries.
For central planning, markets produce bad distributions of income. And could even bring back crisis cycles.
Luxuries are unproductive, and if you keep improving the quality of regular goods those would eventually start to impinge on the luxuries sector which would then be compelled to seek artificial limitations, and you might end up recreating the fake product segmentation we have today where for example some processors are intentionally "gimped" in order to have a "lower end models."
Another examples are the expensive & over-engineered mechanical watches, with enough advances in 3d metal printing those could be mass-produced cheaply. Something like this has already happened to designer-bags, the cheap knock-offs are indistinguishable from originals.
Somebody might figure out how to procedurally generate fancy product design patterns and then what ? Are you not just going to see a luxury sector pursue intentional decadent wastefulness.
The only reason it lasted so long was because it was propped up by the West as a counterpoint to the USSR. As soon as Gorbachev tried to implement something similar in the form of Perestroika, the USSR began to collapse. It's purpose served, the IMF began to demand the loans it had given out before to be repaid. The resulting Yugoslavian collapse was far harder and far bloodier than that of the USSR as it's market socialism had exacerbated existing disparities between the regions for a good decade or so.