After the revolution, do you expect a (proletarian) central state to control and direct workplaces...

After the revolution, do you expect a (proletarian) central state to control and direct workplaces, according to a single plan, or the workers in those individual workplaces to control and direct themselves?

The first one might be better for defending the state from war. The second one, however, is more secure against the growth of tyranny, and it allows more freedom to the individual.

I think if the second one was suggested, people would be more sympathetic to the whole idea, as it seems substantially different that was tried in the USSR.

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A mix of both. All critical infrastructure must be centrally planned

That's a lot more pragmatic and balanced than I expected.

there are going to be baboons EVERYWHERE

I like the way you think

You can design systems to be adaptive. You can have infrastructure run according to different plans (algorithms even) depending on who else it coordinates with. If you have infrastructure able to operate either independently, in decentralized coordination, or according to central planning, it can adapt to a variety of situations, including political shifts regionally/locally and in the event of an emergency that cuts off or disables part of the system.


Stop being a centrist.

Ok, then what happens when the producers of raw materials start fucking up everyone else's plans because there's no coordination?

Anyone with individualist deviations of wanting to manage their own workplace should be killed. That’s porky thought

Baboons who raped and killed your aryan women and soldiers, faggot.

No, communism means that you have to become a new person who sees himself only as part of the proletariat! Individualism is bourgeois!

I feel the same tbh. Also I want to note that centralized does not equal tyranny. You can have a centralized democratic system or a decentralized tyranny.

You will go to the gulag, bourgeois faggot!

What are you even talking about? Workers self management is now bourgeois thought? Get a fucking job and maybe you’ll understand what material conditions mean.

It depends on the decisions at hand. There will always be the need for central planning, otherwise, how do you stop workers coops from exploiting other workers coops? For example, the airport coop could jack up the prices if they are a monopoly in that city.

For day-to-day management, sure, workplace democracy has a role.

Communism abolishes the firm, hence there is no distinct "workplace" to be "directed"

This because the other option is totalitarian authoritarianism. Communism is about abolishing the state not about creating tyranny where workers have no control of the means of production.

But isn't that end goal of Communism and what Marx was originally all about in his writings.

some would probably disagree but "control" of the MoP does not necessarily imply worker ownership. Keep in mind that the end goal here is to abolish private property and property relations completely.

We’re talking about achieving communism and abolishing private property. What you’re talking about is essentially workplace anarchy. Engels himself in arguing against the anarchists said the strictest discipline must be observed in production. The DoTP would be suicidal if it catered to the entrepeneurial whims of each and every prole. It is bourgeois thought, i.e. unmarxist and unscientific. If we’re ever going to distribute according to need we’re gonna need authority from above and responsibility from below with a commisar at the top. Anyone who wants workplace self-management is a nascent class-enemy

I wonder who could be behind this post.

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If you want efficient production we can’t have everyone in their individual workplaces going the a million different directions and creating factionalism where it is least needed and most harmful. The goal is to distribute eventually by need, which requires efficient production and quick decision making. The DoTP should be organized like a vast industrial army. So again: workplace democrat = wrecker in the shadows

Workplace democracy is fine if you treat each work unit as a black box

Centrally managed but the workers form a council that has veto power in case the planners tell the workers to do something stupid due to not having the hands on experience in the industry that the workers do. Or better yet, the (low level) planners are workers in their given industry. They serve short (a year or so) terms as planners, and are chosen by lottery from a pool of applicants. This plus workplace veto power would work pretty well I think

This. All workplace anarchy does is create competition, undermining cooperation. Everyone can input into the democratically determined plan, anyone whop wants to put themselves above that is a liberal counter-revolutionary.

Vetos are antidemocratic.

If alll you do is replace the capitalist with a democratic state I have 0.000001% control over, you have not really created my freedom at all. All your arguments about exploitation, wage slavery, and alienation are hollow if the end goal is just a tyranny of the masses as opposed to mr porkie.

If it's built upon the economic and material foundations of class struggle and solidarity then workplace ownership is not only preferable, but nessisary to the socialist project. There is no "plan" for the entirety of society to "follow" being put forward by socialists, this is Utopian. We want a conquest of power into the hands of the workers, and an end to the separation of the producers from their product, this is why Marx calls socialist society a "co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production", anything less is capitalist minded managerialism.

Come on, user

There is a big difference between discussing governmental structure, and direct production

Chances are you are smaller percentage than 0.000001% of you state, so your control should be actually smaller over it. If you want more than that, you are just unhappy that you have not ore power than other members of society. It's a zero sum game, if you have more say than 1/population, someone else has less. This difference will self-reinforce and thus lay the foundation for the restoration of capitalism.

Perhaps you just want to be more of a porky yourself if you are scared of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Its inevitable that a planner will tell a workplace to do something impossible/unsafe. The workers should have a route to challenge these orders, which would then go to review to determine a proper course of action.

Absolute veto power is antidemocratic but alarm veto is worker protection

There isn't. If you think corporate (or """co-op""") hierarchy is not a governmental structure, you are an idealist. The purpose of societal organization is to manage the collaborative production.

That's the point I was making

I don't care about controlling some huge state, I just want power over my own worklife, and a reasonable amount of control over the product of my labour.

You're going to have cycles and crisis of overproduction and underproduction just like capitalist societies if we split the workplaces up so they don't cooperate. We need a centeral plan to manage production. Workers don't know the productive capacity of all the larger workplaces to even consider rational decision in terms of production.
Sure, we'll let you have collective ownership of the workplace and be able to make improvements in production and lower working hours but we're not going to let you have the freedums to burn your crops and kill livestock.

You state these two positions as if they are in opposition to one another. They are not. To avoid the reemergence of market relations you need central planning, but that does not preclude the democratization of day-to-day management, whatever form that may take. It should be noted that increasing powers of managers and such was always the right wing position in the USSR, held by people more sympathetic to liberalism, while workers who were more smypathetic to the soviet system were the ones who championed more self-management. The aim of the socialist transformation of society is also one were all people are to be trained involved in the management of the proletarian state, this is how the contradiction between state and civil society is to be overcome. All people being trained and engaged in the economic planning of society is essential for the emergence of higher stage communism.

READ COCKSHOTT

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No it’s not, Stalin’s 5-year-plans worked wonderfully and today we can do even better thanks to technological developments. Large multinationals already are planned economies internally (although privately owned of course). Thinking that we can do without central planning that ultimately everyone has to follow is what is utopian (like gift economy, voluntaryism, anarchism etc.). The only other feasible way is market dynamics which is what emerges if you allow individuals or factions privileged control over the product of labour.

Could you still have a central plan if people were free to vary their working hours / output levels however they liked?

For the material circumstances involved with the construction of socialism in the USSR, it did what was needed. But all socialist except that that is what it was, construction, and the nessisary precursors to the establishment of socialist order.
It's clear that you have no idea what Utopian means in this sense
Except there is no need the make it a choice between bureaucracy vs market mutualism, this is a brainlet take.

Statist syndicalism is the true path to socialism, with a state controlled central planning (digitalized of course) on top and union run workplaces that are allowed some leniancy in the way they operate, leaving room for a state intervention if need be, all while keeping the workers interests on an equal level to the economic ones.

Each workplace should have some leeway in its planning, working towards centrally defined targets. Some areas need highly centralised planning (defence, energy, nuclear, railways, steel, aerospace, intelligence) but even at the lower level each workplace should have political officers to ensure workers are treated well and the company works towards central goals.

Depends on material conditions, social modes of organisation have to be adapted. For example you can't decentralise Russia, that is made impossible by geography.


this seems misleading, this boils down to democratically planned vs market-money-hierachy.

Socialism is a planed economy, markets are only admissible as compromise in case of unavoidable material impositions.

You would aim to abolish money and go for a voucher system as soon as possible, because almost all the previous socialist systems that did not abolish money ended up relapsing into capitalism.


freedom is defined in two ways:

negative freedom : freedom from exploitation
positive freedom : freedom to democratically decide over economic surplus

markets produce a specific distribution of wealth that is the major driver of tyranny right now. Markets do not represent freedom or individuality for anybody but capitalists that already have accumulated large amounts of capital. Consider that one wants to be structurally closed off against surplus flowing upwards towards larger neo-liberal structures as much as possible.

In the current context a central planner is absolutely necessary, if only for insulating your self against chaotic global markets, economic warfare etc.
Consider that even if you want to keep a market for Petit bourgeois businesses and co-ops, you will still have to fend off not only military conquest or bypass embargos but also deal with stuff like opportunistic finance predation.

Single plan.

Compare these two voting systems:
1. A binary decision is done by direct vote, majority wins.
2. Instead of directly putting all votes into one pool, we have distinct voting regions that in turn are split up into voting districts. A decision wins in total if it wins in a majority of regions; and to win in a region, it has to win in the majority of its districts.

In scenario 1, the probability that a random guy likes the winning option as much or more than the losing one cannot be lower than 50%. In scenario 2, the probability that a random person's vote is pivotal to the decision is higher than in scenario 1, but the probability that the result reflects that person's view is lower. I think your focus on individual weight is wrong-headed. What does it matter that you aren't pivotal if the collective decision goes your way? The biggest rift in current society is the rift between classes. There is a big conflict that you can't just talk away. Once that conflict is resolved, it will be much more common to reach broad agreement on questions.

What a workplace gets is material inputs, production quotas (lower limits for distinct goals plus scoring by weighted harmonic mean for what's above), an estimate of person-hours (not a single number, but several for the different needed qualifications), and a remuneration budget. If Alice and Bob both can do the same tasks, there is no need to fix their individual work hours to be equal. Some of the remuneration budget can be left to an internal voting procedure.