I've been reading the work by those dutch councilists on labor time computation recently. I' have a question regarding the labor time of new products. If a product has never been "produced" before, then how to we attain an average labor time for it by which to produce it? And how do we prevent that labor time from being over/under productive of what it should be?
Question on labor time computation
Colton Wood
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Jeremiah Murphy
When a new product comes into production we can make reasonable estimates as to how fast it can produce (because we test machines). The avarage labour time it takes to produce is not something we think up, its something we measure. If the measurement is off, we can always adjust it later on, just like how capitalists sometimes over or undershoot production costs. Its no big deal.
If your question is, how do we attain the labour cost of any given product if not from a continuous market process:
1. Make an array with one element for all products. Initialize them to zero.
2. For each product, take the formula describing its direct labour time cost and its costs in terms of how much of another product it has. (IE bread = B, grain = G, water = W -> B = 2G + 0.5W + 3 (3 labour))
3. For each product, take this formula and substitute the variables with the labour cost of those products from your array, sum them up, store the answer in the array.
4. Repeat. Every iteration your list of labour costs will approach the true cost more closely. It should not take more than 20 iterations to converge to within nanoseconds of labour time (or put otherwise, the change will be so teeny tiny it will hardly change).
This process is linear time in relation to the amount of products you produce, or O(n). You can, at any point, calculate the labour cost in so little time you will hardly notice, without needing any information about previous prices or costs.
Jose Ortiz
also read cockshott
Bentley King
By analogy. What are the most similar production processes. Motion studies take apart complex movements and show the simple combinations of motions (and rest) these are made of. You can use these molecules of motion to estimate the amount of work different shop layouts would entail. Time-estimation models also exist for interface design of machines and computers. But in the end, you need repetition. A unique person doing a unique thing knows no standard to compare. Many people have to be asked would they rather do brand-new task X according to some productivity requirement which is built on somewhat shaky foundations or old task A or B or C, whatever they are familiar with and with well-established productivity requirements for the same salary; and how you answer these questions must have consequences for how you get assigned. And if it turns out that after a while there is a flood of people willing to do A now, the productivity requirement gets raised, and the people who consented to do it for the lower requirement get the choice to stay or go back to their old work.
Easton Howard
Read Cockshott's Towards A New Socialism.
Brody Morales
Why don't you lurk a bit before making dumb assumptions?
Connor Long
The LTV is a poor rubric for individual compensation. It's purpose is to explain the way capitalism and the market works, and specifically how it works on labor and the production process in the aggregate. It's sufficient for explaining the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but it's not a total rubric for how to run a planned economy. The whole point of the planned economy is to account for a wider picture of the production process, rather than just looking at this thing exchange value that only makes sense because we believe in a monetized fair exchange. If you try to use labor vouchers in this way you inevitably get bogged down in debates about how value technically went into this or that process, how much your education is worth, whether scarcely available intellectual skillsets have more value than others (and this is the big one, because there's no rule in these considerations that knowledge is to be publicized, and it's often assumed that the so-called meritorious have a right to their merit and credential and status). You'd also have to adjust constantly based on unplanned circumstances, when all you're really debating is the value of something like money rather than all the processes that go into production, distribution, and using the products.
I imagine compensation will work something like a salary, where everyone who has agreed to be a producer in this system is paid in full because they agreed to make themselves available to build socialism, rather than because they agreed to sell themselves by the hour and get cajoled like any other exploitable labor. The system would necessarily need to look at people as people and make people, their well-being and their growth the whole point, rather than essentially retaining wage labor in some more scientific form.
Jayden Garcia
read marx and cockshott
the point of LTV in a planned economy is solely for allocating the final product. all intermediate products are allocated according to a plan with no respect for value.
no you don't. you just measure how long each productive task takes. that's it.
why? the plan should include things like disasters.
If they're not being exploited, then it's not exploitation. someone who works ten hours a week doesn't deserve the same social product as someone who works thirty five.
Xavier Adams
I should add because I hit submit too soon that the very concept of a labor board decreeing what labor is worth what necessarily implies a technocratic body above society, and such a state of affairs would inevitably lead to a new sort of system where intellectual knowledge is considered akin to private property, becomes sacrosanct, and congratulations, you've ultimately just found another form of class society, etched into the very fabric of how people are compensated. It may evolve into something different than wage labor in the long term (indeed, the primary currency to be obtained now isn't the credits, which eventually become more or less arbitrary, but merits that win you the ability to decide who gets to be what in the system, and the trade of favors will run rampant). At some point you have to think about something more than just building another system of compensation and changing the deal from money to "merit" (which we all know will just be hoarded by a clique), and set forward a program not of compensation for labor but compensation for agreeing to build a socialist system, which would in practice mean a fixed salary for everyone who is productively working, and ample free time for people to develop skills that will allow them to fulfill as many tasks as their natural abilities will allow, without inhibiting people by gating their ability to live life based on perceived merit. Unfortunately, the problem with such a system is that it is very hard for technological society to get away from the privatization of knowledge, of intelligence, and the years of ideology pumped into left-liberals to sell "meritocracy". You're fighting a whole new struggle after you get rid of Porky, in the hopes that maybe something actually worthwhile can be built.
Alexander Cooper
youtu.be
don't even have to read
Robert Martinez
there's no decreeing about it just some minor adjustments. computer does most of it for you
Lincoln King
No, the point of the LTV is to explain the origin of market value, so that political economy can make meaningful statements about the nature of what a price is, what money is, what markets are and what they actually do.
According to what standard? "Socially necessary labor time" is very fuzzy when you try to actually measure it, because the concept itself inherently contains the conflict between employee and employer. Socially necessary labor time is based to a great degree on how far the labor force can be pushed, that's why management makes it a point to make work hell, because comfortable workers typically don't maximize productivity, particularly in the field of low labor. I know from my experience as one of those low laborers that a great deal of the productivity increase is literally due to management tightening the screws and working the lowest run of the laboring classes harder than ever before, using the latest in management and psychological techniques to better gauge just how far people can be pushed, and creating a total environment where the low-status worker is hopeless and beaten down. The technological advances aren't just machines, it's the management of people themselves.
So basically, you say "well, the manager says it can be done at X rate" (never mind that it isn't always easy to quantify these rates for every job, and this even applies to a lot of menial jobs). So everyone has to work at X rate, as if the workers themselves are going to be as motivated as the planner who is doing this because he's a revolutionary and has particular ideas about who should be in power, who should rule. Already, implicitly, you have a conflict between the leaders and planners and the people who follow the plan, because we all know the ordinary people won't be let in on the planning process in a meaningful way, and just giving them a vote does not mean their input means much since they'll only be able to vote for their bosses and the bosses have to follow some set plan. You're making the mistake that everyone will just naturally get along with the planners, but what happens when the plan is wrong, because it's based on faulty premises and the monopolization of knowledge and credential creates a bubble of technocrats ruling in opposition to the majority of the people? You get a shit plan.
In the end, all you get if you're at the bottom is that you've traded the capitalist who pays you a wage and might pay a bonus, for a central planner that sets the price you will be able to sell yourself for and you have nowhere else to go. And the planner has it set in his mind that people are going to work at this rate, or else, the plan literally calls for it and the plan expects everyone to just go along with the plan, or it must factor the worker not as an equal participant but as a psychological construct to be exploited.
And no, moving the decision to a computer does not change anything, because computers just execute code that people write, and the program is only as good as the programmer (and if you're talking about AI writing its own code, you still have to consider what went into the AI in the first place, and whether the AI itself is fair and intellectually sound in its judgement).
Again, on paper you can make such a system of compensation, but the human element in production can only be calculated precisely if you reduce the human laborer to a cog and cajole them through various means. This line of thinking appears inevitably every time this LTV topic and compensation comes up, from ostensible socialists. The very idea of "socially necessary labor time" accounts for the fact that humans, generally, don't like being told what to do and what to produce for society's sake and the continuation of institutions. If they do believe in the institutions, great, but you can't please all the people all of the time, no matter how much you tell them dialectical materialism is an immortal science or whatever. Ultimately, if people are still basically submitted to a new kind of wage labor, or worse a system of strict social hierarchy based on credential with no hope of advancement ever, the people pushed into the lower classes of labor and the institutions they serve would become increasingly antagonistic, until the system has nothing to do but rot.
The labor voucher concept is something that was sketched by Marx because he had to suggest something, being coy about what his scientific socialism was really about. It's a crude example made with 19th century technology, and was never intended as a fully realized system. It could only be an ad-hoc system responding to the obvious need to continue wage labor in a way to build the conditions for socialism, not a system that would stand for decades.
James Ross
sure on a micro scale it might vary but on a macro scale socially necessary labor time will most likely remain stagnant until there is a change in the way something is produced
people are still paid more based on their output. cockshott suggests having tiers of pay based on how much you match the socially necessary labor time
it's not as simple as: bruh produce more lmao. should demand increase new factories would be built.
yeah and that will be a contradiction of socialism that will rear its head. then we'll eventually achieve communism.
yeah and code is very good at mathematics. modern super computers can already calculate a world economy
this sounds like a liberal argument. humans aren't that complex. the "muh cog in a wheel" argument is exactly what a labor economy strives to correct. by incentivising methods of production with less socially necessary labor time, it reduces the hours required to work paving the way for more developed personal lives outside of the workplace.
when has anyone said that? it's not like it's a holy position unlike the modern bourgeoisie
even if that was true it would make no difference. cockshott is suggesting practical solutions to problems in the former Soviet Unio's economic planning and I don't see anything of that caliber coming from you.
Blake Jones
I know what Cockshott wrote. I disagree with him on a number of points, largely for the reasons I've already mentioned.
And yes, often times management techniques are literally the manager saying "work harder" and finding some new motivational method. There's a whole industry of self-help and quasi-spiritual Porkyism that has sprung up as a result of this, and there is nothing magical about the working class which makes them immune to adopting bourgeois ideas.
I don't doubt the ability of a computer to plan an economy, I'm saying that handing out labor vouchers and spending the effort to calculate exchange value is a bad way to plan an economy in the long term. You could only use such a system for ad hoc compensation while the actual planning deals with managing resources and use-values for the purpose those things would be created for (and the planned economy would be prioritizing those things which have a fairly obvious and common use-value). The labor voucher then would be little more than a piece of paper offering a promise that may not materialize in times of scarcity, especially if class tensions under socialism escalate along the lines I described (lines which are already starkly drawn today under capitalism, and are the most likely fault line for any revolution in the 21st century). This isn't just a "contradiction" in the Marxist sense, it's a fault line that would be almost immediately fatal to the socialist system if it rests its case on some ideology that communism is natural and preordained. Such a thing was present in the Soviet system as well, because the class warfare within that society was officially denied and gave the regime a blind eye towards the endemic corruption that would eventually lead to Gorby and Yeltsin having a base.
Unless you have a thinking AI, the computer is just a really elaborate calculator, not a mathematician in the meaningful sense of the word. It is only as good as the engineer who programmed it, and the model that program is using. Use a model and perception of human society that is fundamentally flawed, and it doesn't matter how well the program executes that model, because the model itself doesn't represent reality.
Stop, you're totally missing the point and ignoring what happens every time this thread comes up, where a socialist invariably suggests the state is going to cajole and condition workers to accept certain things at the behest of the central planning body. If you've already started from that point, you're past the point where you are talking about a system of all workers cooperating. Class divides and class struggle clearly exist, one side has made it abundantly clear how they view the other and there isn't really a reconciliation or class collaboration at that point.
Jacob Hughes
That is measured, come again?
You confuse training costs which do enter into product prices with special compensation for the person getting trained – in a society where the training is covered by the general public (not just the teaching you is covered by society, but rent and other living expenses while you study). Philosophically, the "natural right" you have for extra compensation based on having extensive special training is ZERO. Practically, there is a difference though, and that difference isn't addressed by debates, but by observing whether there is a lot of brain drain and countering that by regulations (signing up to study this or that means you also sign up to not leave the country for X years) and perhaps as a secondary measure differential remuneration (but this has a bad side effect, more on that below), with a difference no bigger than what's needed to keep brain drain at tolerable level.
There is a guy who can look at a city from helicopter and then draw the whole thing from memory. I acknowledge that he has a remarkable ability. How does me acknowledging that strengthen class society? Do you actually buy into capitalist propaganda that wealth difference is mostly an accurate proportional reflection of talent difference? Do you not know the meaning of class? In what sense would a labor board with members selected by sortition be "above society"?
No it isn't. We will get rid of patents, copyright, and study fees. I said above that differential remuneration for skilled work has a bad side effect, here it is: When you benefit from having rare knowledge, you are incentivized to keep it that way, rare. That's a conflict we have to live with as long as non-socialist regions exist in the world. But this problem can be defanged in various ways. There doesn't need to be a high remuneration bonus for doing a skilled task if there is a high bonus for teaching it, and everybody learning it becomes a potential teacher, so the required bonus quickly shrinks.
Xavier Bell
cont. from
Work intensity is a short-term measure that every idiot understands, that's why it's used everywhere. But that doesn't mean it has great effect on output. The main factor in productivity is science and engineering. Compare what goes on in port cities like Hamburg today with the era before the international container standard. No amount of psychological trickery, whipping people or whatever could have made such a productivity increase while keeping the technology human arms unloading ships.
A factory produces products and it also produces a change in the people working there. What if salary and career prospects of managers substantially depended on numbers capturing staff turnover and how the health among the workforce develops (with due notice of age and pre-existing conditions, of course) as well as (anonymous) grading by the underlings? Suppose there are two columns for the manager, one for output and one for your people, each has an absolute minimum that is necessary or you're toast, above that you're scored by the harmonic mean of the two.
Solution: ANY such standard of productivity and remuneration for it is ONLY voted on by people who are 1. actually qualified to do the task AND 2. bound by their individual statement that they can get drafted to do it in accordance with their own individual statement of what's possible and fair here.
The rest of your post is romantic irrationality and anti-communism pretending to be the opposite.
Books can give people a nudge in what they believe, but the big part of your outlook comes from your daily life. That's Marx101. The life of me as a worker is very different from the life of my landlord, nothing magical about it. My life gives me the rough ideas, good books only tune them a bit.
What do you think scarcity is? The resources of the world are not like a little fish tank you can just grab out anything at a moment. Things have to be extracted and some things have to be built out of other things. This requires work. When some resource is suddenly scarce, we switch to alternative production techniques which we didn't use before since they are more labor-intensive. Hence, that stuff will cost more now, whether we use money or labor vouchers. Labor vouchers capture scarcity very well.
I'm working class myself, I just think your posts are daft.
Sebastian White
user, I think it would do you well to have a peruse of the book I mentioned in the OP. It sets out an interesting program, and argues that labour accounting would inherently have to involve the cooperation of many productive installations (they call cartels), and by extension the individual factories. The book makes an argument for the Councilist system of socialist rule being the only kind that can facilitate this, but this might be an outdated view due to technological advancements. I still feel there is a good point being made here however, their argument that the retention of money in socialist society leads to the kind of stagnation as scene in the Soviet Union, and that labour time accounting is the only rational way to combat this seems spot on to me.
They are also aware of the temporality of the whole system in regards to labour time in relation to an advance in the productive forces of society.
I'm still reading, and am regularly caught out by opaque language, but I see this work as being an interesting bridge between the hardcore planning fetishist, and the unreasonable communizers.
Anthony Butler
It's not rational though, it's entirely dependent on wage labor remaining wage labor with the same relation between the manager and the worker. You've already made the decision that some workers are not really equal and need to be guided by some body, and whoever sets the rules (however much they claim to be based on science) really holds the power. The very notion of a "fair wage" being built into the very foundation of economic planning just makes the managerial class an permanent institution, because the managers are indispensible to the management of this sort of system that judges who gets compensated for what. They become the new bourgeois (and that has already happened to a large extent even in capitalist society, the uneducated are held in the greatest contempt and the educated view us all as mental defectives that need to be controlled, so we would be facing this matter right away. The moment the managerial class can build institutions that enshrine their power into law and the very workings of the economy, the system will immediately turn against the lower classes and work us harder than ever before.
All of these theories rely on the false belief that the working class is actually one unified thing and that there are no class distinctions within the working class, when reality tells us the working class has been at each others' throats without any prompting from the capitalist ruling class. Literally the only thing the working class as a whole shares in common is that we're subjects of capital and finance at the moment. The notion that you're just going to have the planned economy work because you say so and you make your models science-y does not square with reality, and even the planners in the USSR understood that. The labor credits would quickly fail if they were implemented along these lines, the credits would fail to reflect actual energy input into the process, has to be rejigged to account for natural resource limitations, and almost all of your labor credits wind up being taken in tax anyway to fund the central state apparatus, since it has both the bureaucracy to run (and again, the managerial class itself is practically enshrined into law with this system, and will seek maximum benefit for their class position), and it has to take on the task of actively suppressing capitalists through a large-scale war machine. The moment there is anything like an environmental crisis, the managers will quickly decide that their subjects don't really need things like education or adequate food, because they've already implicitly decided (and this is confirmed beyond a doubt if you actually know the managerial class) that the uneducated aren't really people like they are people.
Thomas Lewis
holy shit that entire schizo post is entirely reliant on some crazy ancap strawman world where the manages rule everything like the bourgeoisie. the economic system would require a democracy like any other state to prop it up. this is why cockshott suggests sortition as a method of deciding major changes in production: like a disaster. why would the workers vote for their own annihilation?
Blake Adams
Because they'll have no choice. Democracies can be gamed, especially when the organization of society sets up a managerial class with institutional power that cannot be questioned. We have something like democracy now, yet every year the options we have on the ballot are selected for us, none of them good, and we have no choice but to accept the system for what it is. It isn't just that the American system is rigged or corrupted and that some form of pure democracy will save us, it's the inherent problem of democracies in general that they ultimately are constrained by the reality they have to accept, and part of that reality in the modern world is that institutions and mass thought control are very real (and that's what Bernays captured so well in his book On Propaganda, that control over the mind and public thought is of the utmost importance in a democratic society and can render even an actual democracy a dead letter).
You all show this every time this matter comes up, because you're autistically taking the LTV to mean something it was never intended to mean. It's an explanation of where exchange value arises given the assumptions of a market economy and free trade, not a guiding principle we should use to model a planned economy. Markets and exchange value are a terrible way to handle scarcity, because they are inevitably gamed in a way where one actor realizes the power of hoarding resources and controlling their flow. Unless you're going to argue that agents in a system are unaware of the system and don't have any ambitions of control or power, this is how capitalism, and any other system, has worked throughout history. If the lower classes are to be cajoled like this, then it tells us that workers' democracy probably isn't going to be long for this world, or the lower classes will need to band together and view their managers and the educated as an enemy (because they are an enemy, that much is obvious even now if you've been paying any sort of attention to what educated people say about us).
Isaiah Price
You repeat yourself and that claim was already addressed in (using sortition).
Again you repeat yourself and that claim was already addressed as well, in post (standards of productivity and remuneration should be decided on only by people who are willing to be drafted to work with requirements and remuneration according to their own recommended specification).
You repeat yourself once more and once again, the claim was already addressed (scarcity and labor time are concepts that go together).
Two points here: 1. Sortition. 2. You repeat yourself, like, a lot.
Asher Gutierrez
This does not really address the point made in the book. This is an entirely other hypothetical
Juan Mitchell
RIDDLE ME THIS FAGGOTS:
HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU SAY LABOR DEFINES VALUE WHEN ROBOTS ARE GOING TO BE REPLACING MONKEY LABOR?!?!?!?!
HAHAHAHAHA
YOU ARE GOING TO BE BUYING 100k BITCOIN SOON AND YOU WILL FUCKING BE GRATEFUL YOU LITTLE BITCH NIGGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HAHAHAHHAHHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA EVERYTHING WILL BE VALUED IN 100K BITCOIN AND YOU WILL PAY THAT MUCH BECAUSE IT WILL BE THE BEST OPTION FOR YOUR PATHETIC FAGGOT LIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LABOR CANT DEFINE VALUE BECAUSE ROBOTS WILL WORK FOR FREE BIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTCHHHHHHHHHH
GET WREKT
Robert Wilson
R u ok retard?
Sincere question, no joke
Jayden Flores
TYPICAL LIBTARD RESPONSE.. PERSONAL ATTACKS INSTEAD OF REFUTING THE ARGUMENT BECAUSE YOU HAVE NONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHHAA I CANT WAIT TILL YOU SOY BOYS COME CRAWLING TO THE BITCOIN ATM WHERE YOU WILL SHELL OUT 100 BUCKS FOR 0.000000001 BTC HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH AND YOU WILL BE GRATEFUL BECAUSE KEYNESIANS DESTROYED YOUR NATIONAL FIAT CURRENCY HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
IF ANYTHING ROBOTS WILL BECOME CURRENCY SOME DAY FAGET HAHAHAHAHHAHAA
Isaiah Flores
If robots are currency, what is it we're buying?
Samuel White
drugs and more robots
Ryder Green
Why wouldn't you just get the robot to make the drugs?
Blake Williams
SOMEONE ELSE OWNS THE DRUG BOTS
Jaxson Cox
Something about this economic system makes me think that it isn't indefinitely sustainable, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
Ethan Walker
No, you repeat yourself, and keep insisting your system will work against all evidence despite the numerous obvious problems with such a system. I'm repeating myself because you can't get a simple idea through your head, that all you've done is performed a trick to move the problems of capitalism from markets to planning agencies. It will stop working the moment all the actors in the system realize how easy it is to game it and turn it into a giant shitfest, and the labor values on paper do not reflect anything like genuine value that would be useful for such a computation scheme. As with any computer algorithm, garbage in means garbage out.
But please, go on, you're making it so easy to BTFO socialism. That you're speaking outright of a labor draft already tells you that there's going to be a class above the laborers that is deciding things already, which seems to be the kind of society you have wanted to build from the outset. There is no reconciliation possible with you.
Zachary Walker
Standards for working conditions and remuneration will be set ONLY by people willing to submit themselves to that. How can you say that it's merely moving the problem? That's like saying saying sex between consenting adults is a mere trick moving around the problem of being raped.
Picture this: You and me are in a group and we have a bunch of tasks to do that every idiot of us can do and we have a sack of Space-Shekels (you see this is in the future) for remuneration. Everybody writes down how the budget should be partitioned for the remuneration of this or that task. Then each individual gets assigned to a task for a remuneration that is no smaller amount than the individual's own statement regarding that task. How much room for gaming the system you have here? Note that the guarantee of the assignment process is about the individual, so no matter what others state it's true for you that you don't get lower remuneration than your own specification.
All sorts of social animals like certain birds and bats have ways of punishing non-cooperative behavior, doesn't mean they have a class society. You can talk shit about how unworthy of respect people are who do a particular task, but once you tell the communist master computer that people doing the task shouldn't get more than X amount for that, you put yourself at risk at being ordered to do just that task for that amount YOU YOURSELF said people doing it should be content with. Solution: Don't say stupid shit you don't mean to the computer.
Caleb Brooks
Hint: Most people will not want to go along with your system just because say it will be totes fair and rational and shit. You will be dealing with people who probably do not want to be there, and certainly not on your terms. You will be dealing with managers who are out for themselves and wanting to game the system so that their friends can get better wages and those who aren't will always get bad reviews no matter what. The problems with Cockshott's proposal are so obvious to anyone who has actually dealt with management and knows how shitty they WILL act, in any system. There are quite obviously better ways to mitigate these problems if I wanted to run a planned economy, probably by circumventing both money and this quasi-money and focusing on the actual resources going in and out of the production process. We have the labor, you pay workers a salary just for the contract of being willing to do X and you fire them if they engage in flagrant misconduct. You don't need some per-hour or per-piece method of renumeration, and you certainly wouldn't use that for planning purposes. The only purpose of this wage-equivalent would be to give an incentive and manage the distribution of non-essential consumer goods, not to plan vital areas of the economy that are more dependent on the environment letting you grow more food than getting people to do the work. You can get people to do the work if you treat them like fucking people instead of trying to cajole them and micromanaging their lives, which you have this perverse fetish to do.
Isaiah Anderson
Narcissism alert. Human-mediated processes will not converge to nanoseconds. Neither will weather-dependent processes.
Robert Brooks
This is a gross mis-characterization of our points
Henry Jackson
>You will be dealing with managers who are out for themselves and wanting to game the system so that their friends can get better wages
The "person" doing the assignment is an algorithm you absolute melt.
Levi Wood
An algorithm written by people which is specifically being tweaked to produce an outcome they desired from the outset. Since you've already proven that you favor a ruling planner class and refuse to back down from that, would I at the bottom of the system, or someone in the middle of that system, not do everything possible to fuck with your algorithm?
Jaxon Walker
One of these posters has brain worms, can you tell which?
Austin Walker
It's you, silly. You have this fetish for some perfectly ordered and rational world, but that is not how people behave. People are often selfish and will not fall in line with some universalist system just because you say so. They're not going to accept sortition and random chance for a decision making body (and of course such a process will always have shenanigans, as it has every time those processes have been used throughout history - one way to control the process would be to simply declare large swaths of the population mental invalids, and force them to disclose that status or face punishment. This would eliminate something between 20-40% of the population as simply being unqualified, or those people would have absolutely no option but following the orders of higher classes if they are selected. The extent of invalidity declarations could even be expanded to theoretically include 90% of the population and there isn't much that could be done about it, institutionally, because the principle is believed and acted upon continuously. This principle is in effect today with things like jury duty, and anyone with any mental invalidity basically has to disclose or face legal punishment if they're caught, for example anyone collecting disability for mental invalidity has to withdraw from nearly all aspects of public life today and is effectively barred from meaningful employment without jumping through hoops, and the private sector and the labor force in general collude to blacklist such invalids so that they have no option but collecting the check. Options to escape that system are basically self-employment, and of course self-employment rules are especially punishing for any welfare recipient, beyond the natural difficulty of finding stable self-employment in the first place.)
I don't know why you're even so committed to a retarded allocation scheme, trying to make everything fair by some scientific principle as if human concepts of a fair wage are at all rational or reasonable. You plan based on the flow of resources that you have at your disposal. The labor is available in abundance, right now we are making work just to keep people busy under a sense that everyone needs to work for a living. You fucking pay people a salary just for existing and agreeing to submit to the socialist planned economy, and then the prices of consumer goods (and thus the value of whatever ad hoc credit scheme you work out for wages) depend on the surplus available and how productive/efficient labor is. This is not complicated. The USSR used prices and planning because it was necessarily integrated into the world capitalist system, because they retained markets and wage labor. Even a primitive socialist system, beyond its most early phases (which would use state capitalism to rebuild the economic base, whilst controlling financial institutions and banning usury) can and should move past wage labor paid by the hour and under the direction of a manager, and turn every single worker into a manager with the equivalent of a salary and benefits beyond just the wage, tied to their employment. The credits used would be completely arbitrary, just make sure that they reflect actual purchasing power. If your system cannot reproduce the barest necessities of life and faces starvation, than any money-based scheme of allocation is going to run into problems anyway, just as times of starvation are not accepted silently by people under capitalism or any other economic system.
Grayson Sullivan
I can see why you would be worried about that happening to you.
They needed that because they didn't have replicators like in Star Trek. Even if the USSR had taken over the whole world, they still would have needed prices and planning.
Evan Phillips
Do you realise that you just attempted to declare the other user mentally invalid.
To counter the strategy of excluding people from democratic processes and decision making via pathologising them. Just make "declaring other people mentally invalid" a mental disease…
Joshua Young
communism is not a mode of production, communism is the end of work full stop
read gilles dauvé
Blake Jones
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