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.
