No.1650474
>messed up the redtext and other things in the OP
shameful display
maybe we should use git or something for the OP
also I think the consensus two threads ago was that Magariño doesn't really fit
No.1650477
>>1650427>Cybernetic Marxistsas opposed to…?
No.1650488
>>1650477as opposed to Marxists that do not talk about planning, that think planning is easy, that think planning is impossible or that ignore the necessity of automation in planning
No.1650495
>>1650488>Marxists that do not talk about planning, that think planning is easy, that think planning is impossible or that ignore the necessity of automation in planningDo they even exist?
No.1650500
>>1650495You can't just call all people you disagree with liberals, anon. Most academic Marxists, even economists, are silent on planning.
No.1650506
>>1650500>You can't just call all people you disagree with liberals, anon.Who are you talking to?
>Most academic Marxists, even economists, are silent on planning.Perhaps because it is hard to predict what the world will look like or what will be available to us in the future?
No.1650509
>>1650495name some Marxists that talk about planning besides those in the OP
counterexamples: Žižek, Harvey, Wolff, Chibber, the leadership of practically every extant ML party in power besides maybe the DPRK
No.1650516
>>1650506It could be any reason. You asked who, and now you are asking why.
No.1650533
>>1650506>hard to predict what will be available to usWhat's available now is a pretty good bet.
No.1650658
I feel like the momentum of cybernetics is dying.
There's nothing we can do except jerk off with theoretical shit. How can we actually test this stuff out in real life? I'm exhausted of intellectual bullshit
No.1650700
>>1650658We would first have to determine what class forces are actually at play in the socialist countries as well as the capitalist economies of Bolivia and Venezuela, let alone China, that have been preventing any of these type of reforms. Unless I have missed something, Cockshott's answers to these questions have been less than satisfactory. It's not clear to me why Cybersyn has to lie dead and buried.
No.1650739
>>1650658lol this board is nothing but jerking off with theoretical shit and so is 99% of far left politics.
No.1650768
>>1650658Like "cybercommunism" has been anything but lifestylism/roleplaying.
No.1650881
>>1650768by that logic all communism is lifestylism anyway, the only non lifestylists are dengists and even 99.9% of those are western suburban whitebois who are glorified cheerleaders. This is an internet website not a party
No.1651462
>>1650658there are a couple of things that are necessary to make progress:
1) software
2) a non-trivial amount of people to use the software
we can't really write software if we have no users. as noble of a project as ogasdemo.ru is, it has serious problems that stem precisely from not having any users, from not being operationalized
theory is being produced by some that has no bearing on reality whatsoever. like good scientists we should test our theories with experiments
No.1651489
I kind of suspect the dooming and dismissal of cybernetics in left-wing politics is largely down to most IT professionals that are politically active are almost all libertarians and if you look online where they hang out, they're all rolling their eyes at each other and IT users in general, cybernetic co-operation with others is the last thing they want to achieve.
No.1651541
>>1651489users are the lowest of the low though. they're like clients except they don't pay
No.1651545
>>1651540>Did slavery start capitalismyes it's called the british empire and imperialism gg no need to watch a youtube video for such basic common sense
No.1651551
>>1651545porky doesn't invest in machinery when there are cheap slaves to be had
No.1652049
>>1650658Then why are Amazon and Walmart already doing it, and very efficiently at that? They handle entire supply chains and logistics better than the market ever could. The only difference is what they produce is chosen on a profit basis .
No.1652059
>>1650474formatting in the OP is fuk'd + it's missing this thread
https://archive.ph/xBFYY from the archive links
No.1652067
>>1652049OK but I'm asking how *us* (socialists, communists) can test this out in a practical manner. I don't care about Amazon, Walmart and all those shitty multinational corporations.
No.1652141
>>1652059maybe you can make the next thread and do it right. probably in a few weeks
No.1652150
>>1652141>>1652059and while you're at it take out victor since he doesn't really fit in
No.1652242
>>1652233>>1652206OP doesnt look that bad the only thing missing is redtext. you blowing it out of proportion
No.1652303
>>1651462>>1650658I mean, the problem is you need some scale for the cybernetic planning to be useful at all, the best places to try out these things would be cuba, dprk or even some new revolutionary state like burkina faso in some specific domains at first (like healthcare), but I dont feel like going over there telling them they need to listen to this random westoid and use his IT project to manage their country. Translating and popularizing the ideas to local communists is already hard enough.
No.1652483
>>1651551colonialism and chattel slavery accelerated primitive accumulation, just like feudalism and serfdom did. the weird preoccupation with ignoring this reeks of reactionary idpol.
No.1652502
>>1650658Thats because cybernetics alone doesn't do anything. Cockshott started TANS before the fall of the USSR and it was supposed to be a suggestion/instruction for a communist state. You have to have state power and control of the means of production so you can mandate production and implementation of the necessary technology, which is why these subjects don't deal with the part about actually organizing revolution and seizing the means because that part of the theory was already written and carried out by others. Cybernetics for a pre-revolutionary party is like a novelty fact for a debate argument about the possibility of planning, but you don't convince people, especially capitalist detractors of the viability of communism by showing them math equations. Getting people to adopt linux isn't going to bring about communism, but once you have state control you can simply pass laws requiring everything to be open source.
No.1652821
>>1652483>colonialism and chattel slavery accelerated primitive accumulationprimitive accumulation doesn't make industrial capitalism happen. in fact it can prevent it, such as in the antebellum American south. at least two things are necessary:
1) a technological basis
2) sufficiently high value labour power
if the technology isn't there or if the labour power is of too low value then industrial capital doesn't develop
No.1652837
Cybercom? More like cybercum!
But on a serious note, are children going to be planned also? Only x number of kids per year, you have to get a license, abortion once the limit is reached.
How far will planning go? Will each worker have productivity goals to reach? Will I be allowed to eat apples on Wednesdays, or will fruit distribution be optimised as well?
"Planned economy" is all fine and dandy, but what does it actually entail?
No.1652839
>>1652837sex will be outlawed, you will perform mandatory sperm donation to the reproduction centres each sunday
No.1652861
>>1652837you will be assigned a gf and required to inseminate her twice daily
No.1652926
>>1652849>cybernetic planners: IF I NEED YOUR BODY I'LL FUCKIN TAKE ITPlanning only works with total control, no?
No.1652934
>>1652059And all the nitter.pussthecat.org links are dead. Let's use nitter.net next time.
>>1652926When you program anything more complicated than the tiniest things and you don't want to lose track, you have to arrange the processes into compartments that have very simple communication interfaces between them. Each compartment is a
black box with an interface on the outside when seen from the point of view of other compartments. Only the interface on the outside is what can be interacted with by the other compartments.
The same idea is found in the writings of Stafford Beer about managing groups of people.
No.1652936
>>1652926yes fellow comrade. this is why the USSR was a redfash tankie dictatorship where Stalin decided everything in the economy
No.1652958
>>1652936You will shit on a cybernetically planned schedule, and you will like it.
No.1652969
>>1652958give us the shit
No.1653280
>>1653069anon probably read the paper by that christcuck Austroid which purports that the purpose of planning is to plan end user consumption. the one that claims planning has sextic complexity
No.1657444
>>1657441Why not just make more of the item until everyone that wants one has one?
No.1657799
>>1657441you are deeply entrenched in the monetary mindset, begone, this is a labour voucher thread
No.1658028
>>1657441well first by realizing that the supply/demand curve is unscientific nonsense that exists literally only as a propaganda piece.
No.1658165
>>1657441Anon, even somebody who is completely committed to the neoclassical econ101 mindset would tell you that you are talking gibberish. The demand curve is supposed to display the willingness to buy what amount at what price. It is not supposed to be generated from supply conditions for the product. Most introductory books to mainstream economics have a section about price ceilings and the like and criticizing that using a supply and demand diagram. But it doesn't look anything like what you posted.
No.1658355
>>1658023
>If people believe for good reason that they are under attack and the society is alien to them, and the contempt of cybernetics for the subject is made amply apparent in this autistic thread, they're going to pay a premium to avoid that. That's the majority of our cost of living today
The lion's share of the cost of living in the world today is the cost of avoiding the autists who are posting in this thread?
>anything informative of the world is not merely devauled but attacked
They are rounding up the math teachers for the extermination camps…
>>1658049
>Already, the older model - which only stocked certain kids of goods in quantity - was displaced by "just-in-time" supply chains a long time ago, which itself has been displaced by things Amazon is doing now
Amazon is doing just-in-time.
>It's so simple a child can see it, but woe to the child who thinks it works like that for this Satanic race, and particularly a German who is more Satanic than the norm for humans.
What.
>faggotry
>jannies
>crimethink
>eugenic
OK very interesting. Have a nice day.
No.1658533
Instead of arguing for cybercom, its proponents in this thread have reeeeeeee'd and screech'd at anyone asking questions about cybercom. Cybercom is a nerd's fantasy, answering the question
>what if our leaders were code monkeys?
nobody asked.
Humans have been completely alienated from themselves and now you want to alienate them even further, categorising workers as part of a "black box".
>input goes in, output comes out
>what happens between is not my concern
Humans have been relinquished of agency by liberal capitalism. Now you want algorithms and AI to "optimise" us. Fuck that. You want us to run before we have learned to walk.
Power to the people (not computers) !
Computers are for typing, printing, making shit, hosting websites like this, playing video games, entertainment, creativity when put into the hands of a human. Let's be real, we're not going to let computers run society lol. I mean, think about it, it's a ridiculous premise. Want to ruin a country? Turn off their power.
>oh shit, we got a hit by a virus and all of our data is destroyed, looks like we're all going to starve
As your planning gets more sophisticated, and technology improves, so will the needs of the computer/s running the economy and transportation and society. The server room will become a server building, then a server city, then a server country, running the planet. Humans will be nothing more than slaves to the computer, now the size of Europe. Every minute of a person's day will be planned as they mainly work for the maintenance and substinence of their silicone master, working for a protein cube and carbohydrate sphere the computer shits out at times calculated to the nanosecond. All the fields will lie fallow, and every inch of the Earth will have been drilled for oil.
And the programmers who started it all? They'll be long gone. The AI will take anyone with an aptitude for logic, reasoning and verbal skills, and in a skillful and timely manner remove their heads and hook up the veins and arteries to blood and nutrients to keep them alive. It will interface with the human brains and use their neural abilities for its own programming. The AI calculated that is the most efficient way, after all.
You might think these heads will be hanging in the air in a green-lit room looking at each other, terrified? No, life isn't a movie, all of that is a waste of space and electricity the AI needs. The "programmer" heads will be thrown in a pit together, wire-veins and all, like the wires under your desk but with a bunch of heads in there also. In the dark. Shouting, screaming, crying. Until they die, on schedule.
No.1658544
>>1658533>we're not going to let computers run societyThey already do run society by your standards. They are used in markets. They are jus big calculators. Your same arguments could be used to criticise writing, books, the abacus, clocks,…
No.1658571
>>1658533>Power to the people (not computers) !once again a retard comes waltzing into this thread thinking machines create value or that machines can decide things. they cannot. it's like every "AI" thread on this Marxforsaken website. when a machine "decides" something is it just a human making that decision by proxy. from a simple thermostat to high frequency trading programs, they are ultimately relations between people
thinking we can dispense with planning, with calculation in kind, is akin to anarchists who cannot explain how they will run a sewer system, the railway, steel mills etc. sometimes critics of computerized planning suggest holding meetings to decide things instead, in which case they've just reinvented Gosplan (poorly). Parecon is the prime example of this mindset
you WILL be taken care of by loving machines and you WILL like it
No.1658622
>>1658533>he thinks "AI" = general artificial intelligencebrainlet detected
No.1658742
>>1658023
>>1658049
begone retard
No.1660892
>>1650658>>1651462What would be a
minimal viable product for non-capitalist social media?
I'm thinking: No video, no audio, no pics (this saves a ton of pain with bandwidth, copyright claims, filtering illegal and/or perverse content). I'm thinking simple design. Barely even text. Just enough to figure out you might have something in common with somebody else and then you two can take conversation somewhere else, to email or whatever (saves us cost; remember we don't try to make money with the interaction data, so we don't have the typical incentive to vacuum up everything).
I can see the landing page in my head as if it were reality already: a nice banner with two young women of different skin tones, both wearing hijab, one is showing the other a little notebook, the other one peeks into it with interest. You just feel they are super-friends, and the whole picture has a really cozy atmosphere to it; and there is the name of the site in a very flowery girly typeface:
My Gulag List.All that happens on the site is that you as a member make a list of names of people who should be in the gulag in your opinion, and then it checks for overlap with gulag lists by other members to look for a match. Exotic common mentions count for more, recent activity is a big boost, we add some score fuzzing… and that's about it (nothing asked about your age, country, gender).
No.1660957
>>1660892>What would be a minimal viable product for non-capitalist social media?IRC
>My Gulag Listlol
No.1660989
>>1660892pictures, video, and audio are not a big ask if they fall off and are deleted, which is why chans were so popular since they dont just continuously expand filespace
No.1675752
https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=DyYT-Orc-BcLittle "art exhibition" (some borderline shitposty stuff in there) about cybernetic socialism.
No.1680250
New post on cibcom's site:
https://cibcom.org/un-dia-en-la-agencia-de-planificacion/Firefox translation below with some manual fixes of obvious translation errors:
—
What would a day be like at the planning agency of a socialist economy? How would we handle the accounting? What would be its basic mechanisms and the democratic institutional design that would accompany them?
Welcome and welcome to the central planning office, the body responsible for organizing the production of a socialist economy. In the absence of a market determining the costs of consumer goods, we must use mathematics, IT and telecommunications to allocate a value or cost to each product. In opposition to the market, chaotic and coordinated through competition, the decisions of a planned economy are conscious, democratically taken by workers through different bodies, such as councils, consumer organisations or referendums.
One of these bodies is the central planning office, which we will have the opportunity to travel to get an idea of the technical tools and coordination between the different agencies that make possible a planned economy. In opposition to predatory capitalism, we find here a symbiosis in which knowledge and information are shared to advance society towards better management of natural resources, working time and a higher quality of life.
>The economic plansOne of the key tasks of the planning office is to develop economic plans for future years, which can be divided into three broad categories: strategic plans, macroeconomic plans and detailed plans (Cockshott & Cottrell, 1993). The more general strategic plans are proposed to workers by referendum and implemented according to their preferences. This includes, for example, the amount of taxes for public services, the proportion of consumer goods and production to be manufactured, investment in infrastructure, environmental effects, etc.
On the basis of these strategic plans, the planning office develops macroeconomic plans - which will detail the balance sheet between production and consumption, savings and credit, taxes and public expenditure, etc. and detailed plans, where the units of the different products to be manufactured are estimated on the basis of the preferences of the workers and the ecological and resource limits of the planet themselves. These plans are not bureaucratic, imposed from above; on the contrary, citizens participate in their elaboration through different bodies, such as consumer groups, specialized councils or research institutes.
For example: if according to the strategic plan we want to increase the use of public transport by 10%, the detailed plan will have to answer what it means by specifying how many buses, trains and trams of each model would need to produce, how many wheels and engines are needed and, for those engines, how many screws, nuts and cylinders… and so on. In the meantime, the macroeconomic plan will be responsible for ensuring the budget necessary to make the objective feasible.
>Leontief MethodIn addition to developing general plans, the planning office can solve different problems at the request of workers, councils, etc., while it is one more agency to the service (and not above) workers. At about 9 a.m. we get the first commission of the day, from one of the centers of technological innovation: Farmers in the agricultural cooperative union require planning cereal production for the coming year. After several tests with different industrial processes, the researchers of the technology innovation center propose two new very efficient processes to take advantage of the grain: one to produce flour and one for beer. The technical aspects of these processes are precisely detailed below.
We continue to read and the first key information we find is the technical coefficients for each industrial process [1]. These coefficients indicate the amount of each material we need to produce a final product unit, and are collected in an input-product table. There we can read, vertically, the input units we need for each final product unit. In our case we have three inputs - cereal, electricity and water - and three products (cereal, beer and flour). To produce cereals we need seeds, water and electricity for agricultural machinery; to produce beer we need water, cereal and electricity to roast the malt and cook the must and finally produce flour demands cereal and electricity (to clean and grind the grain).
Picture 1: Insum-product table for cereal, beer and flour production, and associated graph.
When we want to plan a real economy we have to pick up all available products and industries in these tables. These data were collected in the Wassily Leontief office last century [2], collected in posters several meters wide and long. Today we can store these tables of billions of products on a small computer. In fact, it is common for governments to publish these types of tables (although at aggregate level) and can be used to visualize the relationships between the different sectors of the economy with a graph.
This is where the method developed by Leóntief [3] enters the scene that, given a few amounts of final product that we want to draw according to the estimate by the plan, allows us to calculate through the input-product table the total amount of initial goods we need. The fact that raw materials are interrelated - even with themselves - forces us to solve a system of linear equations to find these inputs [4]. The development of this method gave Leontief the Prize in Economic Sciences in honor of Alfred Nobel in 1973.
Once we know the units of each product we must make, we can use the average time it takes to produce this and each of its components to calculate the total time it takes the workers to produce a unit of this final product. Therefore, this working time embodied in each product includes both the indirect time necessary to manufacture the machinery, electricity, raw materials, etc., and the direct time taken to manufacture the item properly. This time is known as integrated labour costs and will be a central amount in the socialist economic calculation.
>Adjustment algorithmThere are several proposals to value products available in stores for workers, although for simplicity we will focus on the proposed working hours exposed at Cockshott & Cottrell, 1993 and overlooked by Marx [5]. In general, the costs of the products will be determined by these integrated labour costs, i.e. the working hours required to produce that product. In order to achieve a balance between production and consumption, each worker will receive as compensation the hours he or she has worked (public services are discounted from compensation via taxes).
Image: Renactment mechanism for adjusting the prices of consumer goods.
However, these labour costs would be only a first approximation to the price. You can never predict exactly how many watermelon units will be eaten in the following summer, as it depends on individual decisions and external factors impossible to control. That's why we need an inventory control system that goes back to planners about what workers are consuming and what are not? This information will be used both in future plans and to correct product prices. For example, if only 80% of the stock of watermelons has been sold, the price can be lowered for consumption before it is wasted. Similarly, if we have a product with high demand, you can modify the future plan to produce a greater amount.
>OptimizationWe're still in our planning office. It's 12 noon, and another assignment arrives. In the last plebiscite it was decided that it should be planned how the lands of the countryside of Murcia are used to cultivate its two star products: lemons and grapes to make the wine of Jumilla. It is the responsibility of the office to design a production plan as agreed. We have the fertile valleys of the Segura vega, which produce a yield of 25 tons of lemons per hectare or 18 tons of grapes per hectare, and the most mountainous grounds of the Altiplano de Jumilla, whose yield is 11 tons of lemons and 35 tons of grapes per hectare.
To grow lemon trees we need one worker per hectare and one tractor for every 200 hectares of cultivated land, while to grow vineyards one worker and one tractor for every 20 hectares are needed. Lemons and grapes have to be produced in more or less similar proportions and 1050 tractors and 10500 workers are available.What would be the distribution of optimal farmland?
This type of problem is easily modeled through linear programming. Resolving with the SciPy package [8], in 0.006 seconds it is possible to conclude that 9500 hectares of the Segura vega field should be used to grow lemons and 5 to grow vineyards, while all the jumilla fields should be used to grow vineyards. This was an obvious result with the naked eye, right? Well, it is one of the advantages of planning: once these free information flows exist and the secrets of production are not hidden, you do not need the
thymos [9] of an entrepreneur so that a project can be done, but consciously and democratically the optimal solutions to the problems facing our society [10] can be chosen.
Although tools like these help us organize production, it cannot always come up with the right solution in all aspects. In a socialist democracy, the main problems should be resolved by referendum after a long and open debate. For example, if you propose a hydroelectric plan that floods a valley that is both a place of beauty and a unique habitat, it makes no sense to look for an economic formula that decides whether the project should go ahead. The problem is political, not economic. It is a decision that requires deliberate prioritization and cannot be reduced to a comparison of simple numbers (Cockshott & Cottrell, 1993).
>Conclusions and prospects for the futureWe hope you're enjoying this short tour. As we have seen, socialist planning is not only carried out from the technical side, making use of the Leóntief method and optimization, but also institutional, thanks to the different democratic bodies through which workers can organize the production and distribution of the goods they want to produce. Economic plans are therefore not an
undemocratic system, managed by artificial intelligence beyond the consciousness of human beings, but a tool to carry out the conscious and democratic planning of the economy. We are not gears in the plan and we are not pawns in the machinations of industrial complexes, but the entire working class is designer, director and executor of the plan.
Still, the cyber-socialist program remains far from complete and economic planning is an area of growing research. In the field of input-product analysis, Cockshott, Härdin and Zachariah are refining the original model proposed by Leóntief more than 70 years ago. They have introduced, for example, the
supply-use tables. In the field of linear programming, conceived in the mid-Soviet era, a series of unmarried and technological advances have been made that allow the optimization of the economy of an entire country, for example that of Sweden (Hagberg & Zachariah, 2022). In addition, Cockshott, Cottrell and Dapprich are preparing a new book on economic planning in the climate change era, where they make use of the input-product method and linear programming to tackle the ecological problem.
The communists of the 21st century must pay special attention to the development of these ideas to explore the possibilities of socialism with current technological conditions and have a good north of where to turn us. Sooner rather than later, we will have to do the bills if we are to answer the questions of
what we want to produce and
how we want to produce it.
>Notes[1] An example of obtaining these coefficients for a Swedish chemical plant can be found in the article by Tomas Härdin, GoBiGas technical coefficients.
[2] Much of Wassily Leontief's work in the United States was based on the elaboration of these tables, although unfortunately he had to cease his activity between 1947 and 1958 because in the eyes of the administration he performed tasks too similar to the communists (Polenske, 1999).
[3] These techniques, which were developed for money calculation (Leontief, 1936), turn out that they also serve for planning in kind.
[4] The procedure can be seen in detail in (Cibcom, 2022). It should be mentioned that with the Leontief method we cannot include in the calculations different procedures to manufacture the same good; this is solved by changing the input-output tables by supply-use tables and linear programming (Hagberg & Zachariah, 2022).
[5] An alternative would be the opportunity costs proposed by Dapprich.
[6] feedback and control is an essential part of the cybercommunist proposal. For more information we recommend our article on cybernetics and cybercommunism.
[7] As Diego Guerrero mentions, this inventory system is a decentralized form of demand management and planning, and not simply a name for disguising a hidden defense of the market (Guerrero, 2007).
[8] The specific script can be found here.
[9] The thymos is an ancient Greek concept of the Spirit, or soul, (Prado Cave. E, 2019).
[10] The thought that firms like Amazon currently function by obeying the intuitions of a certain bald gentleman who went to space for pleasure, is, at little, naive. These capital giants already use tools like these to plan their production, logistics and transport (Phillips & Rozworski, 2019).
Bibliography
Cibcom (2022). Mathematics to plan an economy.
Cockshott, P. & Cottrell, A. (1993). Towards a new socialism.
Guerrero, D. (2007). Values, prices and markets in post-capitalism.
Hagberg L. & Zachariah D. (2022). Receding Horizon Planning -in Introduction.
Leontief, W. (1936). Quantitative Input and Output Relations in the Economic Systems of the United States. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 18, 105-125.
Phillips, L. & Rozworski, M. (2019). The People's Republic of Walmart.
Polenske, K. A. (1999). Wassily W. Leontief, 1905-99. Economic Systems Research, 11:4, 341-348.
Prado Cave, E. (2019). The myth of equality: the failure of cyber-communist utopias. The Catoblepas, 188, 10.
No.1680317
>>1680250spontaneous thoughts: this focus on a supposed central planning office risks feeding liberal opposition that planning is supposedly "technocratic". of the authors listed, only C&C propose that there be some kind of central planning office
>Leontief Methoduseless for planning, as Stalin rightfully pointed out
No.1680822
>>1680317>C&CCock and Cock?
No.1683794
>>1658571>you WILL be taken care of by loving machines and you WILL like itFUCK YOU I WONT DO WHAT YOU TELL ME
FUCK YOU I WONT DO WHAT YOU TELL ME
FUCK YOU I WONT DO WHAT YOU TELL ME
FUCK YOU I WONT DO WHAT YOU TELL ME
No.1684269
>>1683230cockshott is a multipolarista?
No.1684328
>>1684269it seems more like looking outside the window and concluding "yep it's raining". see bloodgasm's multipolarism pasta
No.1684333
>>1684154I don't want to go in the mandatory pampering pod
No.1684344
>>1684333what if I told you here is bepis inside?
>>1684334Socialism! Not Multipolarism.
bloodgasm
Multipolarity is not something one should be for or against, because it really isn't something you can attach yourself to like some camp or some ideology.
Multipolarity, as an existent term, is just a signifier of the current global economic conditions of the world in regards to the current dominant powers that own and transfer capital whether within their borders or without. What it means as a definition is just that instead of a singular global hegemon influencing global affairs or a dual power struggle between two superpowers, it is a condition in which the world is divided amongst multiple powers influencing global affairs/capital/the market.
To be for or against it is the equivalent of going out in the street and declaring yourself as being pro-summer or anti-winterists. Its silly. Its just like the changing of seasons and people have to adapt to it. When its freezing outside, you change into something warmer. But even the hardiest winter clothing is not going to keep one warm against the coldest winter, and we are heading into a long hellish winter. A capitalist winter twilight.
One thing many who espouse the concept of multipolarism (attaching oneself to multipolarity as if it is an ideology) tend to forget (or just outright refuse to acknowledge) that this new multipolar world we are heading towards is a capitalist-centric multipolarity. History has shown that last time this world had gone through a capitalist-led multipolar age, it had unleashed two world wars and countless dead. This not to say that having a unipolar or bipolar world is any better. During the Cold War the champion of capitalist hegemony, the United States, through proxy wars as well as actual wars, coups, and assassinations/subterfuge helped/directly committed atrocities and war-crimes that make WWII pale in comparison. During the unipolar reign of neoliberalism after the USSR fell, the atrocities did not stop, it only continued. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the list goes on and continues to this day. All to reinforce capitalism and sustain imperialist expanse.
This is why one cannot attach themselves to a concept of multipolarity, or unipolarity, or bipolarity. The problem is not how many powers there are in the world. The problem is the global economic system that those powers exist under. Capitalism. Capitalism breeds competition. Nations or precisely the national bourgeoise of that nation compete for capital. They do not grow together in peace under capitalism as many proponents of multipolarism tend to espouse as a benefit of multipolarity. They head towards conflict, because capitalism breeds conflict. There is no multipolar peace under capitalism, only the prelude to war and destruction as nations compete for power.
Multipolarism does not care for the working class of those nations. It is just a changing of task masters. Nothing more, nothing less. Any boon for the workers borne from breaking away from the global hegemon is the equivalent of a heavy boot slightly being let off their collective necks. The fact is that they are still under the boot of their national oppressors. It is up to them and we as socialists to use that slight aside to break free from under the weight of that boot.
Many Multipolarists love to reference the how many of these budding capitalist nations have seemingly good standings with the few socialist nations of this world most predominantly Cuba and the DPRK as if that is a justification that multipolarity is a net positive. They tend to forget completely the this does not wash away the fact these countries are still capitalist and oppress their own working class. If anything this does not justify multipolarity at all, it only reinforces that we still currently exist under a unipolar hegemony front-manned by the United States. This is because most of these countries are aligned due to the economic pressure (sanctions and blockades) put forth by the United States as well as the EU NATO-bloc (which is by in large an extension of American power). When that pressure eventually fades only time will tell if that alignment of those interests between worker-led nations and the nations run by power-hungry capitalists continue or (as history has shown us many times) inevitably clash.
And what of the old lion in the room? The United States. It is a waning power there is no doubt of it. Mulitpolarists love to frame their idealist multipolar world as one in which the United States is practically a nonentity. That there will be new orders that rise in its stead. That same United States that has military bases all across the globe will somehow just cease to be a relevant thing. Or if anything it will turn a new leaf and just accept the changing of seasons. Iridescent foolishness. Capitalism breeds conflict and the United States has sustained itself off conflict, colonialism, and imperialism from its inception. The capitalists who run that country will be anything but docile when their grip on global power is threatened.
We see it today with the arming of Ukraine and the powder keg that is Taiwan. Global war is brewing, a prelude to the birth of a new multipolar world. If we even survive to see it.
And all for what I ask you? Another capitalist-led world built on the ruins of the last? This is not even capitalist realism at this point. It is just capitalist reincarnation. A continual recycling of the capitalist system reinventing itself at the expense of everything; our entire existence put to flame just to try and keep the old ways alive. That is the multipolar world we are heading towards. But it doesn't have to be that way.
The global workers movement has been gutted and kept down for decades especially in the west. This has led many to adopt a form a campism to cope with lack of a united global movement. Anti-americanism, eastern/western dichotomy, and multipolarism are offshoots of this void. It allows one to feel that are apart of something bigger than themselves that, in their minds, can lead to something different. A capitalist multipolar world will not change or fix the problems that affect this world (which are born from capitalism) only the amount of hands that hold power in it (hands which are almost all attached to the arms of each respective nation's capitalist class).
This does not mean there is no global proletariat or that workers movements have gone extinct. Capitalism proletarianizes the populace. Workers currently toil in hellish conditions all around the globe and they are aware of their position. They know they are mistreated. They are striking and protesting for better conditions all around the global south. Workers are fighting against their oppressors. There is class consciousness among the working class. We must push towards socialism. Not some distant idealist dream of a multipolar world which only continues the corrupt system of the past. We should not want a multipolar world in the yolk of capitalism. We must demand and bring forth a socialist world run by the workers not the national capitalist class of warring nations.
Global polarity feels like the changing of seasons and it seems we are heading towards a deadly winter. The best winter clothing may not protect one, but if we all get together for warmth, we'll persevere. And, if there is enough organization, maybe, just maybe, we'll realize that we are actually not in some freezing wasteland and at the mercy of the elements. We are actually Inside a constructed economic bubble (or cave if you prefer Plato) and the capitalists set the AC on way too fucking high and its about time we set the temperature ourselves or better yet just pop the bubble (or leave the cave).
No.1684471
>>1684344>actually reposting that shitty rantembarrassing
No.1684818
>>1684328>>1684344The whole point of communist strategizing is that even though the boat will rock and pitch on its own, we can still shift what little weight we have to tip it over faster. This guy should read Marx sometime
>>1684269Vid related is one of the best expressions of the multipolar position I've yet seen
No.1687537
"The men were built like brick shithouses."
Paul Cockshott on 💪💪💪Bulgarians💪💪💪 in the 80s and why the USSR went down:
https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=oWbZ64lJp74 No.1687542
>>1684344>One thing many who espouse the concept of multipolarism (attaching oneself to multipolarity as if it is an ideology) tend to forget (or just outright refuse to acknowledge) that this new multipolar world we are heading towards is a capitalist-centric multipolarity.This is utterly false. We are not headed into capitalist centric multipolarity, but rather into a new stage of socialist revolution that will overthrow monopoly capital. The capitalist system is in a state of crisis and decline, while the emerging socialist system is in a state of innovation and development. The anti-imperialist forces of socialism and national liberation are the antagonistic and contradictory tendencies of the capitalist system.
No.1687553
>>1687542>We are not headed into capitalist centric multipolarity, but rather into a new stage of socialist revolution that will overthrow monopoly capital.Wishful thinking
No.1687696
>>1687553The breakdown of monopoly capital is the breakdown of capital
No.1687703
>>1687696China is exporting socialism
No.1687845
>Cockshott lets it slip that he denies Copenhagen Interpretation
So what does he make of quantum physics? I sure hope he doesn't deny wave function collapse and merely challenges the role of the observer in it.
No.1687919
>>1687542crisis doesn't automatically mean socialism. capitalism has experienced many crises and survived just fine
>>1687845Cockshott follows in Einstein and Schrödinger's footsteps
>So what does he make of quantum physics?Bohmian mechanics
No.1687921
>>1687919A multipolar state is not crisis. A multipolar state is prosperity. Capitalism and monopoly capital = crisis.
No.1687924
>>1687921>A multipolar state is prosperitywhat in tarnation
No.1689308
>>1687845He stans pilot wave theory afaik
No.1689361
>>1687845>Cockshott lets it slip that he denies Copenhagen Interpretationmega based. Copenhagen interpretation is retarded. Bohmian mechanics is where it's at.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ No.1689393
I like to think about how AI would figure into a socialist planned economy. It's fruitful to entertain various almost sci-fi type speculative scenarios as a visualization method, before advancements in AI become so fully subsumed by capitalist premises it becomes extremely difficult to imagine it otherwise. Commercial AI will bound by the profitability utility function it's intended to maximize, so all the smartest tech will be applied to the stupidest stuff, just like how the brain trust at Google squandered its potential trying to maximize advertisement coverage on its platforms.
The question becomes much realer when you contemplate the thesis that AI could internally destabilize capitalism in spite of it being the bastard progeny of capital by undermining the pillar of wage labor on which capitalism rests. No more middle class jobs, no more consumer base with income to spend on products and services, no more capitalism. AI leads to a collapse in the wages of so called knowledge work. The argument here would be that if the hype is true, AI's ascent would dialectically force a change in the mode of production.
How might AI still be used as a tool for reaction ? There's the rub. The owner class isn't going to like having their own power work against them. Yet even on a technical level, the interperability of these models is very low, their behavior is stochastic at best. The whole point of AI is to not have to explicitly program their logic, but that loss of explicit instruction means a loss in control.
Interested in seeing what China does with AI, as they always provide at least some counterpoint to the western paradigm, not to mention the Chinese internet is a corpus of training data that all the western models weren't trained on thanks to the great fire wall.
No.1689424
>>1689393>I like to think about how AI would figure into a socialist planned economydon't
you are also overestimated the kind of jobs that these so-called AI systems can automate
No.1689434
>>1689424Why not?
>these so-called AI systems can automate5 or 10 years could be drastically different. Even now the difference between what AI could do now versus a year ago is drastic.
No.1689444
>>1689434>Even now the difference between what AI could do now versus a year ago is drastic.You're focusing on LLMs and extrapolating it to all AI, lol.
No.1689551
>>1689434>Why not?we're not seeking to replace an opaque system (the market) with another opaque system (AI voodoo)
No.1689944
>>1689434>Why not?another thing is that none of the people who propose "AI" as a solution to planning ever go into any specifics. especially not how environmental constraints are to be respected, say GHG emissions. with linear planning it's easy enough: add a linear emissions constraint
No.1694559
>>1694524the audio is really bad on her end..
No.1695137
Translated from the German thread:
The Impossible Triangle of Progressive Inclusion Targets
Yes we talk about quotas here, hooray! Everyone loves the idea, only the specifics of implementation are controversial. For example, conservatives usually do not like gender quotas, but do like guaranteed regional representation in parliaments. The left likes the quota idea even more, but often expresses itself in a weird way.
To me it seems to be an idea with three corners:
Corner H: massive help for victims of discrimination (jobs, homes!)
Corner S: a lot of emphasis on subjective impression as the measure of need (intensity and frequency of racist experiences instead of birth abroad, felt sex instead of old-fashioned definition)
Corner B: Betrayal (falsification of statements) should be as minimal as possible
Two corners together are feasible.
Method 1: H & S & chaos (this seems to be very popular in certain circles, no idea why).
Method 2: H & B & non-manipulable criteria (my spontaneous reaction is that this is more to my liking).
Method 3: S & B & avoidance of additional discrimination but no compensation for existing discrimination.
Explanation of method 3:
If people assign themselves to specific groups on a questionnaire (without a higher instance which could reject the self-assignment), then slots can be distributed in proportion to the pattern of answers. An example that is a bit silly but easy to understand: Imagine that a few bags of chips are drawn by the most simple lottery among people, every person wins with the same probability… Now we reform the process: People are marking on a questionnaire whether they feel themselves to be rather red or blue, whatever that means, then bags of chips are laid on two heaps in proportion to the "election result" of the red group and blue group. (This rarely works out exactly with integers. So a bag of chips is then divided in proportion of the rounding remains; this is either realized by opening and distributing the content in proportion of the rounding residues or the bag of chips remains unopened and there are lottery tickets in this proportion. But all other bags of chips are unambiguously assigned to the groups.) The bags of chips will then be assigned via two separate lotteries for the two groups. Whether you assign yourself to the red or the blue group does not change your own individual probability of winning. The principle can be easily transferred to comprehensive identity questionnaires, each answer configuration gets assigned resources in proportion to how common it is. It does not matter if some of the question categories are controversial. Because there is no incentive here for selfish identity falsification because there is no more-than-proportional quota. And the option of no answer simply gets assigned a chip quantity corresponding to how often it gets chosen.
It is not entirely true that only two corners of the triangle can be achieved, because methods 2 and 3 can be combined: simple objective criteria for the more-than-proportional help plus non-bureaucratic subjective self-assignment for the merely proportional quota stuff. I call this method 4.
No.1695176
>>1695137what is the point of this? we're not interested in distributing bags of chips, but taking over the entire chips factory
No.1695194
>>1695176People are hostile to sortition because of how chaotic it seems to them. This is partly because they don't do the math (sortition tends to be very representative with big groups). But partially the haters are right (just think about small groups). It looks disingenuous to criticize capitalism for how random and chaotic it is and then promote a socialism of lotteries for filling committees or to allocate important things and opportunities like housing. So naturally, the question arises how to make lotteries less random. For example if some people show interest in a lottery for something and these people are 70 % female and 30 % male and everyone interested gets a lottery ticket, the expected distribution of prizes will be that, but the actual distribution will of course be likely different (and more so if the number of prizes is low).
The first insight here is that it is trivial to measure this distribution among the applicants and then to fix the allocation proportions (and indeed to to this with several dimensions), so actual distribution = average expectation. So this makes the lottery less chaotic and more acceptable to people. The second insight is that since this fixing does not alter your individual winning probability, there are no gains (or losses) from self-reporting to be this or that. So there is no need to worry about fakers submitting wrong stuff for this procedure in order to gain something from it.
No.1695199
>>1695194>This is partly because they don't do the math (sortition tends to be very representative with big groups).yeah, law of big numbers. they way I explain this to people is that if you want representation to be representative then you can't do better than sampling the population
>The first insight here is that it is trivial to measure this distribution among the applicants and then to fix the allocation proportionsnah just make it opt-out
No.1695202
>>1694524>>1694538give me the too long didnt watch
No.1695204
>>1695199>nahWhy not? If you are bothered by a big-ass questionnaire: Not answering works out mathematically as just another option with its pile of seats (or bags of chips or whatever) allocated in proportion to how often it is chosen.
No.1695206
>>1695202he goes over some of the history of writing TANS, especially how it's a response to Nove and how thirdwayoids in Labour used Nove's work to dismantle the UK's public sector
they talk about the difference between the modern conception of democracy and the Greek conception of it
quotes from Marx, Engels and other writes are spliced in
there's more stuff too but I don't remember all of it
No.1695222
Bohmian mechanics sucks and anyone who gives it any credulence is a cringe midwit larper. Only if you don't have a degree of course, otherwise you're my fellow stemlord and we can engage in civil discourse - still waiting on a Bohmian reproduction of QFT tho, shits taking forever
No.1695223
>>1695222what the hell is bohemian mechanics
No.1695225
this is such a fascinating idea to me. I wish it got tried out for real inside Chile and the capitalists hadn't interfered with it. Also, is there any books or readings about OGAS?
No.1695229
>>1660892isn't the fediverse non capitalist social media?
No.1695236
>>1695229yeah and its about as popular as desktop linux
No.1695286
>>1695223In laymans terms it removes the indeterminate nature of quantum mechanics, at least in principle. The random behaviour we now observe is stuffed into our knowledge or lack thereof of the initial conditions of the universe. It's a fine theory on it's own, especially since in the correct limit it reproduces the Born rule, which is an axiom in usual QM. I only shit on it here since people will champion it as le materialist without giving it a second thought or deeper investigation.
>>1695235Well that's more an interpretation of the math taking place if anything. Not a big fan of many worlds either, since it seems completly superfluous whether the universe splits each time a measurement (very ill defined term, and truly the only real problem of QM) happens or not.
No.1695300
>>1695286>Not a big fan of many worlds either, since it seems completly superfluous whether the universe splits each time a measurement (very ill defined term, and truly the only real problem of QM) happens or notdoes it really put measurement on such a pedestal? I know the Coperhagen interpretation does, which is why it's garbage. Bohmian mechanics doesn't require measurements to be special, and I don't think many worlds does either
the core problem with Copenhagen is its subjectivism. this is taken to the extreme with QBism
No.1695310
>>1695225check out the Kossov interviews from the last thread >>1602915
No.1695369
>>1695300The problem with measurement is an universal one you see. In the Copenhagen interpretation the measurement process just appears more relevant, since this is where the Born rule enters. The Coper doesn't know what a measurement really is, he just needs to use the Born rule and be done with it. This approach works remarkably well and on scales from the hydrogen atom to fullerenes getting shot through a grating onto a screen. In this sense a measurement is anything which forces you to use the born rule and this can truly be anything really. The big problem of course is that any measurement happens via a quantum mechanical interaction and any measurement apparatus is a quantum mechanical object itself. In this sense you could actually say that copers (when there are even any left, I've never met one true believer irl) care the least about measurement. The same is true in Bohmian mechanics, where your instruments are formally part of the whole pilot wave system, but every application which predicts anything meaningful will have to abstract this away. For many worlds this simply means, that there are a myriad new universes being created in just a Planck time, which isn't a problem per se but you don't gain anything new. I would go so far as to claim that beside mathematical subleties the measurement problem is the only big one left, but forever out of reach. I follow the shut up and calculate interpretation of QM btw
No.1695442
>>1695369as I understand it, measurement is a non-linear process. a photodiode measures the amplitude of the signal, not the E-field or the B-field, and the absolute function is a non-linear one. but this is perhaps only relevant for shorter wavelengths. can we measure both fields for RF frequency waves?
>In this sense a measurement is anything which forces you to use the born rulethis sounds circular
>copersamazing pun
No.1695574
>>1695442>this sounds circularto me it sounds like an affirmation of dialectics, that you can't have the part without the whole. people dont like to say it out loud because it sounds woo but its basically "were all connected maaan" except even more where you and a random rock are actually part of the same single entity and its only the subjective ego that has developed through evolution that causes you to believe otherwise.
>>1695369>I would go so far as to claim that beside mathematical subleties the measurement problem is the only big one left, but forever out of reach. I follow the shut up and calculate interpretation of QM btwseems contradictory. why would you shut up and calculate if the answer is forever out of reach? to me it kind of highlights that the entire approach from positivist empiricism is unfounded.
No.1695578
yummy!
No.1695637
>>1695574>people dont like to say it out loud because it sounds woo but its basically "were all connected maaan" except even more where you and a random rock are actually part of the same single entity and its only the subjective ego that has developed through evolution that causes you to believe otherwise.oh yeah that's true. I like to point out that experiment and experimenter are intrinsically linked. one affects the other
No.1696046
>>1695574>why would you shut up and calculateThe answer to this is simple. We can use the Born rule almost axiomaticly and obtain largely correct predictions. It's not my fault that nature seems to organize its constituents into structures which can seemingly be arbitrarily approximated by organizing them into a Fock space and calculating scattering probabilities, giving you useful results. My answer would probably look different if my field of research would concern itself with the absolute fundamentals of the field, but my job is to study exotic types of insulators from the theory side so here we are.
No.1696090
>>1696046doesn't the Bell inequality destroy this way of thinking? as in not all interpretations of QM are "equivalent". at least that's how I understand it
No.1696254
>>1696090Only if you aren't ready to give up locality. They did an experiment which rules out swathes of non local theories, but not Pilot wave theory. You might have trouble explaining why the hidden variables at a microscopic level allow for instantaneous communication but then again having a entangled state in basic bitch QM amounts to saying that the Hilbert space factorizes, so e.g. in a two qbit system after a measurement of one spin you know the direction of the other one. The question thus turns into whether or not special and general relativity are (on their respecive scale) correct guidlines for developing a formulation of QM closer to the truth. This is also what tends to muddy the debate of Pilot-Wave vs the wave function collapse crowd. Ordinary QM is not Lorenz invariant anyways and for most of its applications it doesn't need to be, although the failure of ordinary QM can be seen, when observing the hydrogen spectrum a bit more closely - the same goes for the original Pilot wave theory. QFT otoh has locality enshrined and yielded phenomenal results, although not when gravity gets involved (at least in 3+1 dimensions). I would like to write more about it since I've left out many important parts, but as you see this quickly gets out of hand, crossing over to other subfields of physics. I personally don't have any hard feelings on any of these approaches, since I just want to have a model describing my damn insulator and any model where from first principles (whatever they may be) I can plug in quanities which appear very real to me, such temperature, pressure, mass etc and get a reproducible result would be fine by me. It just happens that QFT with its localist dogma works just fine for this problem and relativistic extensions for pilot wave theory aren't that suited for these highly specific models so far.
Tl;dr: the measurement problem and theories of relativity are intrinsically connected and I don't know for sure what to make of it. I just want to calculate ffs
No.1696281
>>1696254>Only if you aren't ready to give up localitywhy should the universe be local? the universes I simulate certainly aren't
No.1696320
>>1696281Idk for my research it's good enough. If doing non local cosmology is your thing then go for it. We got people doing e.g. spacetime with torsion, wormholes and describing solid state systems as black hole geometries in one dimension higher - literally do what you want.
No.1696347
>>1696320what if the universe is just like a collective high, man
No.1696443
>>1696347If so then communism must be about ending this bad trip
No.1705686
I need a snappy name for this: Ages ago we had something about a potential alternative for consumption budgets and it occurred to me that even if this alternative system is not implemented it could be used as an interesting what-if counterfactual for propaganda purposes.
It's not Marxist(TM) because it is the most crude and extreme egalitarianism. The basic idea is that for a given population and a given pile of stuff, we just do the obvious calculation:
number of units of a thing : number of people = number of units per person
Curiously, this sort of calculation is very often done with money (average income), which does not make much sense: A drastic redistribution of income would result in very different consumption patterns and very different prices (at least in the short run). With the right to own a concrete object, the meaning is clear: So many pencils or whatever in the storage rooms in some area divided by the number of people living in that area means we can guarantee each of them a right to own that many pencils blahblahblah.
So why isn't this calculation with objects done more often if it clearly avoids the weirdness of calculating this with money? Look around in a supermarket. For almost all items, the amount is so low relative to the number of people who visit in a day that we have below one unit per person (also true of online retail). Practically, we often can't divide up an item. So we often can't say that hypothetically everybody could have a share of this or that specific stuff. So it seems like a niche idea…
But! The idea can be easily generalized, generalizing both the what and the who. Items can be grouped together into sets of similar items. And sets of sets, and sets of sets of sets, and so on. For these bigger sets you can say that everybody in the population could hypothetically get one unit of it (or even more). Likewise, a person is a part of a group which is part of a group of groups, which is part of a group of groups of groups and so on. So we can often say that it would be hypothetically to give everybody several units from a broad category of things or that it would be possible to give a specific thing to every household with at least three people in it and so on.
Such data can be arranged in a table, the cells in the top row read left to right: number of units of specific item X; number of units in set of similar items X, Y, Z; number of units in bigger set X, Y, Z, A, B; number of units in even bigger set… The cells in the left-most common read top to bottom: You the individual, number of people in your household, number of people in the group of households on the block… The cells inside the table tell you how many units of this more or less specific set could be guaranteed to an individual or to a group with the egalitarian distribution.
Give me a name for this data table. I'd like to have an abbreviation that is easy to pronounce. (If you can't find something fitting in English, another language is fine too.)
No.1706211
>>1703193i really dont think the counter argument proved anything.
No.1706578
>>1703193>An irrational number is a looping Turing machine programme that generates no repeats in its outputI think Paul is mistaking irrational numbers for normal numbers here
>>1706211the point is that Cantor's table can't be constructed. that doesn't prevent us from reasoning about it though, but such reasoning is fraught because the dimensions of the table are infinite. Cantor argues that the table is square, which it isn't. it also isn't rectangular, because these concepts make no sense for something that is infinitely large
No.1706584
PERA table (Possible Egalitarian Resource Allocation), how does that sound? Or DERA table (Doable instead of Possible). Instead of table you could also say matrix, but after the 4th Matrix movie the word sounds cringe to me now.
No.1706603
>>1705686this sounds like a rationing system. which labour vouchers are too tbh. it all falls under the category of remuneration schemes
No.1706611
>>1706603? Remuneration usually means something you get in exchange for providing goods or services (less common meaning: as compensation for damage).
No.1706614
>>1706578The issue is that it's starting from different set of axioms and then proving that things that work under one axiom don't work under a different set.
No.1706640
>>1706618Anon that is just a drawing and if you ask the person who made it what this or that is for you will not get an answer. Solarpunk thinkers are free to discuss with each other all day about feeling spiritual uplift from the visuals of a yogurt commercial that rips of Studio Ghibli, but doing that is no substitute for investigating logistics.
No.1706655
>>1706611yeah exactly
>>1706614sure. but some axioms are subjectivist
>>1706618it's an aesthetic, nothing more
>>1706643socialism is all about logistics
No.1706656
>>1706643Actually I prefer the green aesthetics. Point is, that's all it is. The people making and sharing these pics don't know much about buildings or farming. You can't even say how Cockshott's stuff conflicts with Solarpunk. It's just vibes. (Maybe he should pretend to be gay?) So how is it meaningful to say that Solarpunk is an "applicable solution"? I can share drawings of an
O'Neill cylinder, is it an applicable solution then.
No.1706901
>>1706655>yeah exactlyThe rationing in that system is per head without differentiation according to individual productivity differences, so it's not a remuneration system.
No.1706905
>>1650658Depending on the definition of cybernetics, we’re already practicing cybercom in some levels right now.
No.1706962
>>1706901it's still a remuneration scheme. basic income is a remuneration scheme, so are hourly wages, so are piece wages. on the consumption side you similarly have many ways of spending whatever tokens are handed out, including not demanding any tokens at all (higher-phase communism)
No.1707232
>>1707213Do you agree with the definition though? If you admit that, yes, this is how the word is used, you have to admit that an idea like giving everybody the same amount of income to spend (as what Technocracy Inc proposed with energy credits) is not remuneration.
No.1707585
>>1707232remuneration is the term used so far in the literature for the types of things I mention in
>>1706962 . you don't quote the dictionary like it's normative. if you know a better idea for the broader concept then please share it
we can have many kinds of means of payment that we hand out for many reasons, and we can demand different amounts and types of them in exchange for goods and services
I am aware of what technocrats propose, and it has the problem that it is "to everyone regardless of need". we
could use an energy credit system, or emissions vouchers, in combination with labour vouchers and UBI for example
No.1707814
>>1707585>remuneration is the term used so far in the literature for the types of things I mention in >>1706962 No. Your list exceeds the dictionary meaning. Do you want a link to another dictionary telling you this again.
>if you know a better word for the broader conceptThere is no such word because your concept is so broad as to be useless.
>what technocrats proposewas only brought up to give you an example of what remuneration is not.
No.1707851
>>1707814>Your list exceeds the dictionary meaningfedora still firmly planted I see
No.1708161
>>1706603>>1706962>>1707585>>1707851Can you give a S I N G L E example of where
"in the literature
" the umbrella term remuneration also encompasses allocation to individuals that is neither based on third-party assessment of individually different contribution nor of third-party assessment of individually different needs?
No.1712369
>>1712311Ah yes,
Commonism. Couple years ago I read some texts in German by those guys (Simon Sutterlütti, Christian Siefkes, Stefan Meretz) and they were always hyper vague. Just skimmed chapter six in the pdf you posted and I can't extract any useful information from it.
Except this. They briefly refer to a German booklet by Stefan Heidenreich called
Geld: Für eine non-monetäre Ökonomie:
<Technical means could possibly allow for a general adjustment and prioritising of needs—for example, via an algorithmic decision-making procedure (cf. Heidenreich 2017).The sentences following after that sound rather dismissive of the importance of Heidenreich's proposal. So it's probably good. I will download it from libgen and report back later.
No.1712446
>>1712369>I will download it from libgen and report back later.Outstanding, thank you.
I got too ahead of myself finding this "idea", I initially thought it was
communisation' + dickblast, or communalism' + hardon'…
No.1712465
>>1712369 (me)
Hrmpf it's just hot air and trendy terms (matching, blockchain) by some media studies guy. He neither describes an algorithm nor a criterion for judging algorithms. He believes there will be many distinct allocation systems (I can see handling housing in a distinct way but otherwise eeh) and muses that maybe intelligent things will actively participate in the post-capitalist economy to help humans (vehicles looking for people to serve).
I like that he praises library genesis in the afterword. There he also mentions an inspiring programmer working on an app for a moneyless economy, Alexander Uribe. Sadly that sounds like a super-common name. Anybody here know which one of the Alexanders out there is the one?
No.1713206
>>1712465>media studies guyoof
No.1713255
>>1712311>We say goodbye to traditional Marxism. For a long time, its utopia of a free society was linked to a concrete practice of transformation>queer-feminist free spaces>ecological practices of daily liferead: same carbon footprint nonsense that fossil fuel companies spout
>muh Kronstadt>According to German Wikipedia>In commonism there will be no central institution mediating needs, providing infrastructures, or enabling self-organisationone wonders how they propose to make the system coherent at all. this reeks of the same problem as Parecon, namely that production is to be coordinated by endless meetings
No.1713331
>>1712449I gave this a listen and it takes all of 25 minutes until he finally gets to how he thinks the base is actually supposed to work
>if some people want to make tractors they should have a bunch of meetings with the people who make rubber and steelnot only is this pretty much how Gosplan worked, but we also know this is slow as shit
26:30 wow it's almost like you need an overarching system that keeps track of everything. but that would be le authoritarian centralized stalinist tankie planning which eurocommunists refuse to grapple with
No.1713356
>>1713331I wouldn't call such a person eurocommunist. In my experience that term is used for reformists and not utopian hippies.
No.1713381
>>1713356if it talks like a eurocom, if it whines about authoritarianism like a eurocom.. but you may be right
No.1714800
>>1713331he kinda cute
tho :3
No.1714896
>>1714800go to horny gulag
No.1718766
>>1713255>>In commonism there will be no central institution mediating needs, providing infrastructures, or enabling self-organisation>one wonders how they propose to make the system coherent at all.Do we have here another
impossible triangle of requirements, a database that is
decentralized & coherent & fast? Allowing data to be updated in some parts out of synch with the rest of the system means the whole thing will be incoherent. We will transport potatoes from A to B and from B to A at the same time (just like in capitalism).
>this reeks of the same problem as PareconPareconists have a lot of decentralizing rhetoric, but they do propose to synchronize all processes centrally.
>namely that production is to be coordinated by endless meetingsAh, well somewhat. You only have to communicate change once the system is running. I find pareconists a bit slippery. They talk both about a back and forth of proposals that sometimes sounds very automatic and quantitative and sometimes like an open-ended discussion. Depending on where the criticism comes from they lean into this or that. If you hate meetings they tell you a lot of stuff gets sorted out by computing, if you hate markets they say they decide holistically through conversations.
No.1718921
>>1718766that sounds slippery indeed
>Do we have here another impossible triangle of requirements, a database that is decentralized & coherent & fast?>They talk both about a back and forth of proposals that sometimes sounds very automatic and quantitative and sometimes like an open-ended discussioninsert the simpsons focus group meme
we can live with the global database being somewhat slow. not as slow as bitcoin, but perhaps on the order of minutes. we also don't need a trustless system
there seems to be certain contingent that fetishizes decentralization. but decentralized computer systems are notoriously difficult to engineer. even things like git are centralized in practice - you just have a local copy of the state
No.1719100
>>1713381Cockshott himself is kind of an eurocom ngl
No.1719232
>>1719100TANS was literally written to help prevent liberalizing the USSR
No.1720005
Does anyone have a diagram of the state planning model in TANS?
No.1723200
Podcast Future Histories interview with the group "Planning for Entropy":
https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e03-planning-for-entropy-on-sociometabolic-planning/Found it underwhelming, but maybe it's because it's in English and the interviewer is more comfortable with German and the people interviewed are more comfortable with French. So even if the interview doesn't do anything for you, you might want to check out these people if you can read French.
Around ten minutes in, seems like they strawman both Cockshott & Cottrell and Hahnel & Albert. They say you have to plan things physically for environmental constraints that cannot be broken down into a one-dimensional measure. I am pretty sure the dissed all agree on that. Of course you can put physical units into an input-output matrix. (And it makes sense to do that rather than quantify by money, because if you quantify by money, your input recipes have to be rewritten when input prices change just to represent the same physical ratios as before.)
Around 73 minutes they say that having multiple physical targets in planning does not mean you need to have multiple consumption vouchers. So I don't know if they have any serious disagreements with TANS or Parecon after all.
The show-notes mention economist Hermann Levy, but wrongly link to Wikipedia about the composer Hermann Levi (Levy is only on the German Wikipedia). I can't recall where did they mention any Levy or Levi in the interview?
No.1724418
>>1721789not really
>nowcheck the date. I'm moderately sure cockshott doesn't actually believe the EU, a neoliberal project, can be salvaged in anyway. feel free to email him and ask
>>1723200thanks for the tip, will give a listen tomorrow
No.1725208
>>1723200input-output matrices can't actually be used for disaggregated planning
>Around 73 minutes they say that having multiple physical targets in planning does not mean you need to have multiple consumption vouchers. So I don't know if they have any serious disagreements with TANS or Parecon after all.can we come up with a term for these kinds of non-criticisms? whining?
some annoyances:
The talk about "indicators" seems wishy-washy. Indicators won't prevent people from burning more fossil fuel than they should. You need actual hard constraints in the system to prevent that. You need to systematically deny inputs to processes that are not to be run, and if attempts are made anyway then beatings are to be administered
They talk about planning "for the next year", which is less granular than even the Soviet system. It is not clear if they realize a time horizon and boundary conditions are necessary
They talk about planning
consumption which sounds very Parecon-ish and dumb
They talk derisively about "technocrats", without knowing what actual technocrats want to do. One example of said "technocracy" is using satellite imagery to monitor forests, as opposed to field studies. Apparently some methods of data gathering are technocratic while others aren't. Why? We are not told. In reality forestry people use both methods
No.1725484
>>1724418The EU in 2010 was as much of a neoliberal project as it is today. But yeah, I don't know what he currently believes is the best way of getting socialism into power, he doesn't really ever talk about it
No.1727701
>>1727695Man this sucks. When will he return to socialist videos?
No.1732020
I recently got Pauls arguements for Socialism. Can someone give me a run down on the cybernetic idea? How would it gaurantee true communism and a more stable socialist state compared to the USSR?
No.1732417
>>1732020computerization enables worldwide coordination in kind without resorting to money or any other Lagrange multiplier
feedback can be near-instant
production data can be collected in a logically centralized way, accessible to all
the global production plan can be maintained feasible at all times
local fiddling with the plan can be done, and checked for global consistency
the business cycle would come to an end
No.1732428
>>1732417This is where anglo thinking gets you
No.1732476
>>1732417didn't the USSR try this in the 80's?
No.1732526
>>1732020How it works- Production takes place. All goods / services are valued by their
composite labor time (in labor voucher hours, see below). Factor in depreciation and education into cost. For example, a smartphone might cost 0.5 labor hours. Goods that have neglible marginal cost (~ 0 labor hours) would be free.
- Open, publicly funded research and development is shared by all, with the goal of
decreasing the labor time cost of every good.
- Workers are paid in labor vouchers
per hour work performed. Working 8 hours would earn you 8 LVH (labor voucher hours) (or a bit less to cover social services). Multipliers _may_ be used if certain work is deemed more necessary, or dangerous, but most likely limited by a certain ratio to foster community.
- Goods are sold in public shops.
- Shop managers are instructed to
adjust labor prices so that all goods are sold. While a good selling out is itself an indicator of demand, adjusting by a certain limited ratio gives more demand information, and prevents unwanted goods from going to waste.
- Each good now has a ratio of its _sold labor time_ to actual labor time cost.
- If goods are selling _above_ their actual labor cost (ratio > 1), that means society wants _more_ labor allocated to produce that good. Below that means they want less labor allocated.
- Planners adjust output targets based on this demand.
- Planners do material balances to derive gross output requirements (raw materials + intermediate materials + labor). Input-output tables are solved using linear algebra.
- They compare these requirements with the _actual resources_ available. Some of these might be set by environmental constraints, or limited quantities.
- Population uses direct democracy to vote on how much labor to allocate to non-consumer goods (see below).
- They see if the final output targets can be met, and if not, go back to the adjust output targets step.
- Finally, form a detailed production plan, broadcast it over the internet to all productive facilities, monitor production (and sales) in real-time. Adjust plan accordingly.
Labor vouchers- Earned by workers. 1 LVH = 1 Labor Voucher Hour earned per hour of work (or less to cover social services)
- Attached to a single person / family, likely through a credit card.
- Can only be exchanged for consumer goods. You cannot transfer them to another person. Buying absentee property is illegal.
- Are destroyed after being used in shops.
- Possibly destroyed after a certain amount of time (to prevent hoarding)
- Labor time across the economy is preserved. If there are 8 million workers in a country :
- Lets say 2 million workers are devoted to social services, 6 million to consumer goods.
- Labor ministry issues 6 million person-years vouchers to workers, split among the 8 million workers.
- Labor hours used producing non-consumer goods (2 million person-years) + labor hours used in consumer goods production (6 million person-years) = cost of goods in shops (6 million person-years) + (2 million person-years cancelled for social tax bin)
- Workers spend 6 million in the shops, social income tax of 2 million ( to provide for social services ), and the 8 million labor hours are fully canceled.
- This defetishizes consumer-producer relations, since you can see exactly how human labor is being allocated, and spent.
### Direct democracy for non-consumer goods
- New enterprises, entertainment, research and development, social services are all examples of non-consumer goods.
- Society votes on how much labor to devote to social services: education, health care, child care, environmental protection, national defense. If a country has 6 million adult workers, it might allocate 2 million people to non-consumer goods.
- Major strategic decisions taken democratically by all the interested population. Minor decisions left to planners. Information open to all, voting available to all.
Foreign trade- Uneven development of technology and natural resources means that external trade with capitalist nations will still be necessary and sometimes preferred during the transition to a global socialist economy.
- Imports (or buys) from capitalist countries are paid for with labor credit certificates issued from the foreign trade ministry.
- Capitalist countries (which already have freely circulating money), could then decide their own exchange rates for the labor credits, and circulate them as they would any other currency. The rates would come from the demand for goods our country produces, and isn't a concern for our planners.
- This is the reverse of the USSR's system, which was to pay for imports in held dollars or marks, and restrict the export of its own currency.
- Exports (or sales) to capitalist countries are either an exchange of goods, or labor vouchers they sell back to us.
- Planners decide whether to import a good, or produce it locally, based on the offered price vs domestic cost.
- Sell the good if the labor voucher price offered is higher than the actual labor-time cost, buy the good if its less than the domestic labor-time cost.
- Example:
| Good | Domestic cost | Price offered | Decision |
| —- | ————- | ————— | ——– |
| Oil | 1 million hrs | 1.5 million hrs | export |
| Cars | 2 million hrs | 1.5 million hrs | import |
| []() | []() |
| ————————- | ——————————- |
| Value of exports | 1 million hrs in domestic units |
| Value of imports | 2 million hrs in domestic units |
| Labour-time trade deficit | 1 million hrs in domestic units |
- Since prices and speculation fluctuate wildly in capitalist countries, the planners will have to make import/export decisions based on long-term trends rather than short-term variations.
- Foreign currency is outlawed. Fight black markets by making sure that labor vouchers are not overvalued. Planners track these markets, and ensure that demands for foreign-produced goods are being addressed by either increased local production, or official international trade.
- For visiting tourists, an arrangement could be made with capitalist banks to allow the use of their credit cards, at the moment-in-time exchange rate. Tourists from our country could use their labor credit cards externally, which would effectively sell their labor vouchers to an external bank for that exchange rate of capitalist currency.
- Trade with other socialist nations, would be a 1-to-1 equal labor-time exchange.
No.1732543
>>1732476they did try, right up until 1991. problems include:
* the technology not being there yet
* institution resistance
* relations of production
* liberal wrecking
* the "poker game" between workplace managers, ministerial middlemen and the people at Gosplan, resulting in data having little connection to reality
* the Liberman reforms
* the anti-alcohol campaign
* pressure from outside
arguably the party form itself was a hindrance
>>1732526way too much detail
No.1732564
>>1732526there are many problems with this post some which I will state as false assumptions:
>workers would always be paid per hour worked rather than performance or piece wages>there would be a category of people called "planners">these "planners" would be the ones responsible for foreign trade, rather than say traders (who we might allow to work on commission)>demand would always be taken ex-post and not say anticipated or consciously altered>input-output matrices are suitable for planning>no amount of voucher transfers would be allowed>plebiscites would (or should) always be used to determine investments or tax ratesadditionally I don't think you can issue vouchers in foreign trade, rather than say a currency for just that purpose. would US vouchers only be usable by the US? why would they ever trade with you in that case? you cannot make statements like this detached from material conditions
a sophisticated planning system could automatically identify arbitrage opportunities, whereby the system can exploit porkoid nations. such exploitation should probably be leaned into hard, as the resulting succ would up revolutionary pressure in the affected areas
you also seem to be unaware of how the futures market works
there is little reason to outlaw currency if the system itself is superior to capitalism. which it will be, because we are talking about a higher mode of production
finally, why would we "trade" with other socialist nations? that implies they are not part of the same system, which would be stupid and obstruct specialization in the system as a whole
No.1732566
>>1732564It's just describing the model in Towards a New Socialism. You obviously don't agree with it, not much I can do.
The poster I'm replying to ask specifically about Paul so the "problems" you list are not really problems.
No.1732569
>>1732566consider my post to be aimed at Paul
and Allin then
No.1732570
>>1732543Also Krushchev was told that the total automation of factories could happen within 20 years. Krushchev was then told that it would cost "twice as much as the space program" and he was like nah thanks.
No.1732645
>>1732570right, gotta spend money on a useless military when you have nukes instead
the Kossov interviews indicate that Glushkov's system was built anyway (Kontur), but only as a way to protect the USSR in case of invasion. it remains in place in Russia to this day
No.1733098
>>1732569you should go read them because your questions are mostly misunderstanding / answered / due to the simplification of the short post made by a fellow anon
>workers would always be paid per hour worked rather than performance or piece wagesYou can totally adjust for performance. using hour is mostly used to make the relation more explicit, its the base average, but if everyone recognize you're 20% more productive, nothing stop from giving you 20% more voucher per hour (or some other benefit).
>there would be a category of people called "planners"yes, some people have to do some math, enter the inputs, adjust the models and input according to democratically taken decisions etc. Those are the planners. Dunno whats your issue with this
>these "planners" would be the ones responsible for foreign trade, rather than say traders (who we might allow to work on commission)you're fundamentally misunderstanding the role of trade in the context of such a planned economy. No, we dont allow commissions, it would be an obvious inequality to the advantage of people working on foreign trade.
>demand would always be taken ex-post and not say anticipated or consciously alteredagain, ofc democratic decision can adjust such things (for example reduce supply of tobacco and alcohol as an health policy). The mechanism described is for adjusting the production of thee bulk of commodities to change in consumption over time, ofc the production is anticipated
>input-output matrices are suitable for planningwhy do you think they're not ?
>no amount of voucher transfers would be allowedyes, thats part of the point, else you're just recreating money and facilitating things like black markets. Labor voucher are not money, even if they fulfill some of its basic function.
>plebiscites would (or should) always be used to determine investments or tax ratesagain, you make no argument here
>additionally I don't think you can issue vouchers in foreign trade, rather than say a currency for just that purposeits literally a currency for that purpose, its just vouchers to link it to the rest of the planned economy, but it does not function in the same way, else as you noticed it wouldnt work
>such exploitation should probably be leaned into hardthe point is not to exploit foreign worker toiling under capitalism
>you also seem to be unaware of how the futures market workswhat are you trying to say
>there is little reason to outlaw currency if the system itself is superior to capitalism. its precisely because its not capitalism that the system does not use regular currency
>finally, why would we "trade" with other socialist nationsmany reasons, they might not share the same system for one, or have different decisions about their surplus
you should really go read the book Towards a New Socialism before trying to critique the system, Im far from being well read on the concept and its been few years since I read it so my response will always be lacking compared to just going to the source
No.1733118
>>1732564>performance or piece wagesPiece wages are already super rare even in very physical jobs. Even Fred Taylor wasn't a fan of those. Some variability for performance is not ruled out.
>input-output matricesOf course input-output matrices are suitable for planning. There are people who say they are not because of "non-linearities". They are projecting individual consumer psychology onto physical processes.
>I don't think you can issue vouchers in foreign tradeAnd why do you think this can't be done? Are you imagining these vouchers as physical objects? These are entries in a database that the socialist commonwealth uses for interactions with the outside world. Non-citizen Mr A obtains vouchers by trading with the socialist commonwealth and this is registered in the database. Mr A can update his account by using some amount of these either to obtain products from the socialist commonwealth (imagine something like Amazon for foreigners) or for a transfer to the account of non-citizen Mr B for whatever reason.
No.1733373
>>1733098>you should go read themI have read TANS
>yes, some people have to do some math, enter the inputs, adjust the models and input according to democratically taken decisions etc. Those are the planners. Dunno whats your issue with thisI don't think it's a good term, and you're mixing up different jobs. a lot of what you describe already happens today: information of what a firm is doing is handled by accountants. what inputs are necessary for what outputs are compiled by engineers and handed to the purchasing people. and so on. are all these different things that currently go into planning capitalist firms be rolled into one job title of "planner"?
>why do you think they're not ?it can't deal with multiple production methods for the same good, or with joint production. it is a statistical tool, not a tool for operational planning
>yes, thats part of the point, else you're just recreating money and facilitating things like black marketsthat depends on quantitative aspects, such as how much transfers you allow. how are petty debts between people to be handled? because if you don't then some form of commodity money will fill this role, say bottles of vodka, which is worse because now you have no information
someone engaging in black marketeering can be spotted using statistical methods
>the point is not to exploit foreign worker toiling under capitalismquit the moralfaggotry. we're building a higher mode of production here, and we're in a class war. these workers supply the enemy with value. they have the choice of rebelling or defecting. if you're this gunshy in peacetime, what of times when we find ourselves in outright war with the enemy? are we not to shoot their soldiers because they are workers?
the only way you're going to smash capital is by being even more ruthless than it is. you may balk at the notion of deliberately making working conditions worse for workers in the capitalist nations, but for the system as a whole there is a double benefit: you get leverage on your labor, and the chances that you can poach said workers get higher, since working conditions are better inside the system. because labor is the only source of value, encouraging immigration at home is important, as is encouraging emmigration abroad. it grows the system and starves the enemy of its life's blood. for the same reason we should encourage antinatalism with the enemy, and natalism at home
>what are you trying to sayfutures allow buying say wheat at a specific price and knowing that you will have that wheat delivered at that price. prices on the futures themselves do not fluctuate
>many reasons, they might not share the same system for one, or have different decisions about their surplusnothing says you can't have multiple political systems interacting with the one informational-computational system
>>1733118>And why do you think this can't be done?because the vouchers aren't fungible, so the capitalist countries that buy them can't trade them with other capitalists
No.1733397
>>1733373>it can't deal with multiple production methods for the same good, or with joint production.Suppose I show you an input output table of a company that does not display any joint production or multiple methods for producing a thing because the company I'm at does not do such a thing. Is such a table OK with you or does it offend your sensibilities? It is OK with you in that context I suppose…
PSYCHE! Actually, the two products with the labels "Chungus" and "Wumbus" you see on this table are one and the same product "Chunguswumbus", we just have two different methods in use, used in different proportions. All you have to do to get the actual amount of Chunguswumbus produced is to add together the two numbers. Joint production can be displayed with a similar hack.
>>And why do you think this can't be done?>because the vouchers aren't fungible, so the capitalist countries that buy them can't trade them with other capitalistsPost
>>1733118 literally explains that people in the capitalist outside world can trade the vouchers among themselves. (This point is also made in TANS in the chapter on foreign trade with the capitalist outside world.) As an outsider, you can decide to either use for shopping at commieworld Amazon yourself or give them to some other outsider (who can also decide to shop at commieworld Amazon or give them to another outsider and so on). All these transactions happen within a system of electronic accounts run by the socialist state for non-citizens.
No.1734256
>>1695206>he goes over some of the history of writing TANS, especially how it's a response to Nove and how thirdwayoids in Labour used Nove's work to dismantle the UK's public sectorwhat i get from this is that his defense of the soviet system was kindof motivated by a desire to defend british social democracy by proxy?
No.1734381
>>1733397>Suppose I show you an input output table of a company that does not display any joint production or multiple methods for producing a thing because the company I'm at does not do such a thing. Is such a table OK with you or does it offend your sensibilities? It is OK with you in that context I suppose…the problem isn't with individual workplaces but with the system as a whole. Stalin rightfully criticized input-output as being nothing but a numbers' game
>PSYCHE! Actually, the two products with the labels "Chungus" and "Wumbus" you see on this table are one and the same product "Chunguswumbus", we just have two different methods in use, used in different proportions. All you have to do to get the actual amount of Chunguswumbus produced is to add together the two numbers. Joint production can be displayed with a similar hack.yes you can attempt to split things up by "typing" each variable, but this will result in an inferior solution. a concrete example would be electricity. instead of electricity we can type it into coelelectricity, waterelectricity and nuclearelectricity. but then the downstream workplaces that need electricity have to specify their need as some specific mix of coelelectricity, waterelectricity and nuclearelectricity. and so on for every use-value that can be produced in multiple ways
>Post >>1733118 literally explains that people in the capitalist outside world can trade the vouchers among themselvesthen they are not labor vouchers as we understand the concept, but Proudhonian labor money
>or give them to some other outsiderI like how you say this but also raise criticism of being able to transfer some amount of vouchers to someone else (assuming you're the same anon as
>>1733098 ). I am not wedded to the idea of limited transferrability, but I've seen the point raised by critics of TANS that settling debts would become difficult if there is no transferrability at all, and it behooves us to answer such criticism
No.1735469
>>1734381>a concrete example would be electricity. instead of electricity we can type it into coelelectricity, waterelectricity and nuclearelectricity. but then the downstream workplaces that need electricity have to specify their need as some specific mix of coelelectricity, waterelectricity and nuclearelectricity.The computation gets more complicated but you don't have to do such a thing.
>then they are not labor vouchers as we understand the concept…Well that's how it is in TANS.
…but Proudhonian labor money
Give a source text by Proudhon where he proposes "labor money" (and I mean something that you actually know and not "know" because Marx claimed that about Proudhon).
>I like how you say this but also raise criticism of being able to transfer some amount of vouchers to someone else (assuming you're the same anon as >>1733098 ).I'm not that poster.
>I am not wedded to the idea of limited transferrability, but I've seen the point raised by critics of TANS that settling debts would become difficult if there is no transferrability at allThe vouchers for consumer products are not physical bills, but amounts in accounts under control of a state "bank". Foreigners can obtain consumer products with them
or transfer them among themselves, citizens can only order consumer products with them.
This might be a bit disappointing for a citizen, having less freedom than an outsider in a sense, but it's an improvement over what existed in the USSR and GDR: special shops with special goodies you could only get with foreign currency.
No.1735621
>>1735469>The computation gets more complicated but you don't have to do such a thing.then how do you propose to solve it? with LP it's easy enough, because LPs can be rectangular
>Give a source text by Proudhon where he proposes "labor money" (and I mean something that you actually know and not "know" because Marx claimed that about Proudhon).my source is Gothakritik. while Marx may be misrepresenting Proudhon, it is hardly in question that Proudhon suggested using public banking. if you think Marx is lying, that Proudhon's labour notes were actually meant to not circulate, then please provide evidence of this
>The vouchers for consumer products are not physical bills, but amounts in accounts under control of a state "bank". Foreigners can obtain consumer products with them or transfer them among themselves, citizens can only order consumer products with them.I know they are not physical bills. the question is if they can circulate, which can be done just as well on a computer as it can with physical paper and coins
>Foreigners can obtain consumer products with them or transfer them among themselvesdo you even know what circulation is?
>This might be a bit disappointing for a citizenwe could price things differently for foreigners, adding a surcharge to exports just as Chile did with copper. that would provide incentive to becoming a member
No.1735648
>>1735621>>Give a source text by Proudhon where he proposes "labor money" (and I mean something that you actually know and not "know" because Marx claimed that about Proudhon).>my source is Gothakritik. while Marx may be misrepresenting ProudhonWhere did Marx mention Proudhon in that text?
>do you even know what circulation is?…
The past couple posts were simply explanations of what is in TANS because you don't seem to remember what's in there. Chapter 10 on foreign trade. Neither Cockshott & Cottrell nor me needs to be reminded that the LVs in CotGP are not supposed to circulate. Marx never wrote the volume on foreign trade under capitalism and he didn't even sketch what to do about foreign trade in a world that is only socialist in one region.
No.1735731
Labor notes should not be able to circulate. If the nation needs to make foreign trade with a capitalist one, it should just exchange physical goods like the USSR did.
If a tourist wants to come to the nation, it should work like in any other country: they exchange their capitalist money to an equivalent labour note. How, exactly, this calculation is done, I'm not so sure of. Maybe just a sort of average.
No.1735733
And about debts: bigger debts that you would acquire from something like a bank wouldn't happen in a cybernetic economy (unless it's something like a disability check or retirement). For personal debts (like something between a family member or a friend I guess) could be paid with some kind of gift, this is basically the same shit we do today.
No.1735782
>>1735648>Where did Marx mention Proudhon in that text?huh, you're right, Marx doesn't explicitly call out Proudhon in that text. seems it's in Grundrisse
this actually made me go on a bit of a dive regarding where the labour money (time-chits) idea comes from. it is often attributed to Proudhon but appears to more correctly originate with Darimon. either way it doesn't matter who is behind it, because the distinction remains the same: labour notes circulate, labour vouchers do not. you both agree on this of course
as for chapter 10 of TANS, it seems C&C are sloppy:
>We are proposing an internal economic system in which money as a means of payment is phased out in favour of non-circulating labour credits.here "labour credits" is used to mean non-circulating vouchers
>In outline what we propose is the reverse of this: imports from the capitalist world are paid for in labour credits; labour credits may be exported and can circulate abroad but not at home; and the import of foreign currency is outlawed.but here these "labour credits"
do circulate. how is this possible? the only possibility is that all capitalist nations share a single "account" within the socialist economy. but then why use the term "labour credit" at all? is it to be stamped with labour time? if so, why? it would be better to have a foreign currency lacking any basis that can be inflated at will
>A capitalist firm that supplies the commonwealth with imports will be given an account with the ministry of foreign trade and credited with a certain number of hours of labour.the correct term is "debited"
>The firm may then obtain a transferable certificate of credit from the trade ministry.this is money, not labour vouchers
consider two currencies used for the purpose of foreign exchange: the Hour and the Kek. the Hour has a fixed exchange rate in terms of domestic labour-power, similar to how the USD used to be pegged to a certain amount of gold. the Kek on the other hand is a fiat currency, which can be printed at will, which has the effects of injecting Keks into international trade. consider that Porky has amassed an obligation of one Hour per member of the socialist commonwealth. he can then return
at any time and demand goods equivalent to one Hour, still worth one hour's social labour. this is no good. if instead Porky has amassed Keks, and the commonwealth prints Keks at a rate of 3.5% per year, in 20 years time that hour's worth of social labour has reduced in value to 30 minutes, much to the amusement of the commonwealth. too high of an inflation rate may undermine faith in the Kek though, so some care must be taken
>>1735731>If the nation needs to make foreign trade with a capitalist one, it should just exchange physical goods like the USSR didthis is bilateral barter, C-C circulation. this can be done to an extent, but it is incredibly inflexible. have a look at how Comecon worked to see why
No.1736356
>>1735731>If a tourist wants to come to the nation, it should work like in any other country: they exchange their capitalist money to an equivalent labour note.What advantage do you see in that over the proposal by C&C?
>>1735782>it seems C&C are sloppyThe meaning of a word depends on its context. I had no problem with that chapter.
>but here these "labour credits" do circulate. how is this possible?Because they are electronic accounts controlled by the socialist commonwealth. All sorts of crazy rules can be programmed in.
>the only possibility is that all capitalist nations share a single "account" within the socialist economy.What on earth makes you say that? Different non-citizens can have their own distinct accounts.
>it would be better to have a foreign currency lacking any basis that can be inflated at willThat doesn't sound very attractive from an outsider's perspective, but anyway. The accounts are entirely controlled by the socialist commonwealth, so they can be frozen or reduced or deleted at will. I agree with you that there should be something to nerf a bank-run scenario. I'd prefer an automatic rule rather than the fingers of bureaucrats touching my account. There could be a limit on how many points from an account can be instantly used in the shops, higher amounts requiring advance notice about the time window of usage (not applying to transfers between accounts of non-citizens). Alternatively, there could be an expiration date.
>>A capitalist firm that supplies the commonwealth with imports will be given an account with the ministry of foreign trade and credited with a certain number of hours of labour.>the correct term is "debited"Depends on which account the verb refers to. Don't be a wanker.
No.1736374
>>1736356>The meaning of a word depends on its contextit behooves Marxists to be extra fucking careful with language, as this entire exchange demonstrates
>Because they are electronic accounts controlled by the socialist commonwealthit could be numbers in a paper ledger and it wouldn't change the fundamental point
if these "credits" can circulate freely then they are currency. this is perfectly fine of course, but then one wonders why they use the term "labour credits" rather than money. the only conclusion I can draw is that they would be stamped with time. but this means liabilities that don't attenuate over time, unlike liabilities expressed in fiat currency (sans interest)
>What on earth makes you say that?because if different countries have credits (vouchers) tied to their country then these credits cannot circulate and are therefore not money. they could conceivably be traded as a specialized financial asset to an extent, but if only the US Treasury can spend credits given out to the US Treasury then I don't see them being particularly attractive
>That doesn't sound very attractive from an outsider's perspectiveit already happens today. fiat currencies inflating is a fact of life accepted by all capitalist countries, in a way that outright expropriation is not. C&C make a very similar point about the US dollar, which gets used as a means of indirect taxation on the rest of the world
>I'd prefer an automatic rule rather than the fingers of bureaucrats touching my accountI agree, but with a caveat. transparency is key, but only towards the commonwealth's citizenry. a deal's a deal
but only with a Ferengi No.1738134
Wouldn't algorithmic A.I be perfect for running planned economies?
No.1738147
>>1738134AI is a meme
more seriously, we don't want to replace the black box of the market with the black box of "AI"
No.1738164
>>1736374I like the lobes on this one.
No.1739775
>>1738164the rules of acquisition will be required reading in the cybernetic commune
No.1741948
What is the difference between OGAS and Intensification 90? Are there any books about either of them?
No.1742180
>>1741948>Intensification 90I've only heard this name in passing. it makes me sad
No.1742387
Bigbrain anons ITT, speak to me on my level.
>If Bill Ackman can threaten to run an AI over academic's work to further his agenda why aren't left orgs taking up the same concept?
<Why can't we run AIs over capital + power relations of the establishment and use the data and patterns revealed to further our political agenda?
No.1742392
>>1738147>we don't want to replace the black box of the market with the black box of "AI"jfc it goes without saying that the algos would be written and controlled by left orgs, or the algos would be open source and auditable or whatever.
Why would they be black box?
No.1742395
dreamt of cybersyn today
No.1742396
>>1742180I only about it once in an Adam Curtis documentary
No.1742769
>>1742387>>1742392I'm going to reply to both of you because you're both basically saying the same dumb shit
AI doesn't exist. what we call AI is just statistical regression. a lot of people who promogulate AI garbo do so partly because they don't understand why these systems spit out the answers that they do. but fundamentally they are no different from polynomial regression. but fitting a quadratic function to a bunch of points doesn't get you any research grants from dumb porkies
No.1743910
>>1743535was just about to post this
No.1744301
>>1742769Are you really unable to understand the point being made in those posts? AI, algorithm, call it what you like, are you capable of addressing the posts on their level?
No.1744777
>>1744301>AI, algorithm, call it what you likethese are two very different things
I've been through two or three AI hype cycles by this point anon. but I guess I can address what
>>1742392 said more thoroughly
>Why would they be black box?the entire point of these systems is to be a black box. the purpose of the AI field is to mystify what is fundamentally statistical regression. it is fetishistic
no one but salesdrones would call a polynomial model "intelligent". but for some reason if you pick some other basis function people's reasoning ability goes out the window
how democratic do you think a completely inscrutable model is? how do you guarantee stability? this is hard enough with a linear model
No.1745297
>>1745289Cottrell has some good insights into how the Soviet economy actually worked, but no1curr because he doesn't have a funny name
No.1745357
>>1650427>this whole threadThe market is eliminated not by "cybernetic technology" but by global revolution which allows commodity production to be superseded by social planning on a world scale. Even using the term "planning" is silly as Lenin describes it as a feature of imperialist capitalism.
The material conditions for communist society were already laid in England before 1848, when scientific socialism came into being in its mature form. Then there was the wave of 1917 to the late 1920's. Once they failed and/or degenerated none of them even were "planned" economies anyway, the USSR was just as capitalist as the United States.
No.1745431
>>1745357but anon proper government
is cybernetics
when big dick wolff sarcastically said "socialism is when the government does stuff" he was actually correct. the present state of things is poorly regulated. anarchy reigns in production. this is bad cybernetics. what we want to achieve is
good cybernetics
>they failed and/or degeneratedlol
>the USSR was just as capitalist as the United Stateslmao
please read what the Soviets actually tried to do
No.1745439
>>1745357I'd also go so far as to say democratic planning is synonymous with good governance, good control, good cybernetics
No.1745442
>>1745431>>1745439you arent a communist, and socialism is communism. we want socialized production not a centrally planned capitalist economy
No.1745443
>>1745442>centrally planned capitalist economythis is an oxymoron
No.1745450
>>1745443rationalizing capitalism doesnt stop making it capitalism
No.1745452
>>1745442Isn't central planning fine as long as the state is actually equal and democratic though?
No.1745454
>>1745450cite one (1) case ITT where someone wants generalized commodity production
No.1745462
>>1745431>>1745439Getting rid of the bourgeois but keeping capital around will not destroy capitalism.
No.1745467
>>1745452>equal and democraticI'd try to stay away from such abstract lines that have a strong liberal basis. The liberation of the proletariat coincides with the liberation of all humanity and it's inaccurate to take such a moral position to justify communism from it. The proletariat has the
class necessity of abolishing capitalism, which results in a new productive relationship which coincides with the abolishing of all exploitative forms.
No.1745640
>>1745431>>1745439>>1745443>>1745297>>1732417>>1732526A corner-street department store today is more technologically advanced than most Soviet computers were. The notion of 'socialism' here simply boils down to 'efficient price calculation' (a fantasy) which would somehow be achieved if the USSR had bigger computers, apparently. Possessing X or Y tech doesn't alter the relations of production in a society by itself. Soviet computation was never too impressive even for its time and it's long been surpassed even in daily use, but we clearly don't live under communism now.
This thread is a lot like the losers that rant about Soviet spaceships and rocketry. You can tell they're children with no life attempting to appropriate communism for their own techno-fetish fantasies. It gets even more embarrassing when the whole thread talks about "socialist nations" or "foreign trade" that make absolutely no sense under communism.
No.1745713
>>1745640So you think the entire world is going to go communist at the same time?
No.1745717
>>1745443Isn't that exactly what dirigisime was?
No.1745771
>>1744777>how democratic do you think a completely inscrutable model is? how do you guarantee stability? this is hard enough with a linear modelAppreciate the reply anon but I feel like you're avoiding the point of the posts. It's pretty frustrating ngl.
WHY MUST THE MODEL/AI/LLM/ALGORITHM BE AN INSCRUTABLE BLACK BOX IN YOUR MIND? WHY CANNOT IT BE WRITTEN, AUDITED AND CONTROLLED BY TRUSTED AND QUALIFIED PEOPLE?
No.1745815
>>1745771>If Bill Ackman can threaten to run an AI over academic's work to further his agenda why aren't left orgs taking up the same concept? <Why can't we run AIs over capital + power relations of the establishment and use the data and patterns revealed to further our political agenda? Where our political agenda is to equalize living standards and class mobility in our societies. We are surrounded by sensors that create terabytes of metadata that only porky has access to. Left orgs could write and control algorithms which could parse this data, and AIs which could suggest in realtime policies which could further a left political agenda. Is this beyond the scope of the /cybercom/ thread?
No.1745826
>>1745357>Even using the term "planning" is silly as Lenin describes it as a feature of imperialist capitalism.That's like saying using the term "house" is fascist because Hitler lived in a house.
>Once they failed and/or degenerated none of them even were "planned" economies anyway, the USSR was just as capitalist as the United States.Just a few words before this you said imperialist capitalism got planning, now you make a contrast between planning and capitalism. In the USSR, the proportions between efforts going into direct production of consumer items and efforts for building up productive capacity was a political-administrative decision and not the outcome of blind market forces. This is the logical proof the USSR had a very distinct system from what the US and Western Europe had. The collapse around 1990 is the empirical proof: What crisis would you need to go from same to more of the same.
>>1745443Capital is always competing capitals, yes. That doesn't mean any society with centrally steered production is communist. It could be a caste society.
>>1745640>The notion of 'socialism' here simply boils down to 'efficient price calculation' (a fantasy) which would somehow be achieved if the USSR had bigger computers, apparently.The notion of socialism in TANS includes price-independent long-term planning, collective housing and other stuff. Also, not one of the posters you reply to is saying what you claim here. You just made up someone in your head to get smug about.
>"foreign trade"It's about how to deal with a scenario where the whole world isn't communist, not wishing for such a scenario.
>>1745644>Marx nowhere argues that communism is 'more efficient'<The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it.t. Marx (Capital Volume I)
No.1746022
>>1745640>price calculationPareconists are the people who suggest this. the end of the USSR is connected to the optimizing school of planning, which among other things were obsessed with pricing, including the shadow prices that Kantorovich proposed and that most recently Phillip Dapprich has been trying to revive. Cockshott, Cottrell and Dapprich's recent book on environmental planning was rightfully criticized on this point. it is a step back. you cannot get from a mode of planning that relies on prices, to higher-stage communism. the fate of the USSR is the proof of this. read up on the Liberman reforms and the reasons behind them
>>1745641this isn't news and is partly due to the turbo autism of Norbert Weiner
>using machines means people won't have a hecking say!these people should re-read the chapter on machines in Capital vol I. machines do not create value. machines cannot think. machines cannot fight for anything
>>1745771>WHY MUST THE MODEL/AI/LLM/ALGORITHM BE AN INSCRUTABLE BLACK BOX IN YOUR MIND? WHY CANNOT IT BE WRITTEN, AUDITED AND CONTROLLED BY TRUSTED AND QUALIFIED PEOPLE?why indeed. perhaps if you had some actual insight into AI you'd know what I'm on about
>TRUSTED AND QUALIFIED PEOPLEif it isn't relations between people showing up yet again
>>1745826>This is the logical proof the USSR had a very distinct system from what the US and Western Europe hadthis. the USSR didn't have generalized commodity production
No.1746023
>>1745826>Capital is always competing capitals, yes. That doesn't mean any society with centrally steered production is communist. It could be a caste society.must we always insert "necessary but not sufficient" into every statement in these threads?
No.1746713
>>1746022>the end of the USSR is connected to the optimizing school of planning, which among other things were obsessed with pricing, including the shadow prices that Kantorovich proposedThese two issues are practically orthogonal and you will find people with any combination of stances on them. USSR ended because bureaucrats wanted to become capitalists.
>Cockshott, Cottrell and Dapprich's recent book on environmental planning was rightfully criticized on this point. it is a step back. you cannot get from a mode of planning that relies on prices, to higher-stage communism.Isn't this sort of criticism the same type as complaining about trade with foreign countries a couple posts earlier. The global situation is not a wish.
Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis is not an update to TANS.
No.1746740
>>1746713>These two issues are practically orthogonalGorby explicitly cites Nemchikov as the inspiration for perestroika, and the Liberman reforms stem directly from the optimizing school
>USSR ended because bureaucrats wanted to become capitalistssure, but
why did they want to? did they just wake up one day and decide to pork out? or was there perhaps a set of systems put in place to encourage such behavior?
>Isn't this sort of criticism the same type as complaining about trade with foreign countries a couple posts earlierno? there's a vast difference between trading with capitalist countries (because there's literally no other way to coordinate production with porkies) and introducing trade and profit into an in-kind economy
No.1746741
>>1746740The shadow prices of Kantorovich are directly derived from the technical coefficients of production. They do not simulate real-world capitalism.
>introducing trade and profit into an in-kind economyWe don't live in such an economy. The book is not a revision of TANS, it is about a different topic.
No.1746756
>>1746741>The shadow prices of Kantorovich are directly derived from the technical coefficients of productionI know
>They do not simulate real-world capitalismarguable. once you've introduced prices for MoPs and allow for profit, the step to capitalism is small, as history shows. I think we can set our sights higher than dirigisme
>The book is not a revision of TANS, it is about a different topicTANS already talks about the climate problem, and rightfully points out that it cannot be dealt with by pricing. hence why EPACC is a step back
rather than confronting in-kind constraints head-on, C&C&D instead propose that we do so through prices. to me this seems like fetishization. TANS has this to say:
>The introduction of imputed rents into a socialist economy, as was advocated by Soviet ‘reformers’, is equivalent to performing calculations of labour values using marginal rather than average costs and assuming diminishing returns to labour. But given the arguments above, imputed rents under socialism will be no more effective in husbanding resources than real rents are under capitalism. We would argue the more radical point that ecological destruction is the result of any ‘economic’ decision mechanism, i.e. any decision mechanism based upon a single objective function. Any decision procedure based upon prices fails to convey information about the ecological and environmental consequences of a course of action, since these are complex and not reducible to an accounting entry. Any non-qualitative assessment of environmental impact is misleading. The environmental consequences of a course of action have to be determined by scientific investigation and resolved by political struggle. Examples of this have been the campaigns waged by the scientific community in the USSR to stop industrial development on the shores of lake Baikal and to halt the plans to divert Siberian rivers south to irrigate Central Asia.after all, if marginal pricing were the solution to the climate catastrophe, perhaps we should all put our weight behind the cap-and-trade system in the EU? a system that predictably isn't working very well at all, and that just passes the cost of the runaway production onto the worker-consumer. "but consumers wouldn't pay that price in my system!" you might say, to which I reply why bother at all? just treat constraints as a fact of life. in some cases they can be overcome by investments, which are unaviodably political
No.1747201
>>1745443A state that replicates capitalist relationships and the conversion of the means of production into capital systematically is a bourgeois state. To industrialize nationally means extracting surplus-value and enforcing the proletarian condition rather than abolishing it.
As long as commodity production and money-wages exist, development can only be capitalist in nature and imply accumulation. This is precisely why Marx says in the Grundrisse that 'nothing can be more absurd' than implying a conscious control over production as long as value exists.
No.1747903
>>1746756>>shadow prices (…) do not simulate real-world capitalism>arguable.How many trades would need to happen for that and about what? And is that something you actually observe in capitalism.
>rather than confronting in-kind constraints head-on, C&C&D instead propose that we do so through prices. to me this seems like fetishization.Fetishization would be green taxes, since these don't fix a physical constraint. For the proposal of C&C&D, the constraints in kind are there in the system. Of course these have an effect on prices. The effects on prices would also happen with pure labor-time pricing, since the constraints create extra work.
>cap-and-trade systemMarkets for pollution rights aren't fetishization either, since here too the constraints are set in physical terms. They don't work wonders in real life because of massive corruption, so the constraints are too loose and there are plenty of extra allowances for established mega-polluters.
>>1747201>A state that replicates capitalist relationshipsDoes this entail MOP ownership being split into competing capitals? If your answer is yes, this is probably why that poster said oxymoron.
No.1747907
>>1747903>MOP ownership being split into competing capitals………………………………
No.1747909
>he thinks the ultimate end of human history is to be controlled by a computer that makes sure everyone gets an equal amount of toothbrushes
do autists really?
No.1747918
>>1747907When you say "state that replicates capitalist relationships", do you mean MOP ownership being split into competing capitals? Either say yes or say no. Dont say pointpointpoint.
No.1748053
>>1747903>How many trades would need to happen for that and about what?you seem to be unaware of the field of econophysics. please read pdfrel
>Of course these have an effect on prices.yeah, so what we have here is rent, or an indirect tax. I'm honestly baffled that Cockshott would put his name behind this, seeing how he's been an ardent opponent of indirect taxation
>The effects on prices would also happen with pure labor-time pricing, since the constraints create extra work.it isn't the constraints that create extra work, it's the fact that you have to deploy less labour efficient MoPs. if there are no such MoPs available then constraints cannot increase costs, because no more work is to be carried out. going home early for the day does not increase the embodied labour in the goods produced that day
we do not need to reproduce the productivist mindset that the Soviets had, that for some reason GDP is to be maximized
we might pick labour as the thing to optimize (minimize) on, but then the cost of the things produced isn't really the issue, but rather making sure we produce just enough of everything. we'd almost certainly use the most efficient MoPs, and an improvement in the objective function (shorter work week) necessarily means the marginal price decreases rather than increasing
>Markets for pollution rights aren't fetishization eitherthey literally are. they turn pollution into a commodity, and ultimately a regressive tax paid by workers. it should be abolished along with all other regressive taxes like VAT, energy, road and fuel taxes and so on
>>1747909you WILL get ze toothbrush and you WILL like it
No.1748054
>>1747909as a programmer im convinced you dont need to be smart to know programming and computing and liberal economics, as nobody in this thread who is for "cyber-"communism" can grasp basic marxism
No.1748059
>>1747909Only the central economic plan would be automated by a computer, silly.
No.1748186
>>1747909Replying to bait in good faith:
TANS explicitly describes Lower Communism i.e. Lenin's "socialism", a system "stamped with the birthmarks" of the capitalist machine but without money, exploitation, private ownership. Cockshott himself has a muddled idea of what the Higher Phase is (see video "Paul Cockshott Talks Technology"), which should remind us to check such proposals with an eye to their evolution towards Higher Phase, our real object. But ultimately as you well know, this is up to the vagaries of history and not you or me, making your objection retarded.
No.1748547
>>1748053>>shadow prices [of Kantorovich] do not simulate real-world capitalism>arguable.>>How many trades would need to happen for that and about what?>you seem to be unaware of the field of econophysics. please read pdfrelThis pdf is about aggregate money quantity being preserved and inequality in distribution automatically arising from trade. I don't see what that has to do with the question (is there even a quantity preserved when calculating opportunity costs?). Trades are between firms, not inside. Transfers inside a firm are not really market trades. Inside the factories, recipes are chosen to produce things. Kantorovich proposed to compute best usage of recipe ratios from the input ratios of the available recipes and that (insofar as computation power allowing it) this happens
across factories. In capitalism, these factories are managed by distinct owners and they don't by default share recipes.
>>The effects on prices would also happen with pure labor-time pricing, since the constraints create extra work.>it isn't the constraints that create extra work, it's the fact that you have to deploy less labour efficient MoPs."I didn't kill him, it was the hole (from the bullet from the gun I fired)."
No.1748992
There is a problem to markets that would even exist if everything was co-ops and the boss-employee relation made illegal (I mean aside from the constant threat of classes re-emerging in hidden form just like today we have a lot of fake self-employment to circumvent existing employee protections). There is a fundamental hostility between people at the level of the most basic interaction on the market:
I am motivated to increase the price for whatever I sell because this translates into higher income for me. I want others to sell their stuff at low prices so I have more money left to obtain more stuff. And it's like that for everybody else. On the marketplace, our interests are at odds objectively. We can be very similar genetically, in the way of our upbringing, our religion, etc. and still there is a constant hum of hostility all around us and running through our heads, because of the rules of the game, because we live in a market world.
I can see two countervailing tendencies:
1. I may want to lower the unit-price to increase the quantity sold to a level overall increasing my income.
2. My worries of market players sensing I have high income and get into producing what I produce checks my price-gouging ambitions.
These two apply to both "normal capitalism" and the co-op market world with a minimalist central government. I believe these tendencies are weak. And in a society with a strong center making a lot of decisions for the co-ops, these will be weaker still: The quantity to be produced might be a given fixed target handed down from the center. Other people might not be allowed to try to produce what I am producing because the center denies them the opportunity.
It looks like our only hope for the system with a strong center is weakening the link between "economic performance" and standard of living (making consumption more needs-based), yet this idea is precisely what thinkers with economic "common sense" attack. But let's take a second look.
What is really the problem with performance-based incentives? Look at co-op-market world. Demand higher than anticipated translates into more money flowing to the co-op. The co-op got a lot of wiggle room in how to split that extra money between investment and consumption.
In strong-center world, we can have pseudo-money and pseudo-profit calculations. Suppose the pseudo-firm was tasked by the center with producing an amount that turned out to be very low relative to demand. We deal with the shortage by expanding production, but we also have to do something in the very short term and that is raising the price, resulting in the spreadsheets of the pseudo-firm showing high pseudo-profits. AND HERE IT COMES, the reason I'm writing all this crap: The high pseudo-profits should NOT translate into higher remuneration per hour.
The goal should be to produce the quantity that can be sold at the price that justifies production. Overshooting or undershooting that quantity are both mistakes and should be treated symmetrically (unlike in capitalism, where high demand is a win for suppliers). These mistakes should be dealt with by adjusting quantity supplied and for the short term by changing price (if the stock buffer isn't sufficient). The price changes should have no effect whatsoever on the hourly remuneration of the workers there. This means we don't treat production sites as self-financing entities.
No.1749098
>>1748547>Kantorovich proposed to compute best usage of recipe ratios from the input ratios of the available recipesthe material need for methods like this has long since passed, given modern advances in communication, storage and computation. local optimization is shit, and the USSR was never able to optimize globally except in aggregate. assuming we want to optimize at all, which isn't necessarily the case
this doesn't mean we couldn't use shadow prices for certain things, but the USSR's experience shows us that we should be cautious. and there is little need for them, since we now have sufficient computation power
>>1748992>The high pseudo-profits should NOT translate into higher remuneration per hourthis sounds in effect that you propose to compare how efficient workplaces are, which is perfectly fine and straightforward to do. just compute the embodied labour of the output of each one, and compare that to the average. if the deviation is above say 2 sigma then there is reason for someone somewhere to act
>The goal should be to produce the quantity that can be sold at the price that justifies productionwe should be very careful with statements like this, because once you're selling something at a price different from its value you've set in motion a whole series of accounting problems
we can for sure use price to regulate demand. but that's not the only way. for example we could have CO2 emission vouchers handed out to everyone which have to be supplied in addition to labour vouchers when purchasing goods. we could use law to curtail the demand for certain goods, for example by moving drugs to a prescription model. and so on
No.1749358
>>1749098>the material need for methods like this has long since passed, given modern advances in communication, storage and computation. local optimization is shit, and the USSR was never able to optimize globally except in aggregate. assuming we want to optimize at all, which isn't necessarily the casethis doesn't mean we couldn't use shadow prices for certain things, but the USSR's experience shows us that we should be cautious. and there is little need for them, since we now have sufficient computation power
You say the USSR was not able to use the idea to full extent because of the state of technology at the time and also the experience of the USSR shows we should not use the idea…?
>we could have CO2 emission vouchers handed out to everyone which have to be supplied in addition to labour vouchers when purchasing goods.I suppose you mean vouchers here that cannot be transferred to other people. Alice may want to obtain something which costs some combination of X and Y vouchers. And she has enough X budget, but not enough Y budget. And it's the opposite case for Bob. Alice and Bob can improve their situation by buying for the other person. It's not a bad thing if they are doing that, since whatever constraints on the production system are represented by the various consumption vouchers will be met irrespective of how the vouchers are split up between the people. But then we have to admit that it is not necessary to have multiple consumption vouchers.
No.1749373
>>1745641The opposition to 'Cybernetics' here seems very reasonable. At the time, there was no cybernetic development outside of the controlled environments of capitalist-sustained research, and the idea of socialist-sustained research would have hierarchized it, and distracted from pressing opposition to global capitalism.
It was right at the time. Now? Perhaps not. Engels also warned, in the 1890s, that the vision of revolution popularized in 1848 was a suicidal delusion if seriously enacted then. The information age, just from the fall of the USSR to now, has transformed revolutionary potential more in just 30 years than the prior century.
Revolutions in consciousness derive from the material potential of communication. This has been the same for 3500 years, and thus taken for granted. We're seeing an unprecedented change, and must account for it if we ever hope to change society.
No.1751543
>>1749358>You say the USSR was not able to use the idea to full extent because of the state of technology at the time and also the experience of the USSR shows we should not use the idea…?shadow prices are a Lagrange multiplier used to deal with the fact that the USSR could never do LP on the whole economy. in some sense this cedes ground to the Austrians
one problem is that shadow prices can only be computed if you have an objective function. in the USSR this objective function was something akin to GDP. hence bourgeois production mania gets reproduced. if I'm not mistaken you also need to be at the optimal point in the LP for shadow prices to be computable, which we cannot guarantee computationwise when we have billions of variables
No.1752017
>>1751543>USSR could never do LP on the whole economyYou could always do that, even with pencil and paper, with highly aggregated data of course and less than optimal results.
>one problem is that shadow prices can only be computed if you have an objective function (…) hence bourgeois production maniaWe can have bourgeois production mania without an objective function and we can have an objective function without bourgeois production mania. We gonna have a goal.
>if I'm not mistaken you also need to be at the optimal point in the LP for shadow prices to be computableDid you mean optimal instead of computable?
No.1752019
>>1751535thanks anon was gonna post this
No.1752043
>>1752017>with highly aggregated data of courseyes anon, which is the entire point of using Lagrange multipliers. one of the reasons the market works but also sucks is because everything gets aggregated into a price
>We can have bourgeois production mania without an objective function and we can have an objective function without bourgeois production mania. We gonna have a goal.we don't actually need an objective function, nor any kind of goal. there are for sure certain things we need to do in the short term, like bringing emissions to heel. but beyond that, are we to define an objective function for the entire planet? do different geographical areas not have different needs?
>Did you mean optimal instead of computable?the optimum is computable, it's just not feasibly so for large LPs. you cannot compute shadow prices for interior points as far as I'm aware, they come from the dual solution to the LP you're solving
No.1752060
>>1752043>are we to define an objective function for the entire planet?The area under control.
>do different geographical areas not have different needs?Planning with an objective function does not logically entail that everybody gets the same things.
No.1752493
>>1752060>The area under controlso the entire planet then, under the assumption that we're talking about an actual new mode of production. the only alternative is exchange between islands of planning, in which case we're not talking about a new mode of production. nevermind how global constraints are to be incorporated in a non-global mode of planning
>Planning with an objective function does not logically entail that everybody gets the same things.luckily I didn't claim this. but if we look at actually existing planning what we find are objective functions where for example diapers and potatoes are commensurable. this fact alone is obviously problematic since people can't eat diapers. now add to this the fact that demand is different in different places
there are
some objective functions that do make some sense to apply globally, for example minimizing labour under demand constraints. but usually this isn't what people mean
No.1752545
>>1752493>>The area under control>so the entire planet then, under the assumption that we're talking about an actual new mode of production.Are you saying that the USSR was capitalist then.
>but if we look at actually existing planning what we find are objective functions where for example diapers and potatoes are commensurable. If we look at actual vegetarians, what we find is that some of them are murderers, so if you are vegetarian do you think murder is good.
No.1752861
>>1752545>Are you saying that the USSR was capitalist then.I am not. but you have to realize our goals stretch further than petty borders
No.1753081
>>1753040again appears the notion that there should be a class of "planners" that in Tim's model sets prices, for some reason
No.1753090
>>1752493>so the entire planet then, under the assumption that we're talking about an actual new mode of productionWhy are you saying that you need the whole planet to be socialist to have a "new mode of production"? Capitalism didn't exist at the same time in the whole word for a long time
No.1753097
>>1753090that is correct. but a single country doing things differently does not a mode of production make. hence why for example within Comecon there was barter
capital is global, and we should hope that socialism/communism becomes so as well, so we should not confine ourselves to national borders, not at the concept stage. you're either doing global planning or you are doing at best exchange between national islands of planning
No.1753121
are there any books about marxism and game theory
No.1761241
>>1761229>le increased productivity memeeven Adam Smith remarked that more efficient means of production leads to having to work more, not less
also yeah the ad is funny
No.1761271
>>1761241I find it funny how the very content of his video negates his intended message. He's working (promoting for money) while saying that we're working less.
The absolute fucking state of the reactionary mind never ceases to entertain me. It's like they lack consciousness or just didn't care about contradicting themselves.
No.1761279
>>1761229Life WAS easier as a peasant tho
He's not really getting to that argument, he's just pulling econ 101 talking points out his ass
But at the same time, so what? Should we go back?
>>1761241Yeah, cos for a piece of equipment to be worth what its sold for, it has to yield a maximum amount of value; marx talks about this tangentially in capital.
No.1761287
>>1761279I wouldn't call dedicating an entire chapter to machinery "tangential"
No.1761290
>>1761229>that blatant shilling at the end.Fuck this guy.
No.1761367
>>1761308ehh kind of seems like an oversimplification
No.1761370
>>1761287He doesnt talk directly about better means of production meaning longer hours iirc, but but can still be inferred
No.1761379
>>1761370no I'm pretty sure he talks about it explicitly. about how more productive machinery is often more expensive (but not always), which means longer hours since the value of the goods produced eventually goes down. and also because no porky says no to surplus value
No.1761384
>>1761379Well i dont have the quote so i wont make any certain statements
But i know thats true after reading it regardless
No.1761410
>>1761384it might be worth it to know that sometimes more efficient MoPs are also less expensive, and so there's potential for working hours to reduce. that I don't think Marx goes into very much. in fact the TRoPF assumes that OCC has a tendency to rise, which isn't necessarily true
No.1762185
>>1761379>>1761410From the boss POV, if you go into debt to get expensive machinery, you want to make money fast because taking more time to pay back means you have to pay more interest. Aside from that, when you make a change that puts you ahead of the competition, you want to use the time before they copy the change. So even if the change is cheap, you make people work overtime.
No.1762710
>>1762185>Aside from that, when you make a change that puts you ahead of the competition, you want to use the time before they copy the change. So even if the change is cheap, you make people work overtimeoh yeah good point
>>1762573might be good idea to add that since
Economic Planning in an Age of Economic Crisis he's changed position to one in favor of ground rent on emissions, which is a departure from TANS, as has been discussed ITT
No.1765146
>>1762710Hi, I assume you mean the exchange beginning with this post:
>>1746022I have not read EPACC yet so I cannot in good faith write that it supports a climate tax. If you have a relevant section or peer-review you can cite I would be able to write the edit much more quickly. If you wish I can cite this TANS passage
>>1746756 and write "some argue that EPACC contradicts this" etc.
No.1766392
>>1765545Both the cosmonaut author and the poster ITT are disappointed because they want "Economic Planning in an Age of Economic Crisis" to be a sequel to TANS, which it is not. While its authors do say that socialism would be preferable, they do not limit themselves to a socialist scenario.
The cosmonaut author seems to really dislike the idea of nudging people with prices and using market-like solutions. That stuff certainly looks compatible with pro-capitalist ideology. But markets have been around for thousands of years and capitalism is only a few centuries old. So markets do not amount to capitalism (Marx also said that in Capital).
No.1766454
>>1766392EPACC doesn't propose using the market though. it's just a revival of shadow pricing using an objective function. as the Cosmonaut article points out, C&C&D try to have it both ways, somehow combining calculation in kind with marginal utility. this is precisely the optimizing school, where rather than taking political decisions and deliberating over the economy in kind, all information is instead collapsed into a set of prices, thus cucking to the Austrians. all that we need to add is some kind of incentive system for workplace managers in terms of these prices and voila! late Soviet system reconstituted!
while every socialist experiment so far
have used markets (C-M-C) to some extent, for example between kolkhozes and the state in the USSR, there is a massive difference between using the market mechanism in the periphery of the economy compared to using it for the base. addressing the environmental situation is all about the base, all about deliberating over the base in kind
>So markets do not amount to capitalism (Marx also said that in Capital).this is true, but capital also accumulates, as Marx also points out and as econophysics demonstrates. one wonders, if socialism is to be nothing but the government setting a bunch of prices, why these gentlemen don't come out as Keynesians
No.1766470
>>1766454>rather than taking political decisions and deliberating over the economy in kind, all information is instead collapsed into a set of pricesOn the macro scale, the decisions about limits on pollution limits and non-renewable resources are all set in kind. The stuff with the prices is downstream from that.
(The rest of your post is downstream from the error you start with, so consider that rejected as well.)
No.1766473
>>1766470 (me)
>limits on pollution limitsHarmless typing error or subconscious pollution fetish erupting, you decide.
No.1766485
>>1766470>downstreamthis is the key issue. if in-kind constraints have already been implemented then what is the point of these prices? production in excess of environmental constraints are not to take place
No.1766508
>>1766485The in-kind constraints are set in physical terms at the aggregate level. There are millions of different doable configurations for meeting them. Prices for consumer items
don't need to include some pollution cost, because the combination of the produced various consumer items and their quantities will be within the administratively set eco-constraints no matter what.
Prices for consumer items
can include eco-costs. If two childless men work the same hours at the same job and with same performance and then they get different baskets of consumer items and these baskets amount to the same in labor costs and the two baskets are very different in terms of how much of the ecological pie they take to produce, should the equilibrium prices of the two baskets be the same or should the "dirtier basket" cost more? Dapprich seems to favor the letter variant. And we can do it that way.
I don't have strong feelings about it and don't know why you and that guy from the cosmonaut blog shit pants over this.
No.1766520
>>1766508>Prices for consumer items can include eco-coststhey already do by definition if you use labour values. the amount of labour that went into the entire process of making a product is ex-post the value of that product. linear planning is convex, hence unit values already tend to increase as you push harder against the constraints, especially if you choose to maximize GDP as C&C&D seem to suggest (GDP maximization being another can of worms)
you should also know that in the optimizing school shadow prices apply to enterprises and less so to consumers
>equilibrium pricesneoclassicals out
>And we can do it that waythat we can. I prefer fewer moving parts
>I don't have strong feelings about it and don't know why you and that guy from the cosmonaut blog shit pants over this.you should be skeptical when socialists start bringing in neoclassical nonsense, especially nonsense that amounts to ground rent, or more correctly to hidden taxes
No.1766530
>>1766520>>Prices for consumer items can include eco-costs>they already do by definition if you use labour values.No.
>unit values already tend to increase as you push harder against the constraintsI wouldn't say that's true even just as a tendency. Change in unit values can be flat and then "infinite" right at the constraint. Something like the neoclassical "standard" of rising marginal cost only happens very near to the constraint, and normally you are not there. You have a buffer stock and within a range unit-cost stays basically same. And in more long-term planning about changing the scale of production, unit values are usually lower at the bigger scale.
>>equilibrium prices>neoclassicals outYou just in this very post made the neoclassical assumption of rising marginal cost as the normal thing. The equilibrium price I refer to would be the cost-covering price, nothing marginal about it.
No.1766568
>>1766530>Change in unit values can be flat and then "infinite" right at the constraintmhm
>normally you are not thereDapprich explicitly relies on being at an optimal point (page 164), which means not only are you near a constraint, you're
on as many constraints as you have variables (disregarding the case where there's more than one optimal point, such as an optimal line or facet). the shadow prices are given by the dual solution to the primal problem
>You have a buffer stock and within a range unit-cost stays basically same. And in more long-term planning about changing the scale of production, unit values are usually lower at the bigger scalethis is true of course, and investment is non-convex so costs can actually decrease per unit there. this also goes whenever there's spare capacity, this being equivalent to being in the interior of the plan polytope. but Dapprich doesn't propose that. he proposes maximizing GDP, which means operating at an extreme point, not in the interior
>You just in this very post made the neoclassical assumption of rising marginal cost as the normal thingmarginal costs do rise in convex planning, as soon as you start hitting constraints. in the interior it is not necessarily the case
>The equilibrium price I refer to would be the cost-covering price, nothing marginal about it.this isn't what shadow prices are though. they have nothing to do with costs
in a socialist economy there are no other costs than labour, and all such costs are ex-post covered. we can choose to price things differently, but the cost is a given
No.1766935
>Production of goods=population*social media trends
Solved your economic planning bros
No.1766971
>>1766935I'm going to give an example
1.36% of zoomers own Jordan sneakers
2.theres 68 million gen z in the us
3.thats 24 million gen z
4.the interest is half of its peak
5.you can draw a trend line and predict how many Jordan sneakers will be needed based on that
Not that'd there ought to be Jordan sneakers in a proper socialist society. I don't know throwing darts.
No.1767069
>>1766935>>1766971my god, he's cracked the code
more seriously, of course demand prediction is important and useful. companies do it all the time
No.1769285
>>1768848He says Sraffa got a linear model in
Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Sraffa says right in its preface:
<No changes in output and (at any rate in Parts I and II) no changes in the proportions in which different means of production are used by an industry are considered, so that no question arises as to the variation or constancy of returns. No.1770569
>>1770479You are not wandering around correcting people about the meaning of a book you haven't read yourself by an author who is a total stranger to you based on what spontaneous vibes you feel from a single sentence?
No.1770651
>>1770569I have read Sraffa, but not PCMC
No.1772704
>>1705686>>1726292An interesting scenario would be using this instead of consumption budgets at a higher stage of communism. Contrary to neoclassical standard assumption, demand at zero price is usually not infinite. So, imagine people making wish lists. Demand for a thing would be the number of units people wish for at zero price, just like with demand at any other price.
But instead of the normal measure of demand for this or that thing, I'd use some other measure,
democratic demand. (This name already annoys me as I'm typing so I'm open to renaming it.) It works like this: Thing A has a higher democratic demand than thing B if more people ask for at least one unit of A than people asking for at least one unit of B. If there is a tie, we look whether there are more people asking for at least two units of A than for two units of B. And if there is still a tie after that, blahblah three units blah and so on.
No.1772707
>>1772704 (me)
Missing two words:
>If there is a tie, we look whether there are more people asking for at least two units of A than for at least two units of B. No.1773668
>>1772704 (me, again)
>An interesting scenario would be using this instead of consumption budgetsOr said more precisely, it could be part of a flexible meta-system, something that provides a system with consumption budgets and prices and also an "escape tunnel" to a "post-budget" system of allocating things for consumption with neither budgets nor prices. But I believe we should be less assumptive with terms. It is not certain that the change will be for the better and permanent, so I prefer the terms
no-budget system and
bridge, since a bridge can usually be crossed in both directions.
There can be salary differentials or equality and the things can have prices or not, meaning there are four basic combinations for an assignment system here. (The combo that might not be intuitively obvious is
salary differentials & no prices. For that, we can treat the consumer population as if it were a 100 times bigger one in the equality model, and we simulate a person with average salary as 100 people and people at lower or higher income as 80 or 120 people or whatever.)
One particular combination is "on" (the one that is actually followed for assigning items), but the results from the other systems can be easily calculated as well simultaneously from the same user inputs, giving individuals an instant impression what a different regulation of consumption assignment would entail for them. This peeking into the alternative systems is possible because these different configurations of the meta-system all have the same user-interface:
For a given pile of stuff people specify in a first phase what items they would like to have regardless of prices and incomes. In a second phase, they get individually presented with a list of things they can approve to have and are then guaranteed to be assigned what they do approve. And here they can also peek at hypothetical approval lists generated from the same first phase inputs by the other assignment systems not currently in use.
(The interface might be criticized as
sporky. If there is broad agreement that a particular configuration is best, this will lead to ideas of optimizing the interface more, possibly reducing the meta-systems ability to show you how alternative systems would allocate the items because of diverging input formats for the first phase.)
No.1778395
not sure if this recent paper by Spyridon Samothrakis has been posted here yet
<Artificial intelligence and modern planned economies: a discussion on methods and institutions
>Interest in computerised central economic planning (CCEP) has seen a resurgence, as there is strong demand for an alternative vision to modern free (or not so free) market liberal capitalism. Given the close links of CCEP with what we would now broadly call artificial intelligence (AI)—e.g. optimisation, game theory, function approximation, machine learning, automated reasoning—it is reasonable to draw direct analogues and perform an analysis that would help identify what commodities and institutions we should see for a CCEP programme to become successful. Following this analysis, we conclude that a CCEP economy would need to have a very different outlook from current market practices, with a focus on producing basic “interlinking” commodities (e.g. tools, processed materials, instruction videos) that consumers can use as a form of collective R &D. On an institutional level, CCEP should strive for the release of basic commodities that empower consumers by having as many alternative uses as possible, but also making sure that a baseline of basic necessities is widely available.
now before Jenny gets irate, Spyros appears to be suggesting that we could use more tools from the so-called AI field, such as reinforcement learning. he also seems to suggest a similarity between RL and deploying certain production techniques at scale (the exploitation side of the exploration-exploitation dialectic). but at the same time he seems to think that planning is only investment planning, and not operations. or I'm reading him wrong. he also lays down more details on his idea of a "lego" economy, especially for basic goods
thoughts?
No.1778451
<Contrary to what popular media or corporate marketing propagate, AI is nowhere close to replacing human labour, as quite a few problems that originally seemed easy elude today’s state of the art. The archetypal failure case is self-driving cars; they have been promised for years, but it looks increasingly unlikely that fully autonomous driving can be solved without resolving the problem of (almost) replicating human intelligence.I read today that Baidu offers self-driving taxis in some Chinese cities (just the last sentence):
https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/470649.baidu-steigert-gewinn-um-169-prozent.htmlSamothrakis writes
tacit knowledge is this:
<it does not exist in a form that can be trivially “algorithmised” and mechanised, as it cannot be verbally or mathematically expressed.In the usage of the term I am familiar with, it is all the knowledge that is not expressed that way, whether it can be or not
<flat-tailed distributionsProbably meant "
fat-tailed".
In the context of a planned economy:
<A loaf of bread satisfies a specific human need. If you ask a factory to create 100 loafs of bread, there are enormous incentives to cut corners. Since no exchange is recorded, there is no reason for the quality of the product to plummet.Probably meant "quality of the product
not to plummet". Well, in the TANS proposal consumers can decide to reduce their demand.
<Under CEP one can trivially imagine scenarios where product quality is monitored, but the whole CEP has an obvious blindspot on the conditions of labour, i.e. what goes on inside a factory. The problem is hard to solve…Allowing people some choice in where they work? Look where they go.
<We would also like product quality to remain high, so the feedback mechanism should come from the users of a product (i.e. not through workers’ councils or voting mechanisms).Author introduces an artificial either/or here. An individual user doesn't have sophisticated testing equipment.
<Agents prefer to be in conditions that would allow them to maximise their future freedom and choices, as they are unaware of what these choices would have to be (…) An example of a powerful and rewarding commodity would be water, as it is necessary for life and can be used no matter what we want to make. A pre-packaged meal with duration of 1 day is a disempowering commodity, as it can only be used to be consumed (i.e. it has one use). In this sense, capital is raw power…Makes sense.
No.1778479
>>1778451>In the usage of the term I am familiar with, it is all the knowledge that is not expressed that way, whether it can be or notfrom an operational standpoint the distinction probably doesn't matter. not that the Austrians care about such things. there may also be information that could potentially be quantified but which are difficult and costly in terms of labour to quantify. we probably want to start with the lower hanging fruit (BOMs, known chemical processes etc)
>Probably meant "fat-tailed".long-tailed?
>Allowing people some choice in where they work? Look where they go.I think this point can be summarized as garbage in garbage out
>>capital is raw power…>Makes sense.you might want to know that Samothrakis is gesturing towards our favorite reactionary academics, Bichler & Nitzan
No.1778488
>>1770651Politically Correct Managerial Class?
No.1778861
>>1778479>>Allowing people some choice in where they work? Look where they go.>I think this point can be summarized as garbage in garbage out?
>you might want to know that Samothrakis is gesturing towards our favorite reactionary academics, Bichler & NitzanLiterally mentioned at the end of the sentence the quote "capital is raw power" is from, so no need to say that.
>>1778488Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities.
No.1779034
>>1778861>?I mean if you don't put in stuff about conditions of labour, for example that there should be enough OSHA people etc, then of course you'll have a blind spot regarding that
No.1783819
The unfinished alternative-society simulator "Dissent on Mars" now has a free (as in beer) demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2138560/What does it play like: I'm on a toaster running Linux so I have no idea.
No.1784038
>>1783819something like this really ought to be free software
No.1784079
>>1784038I guess the devs want to eat
It's just so ugly though I dunno if I can be bothered to try play it
No.1784151
Tell me why I should prefer communism from the perspective of a freedom-loving person.
My position:
>I don't want to live in a labor credit economy.
>I want to live in an economy where my purchasing power appreciates.
>I want to open a business easily and not be burdened with regulations and taxes.
>I want to decide my customers and employees.
>I don't want government to shut down my company because "it's not fair that I own a company"
>Im a poorfag but I want to have wealth and the american dream.
>I don't want to live in a small flat stacked atop other small flats and be forced to use public transit.
>I love suburbs and SUV's
>I want to drill oil in my backyard without government intervention
>HOW THE HELL WOULD AN ECONOMY WORK WITHOUT PRICES?
>HOW THE HELL WOULD LABOR VALUES BE RELEVANT WHEN NOT ALL WORK IS THE SAME?
>SOME PEOPLE DESERVE MORE THAN OTHERS.
>if someone spent more effort to master a difficult subject, they should be rewarded.
>You need barriers for difficult fields so that only professionals pass
>I HATE MASS-PRODUCED GARBAGE
>Feudal shops produced high-quality products. Because they cared, that was real capitalism. Nowadays capitalism has been corrupted by the socialist profit motive (i.e. stock market shareholders) so they all moved to PRC to maximize profits.
>We need to shut down financial markets and reintroduce inefficiencies in markets to reaffirm private ownership free from influence of shareholders.
>ITS MY COMPANY AND I WON'T BOW DOWN TO SHAREHOLDER DEMANDS.
<I LOVE WEALTH
<I LOVE WEALTH
<I LOVE WEALTH
<I HATE POVERTY
<I HATE POVERTY
<I HATE POVERTY
I LOVE FREEDOM
Enlighten me commies.
No.1784153
>>1784151TLDR: How will I have economic freedom in cybercommunist planned economy?
No.1784161
>>1784151Capitalism is the opposite of freedom. The only place you have freedom in this world is where the government has stood against capitalism. I grew up next to a national forest so I'm used to having space on the Earth where you can be anytime day or night and nobody can tell you you are tresspassing. Now I live in Texas and for 1000s of square miles there is not one square foot of land you can stand on they can't tell you're tresspassing except for the government roads and sidewalks.
No.1784167
>>1784161Where did you live before Texas?
No.1784181
>>1784167Los Angeles. Those mountains in the back are pretty much100% public land.
They have some limits about how long you can stay somewhere, but you're allowed to camp anywhere there for free. Definitely able to walk anywhere, anytime, day or night. No curfew.
No.1784190
>>1784181So why is california such a mess and a bunch of people are moving to texas? Wouldn't california be a freer place to live?
No.1784213
>>1784190California was developed before Texas because it's way nicer climate wise. Well actually only the select areas near the coast LA/OC, San Diego, The Bay. Most of California is as unlivable as Texas probably worse actually.
No.1784225
>>1784213And Texas has a shitload of land too obviously. Probably better water situation too but I haven't looked into it.
Texas they're just building whole cities out of nothing for the past few decades. Most everywhere you go it's entirely brand new. Brand new shopping centers, brand new housing developments, brand new townhouses.
They were doing the same in LA/LAish area in my lifetime like in San Bernadino and Santa Clarita area. At that point tho you're paying a premium to live in the sticks anyways.
No.1784238
>>1784079there is no contradiction between free software and getting to eat. you can sell free software just fine
No.1784390
>>1784238For what price? 0 cents?
You know food doesn't cost 0 cents right?
No.1784400
>>1784392Regardless if it could or not, private jets are an ecological disaster and it should be legal and even mandatory to shoot them down.
No.1784418
>>1784400>Planet-worshipping poverty cultist oblivious to his entire existence being an ecological disasterGo live in a cave with your beloved nature while I feed the plants CO2 from my private jet
No.1784420
>>1784151I've remove the most egregiously irrelevant, poorly read, boyhood liberal whining
>I want to live in an economy where my purchasing power appreciates.then you're in luck because socialism means at least the doubling of value going to workers, since the rate of exploitation (or "work tax" if you will) sits at ~100% in the West
>I want to open a business easily and not be burdened with regulations and taxes.there's no contradiction between a cooprative and a planned sector. in fact we should expect the two to coexist for possibly hundreds of years
>I want to decide my customershow? in my business customers come to me, not the other way around
>and employees.good luck trying to hire people to exploit when there's a well-establish non-exploiting sector
>I don't want government to shut down my company because "it's not fair that I own a company"that's not how any of this works
>Im a poorfag but I want to have wealth and the american dream.behold the average ancap bootlicker
>I don't want to live in a small flat stacked atop other small flats and be forced to use public transit.you'll probably want to look up that thread on here about Stalinist architecture and how the USSR didn't have to go with boring khrushchevkas. also you can have a car if you want
>HOW THE HELL WOULD AN ECONOMY WORK WITHOUT PRICES?no one has said there wouldn't be prices
>HOW THE HELL WOULD LABOR VALUES BE RELEVANT WHEN NOT ALL WORK IS THE SAME?no one has said there wouldn't be wage differentials. but from an accounting standpoint, we still have to account for labour time expended in production so that things add up
>SOME PEOPLE DESERVE MORE THAN OTHERS. even Marx would agree with this (Gothakritik). different people have different needs. for example a father needs more resources than a bachelor since the former has children to care for
>if someone spent more effort to master a difficult subject, they should be rewarded.normative nonsense. we can pay people for vocational training rather than them having to take on debt as we do now
>You need barriers for difficult fields so that only professionals passyou mean like a licensing system? you just said you hated regulations. which is it?
>I HATE MASS-PRODUCED GARBAGEtyped on a mass-produced keyboard or touchscreen. we should have well-made things though, I agree. down with planned obsolesence!
>Feudal shops produced high-quality products. Because they cared, that was real capitalism. Nowadays capitalism has been corrupted by the socialist profit motive (i.e. stock market shareholders) so they all moved to PRC to maximize profits.not real capitalism!
>We need to shut down financial markets and reintroduce inefficiencies in markets to reaffirm private ownership free from influence of shareholders. absolutely utopian. I would suggest you start a business and learn how the economy actually works
>ITS MY COMPANY AND I WON'T BOW DOWN TO SHAREHOLDER DEMANDS.good like attracting capital
<I LOVE WEALTH<I LOVE WEALTH<I LOVE WEALTH<I HATE POVERTY<I HATE POVERTY<I HATE POVERTY<I LOVE FREEDOMwe are in agreement on these things. communists also love wealth, hate poverty and love freedom
>>1784400we could have private jets, but the full cost of owning one would be hard to bear without exploitation, especially when the environmental impact is fully incorporated into the value of said private jet
we could imagine for example clubs that own private jets together, much like pilot clubs work today. all that is necessary is that they pay their share of the actual cost of the jet in question
No.1784427
>>1784420>good likegood luck*
No.1784430
>>1784390you know that there's an entire commercial ecosystem attached to free software, right? I make my living off it
No.1784523
>>1784420>then you're in luck because socialism means at least the doubling of value going to workers, since the rate of exploitation (or "work tax" if you will) sits at ~100% in the WestBut I cannot accumulate wealth if my labor credits expire.
>there's no contradiction between a cooprative and a planned sector. in fact we should expect the two to coexist for possibly hundreds of yearsI don't want to share my company with a newfag that just arrived. I need him to be a wagie for like 5 years until I decide to make him a partner.
>how? in my business customers come to me, not the other way aroundI want to be able to discriminate customers and employees. Also, what business you run fren?
>good luck trying to hire people to exploit when there's a well-establish non-exploiting sectorAll work is exploitative. "surplus value" exists in every economy. The only thing that doesn't have surplus value is me digging rocks with bare hands because i can buy back a rock I sold after 1 trade. People don't want to be salaried bureaucrats and they want good rewards for work.
>that's not how any of this worksIt was like this in every communist country
>behold the average ancap bootlickerpot calling the porcelain vase black
>you'll probably want to look up that thread on here about Stalinist architecture and how the USSR didn't have to go with boring khrushchevkas. also you can have a car if you wantStalinist architecture was the exception, it was grandiose public buildings but people lived in shacks before the Khruschev construction boom of 60s. The choice was live in shack or live in box flat. So there was not much of a choice. If Stalinist architecture was more accessible to average people, sure it would be based.
>no one has said there wouldn't be pricesYes they did
>no one has said there wouldn't be wage differentials. but from an accounting standpoint, we still have to account for labour time expended in production so that things add upYes they did. Everyone gets paid 1 hour labor credit for 1 hour of work independent of the nature of work.
>even Marx would agree with this (Gothakritik). different people have different needs. for example a father needs more resources than a bachelor since the former has children to care forI'm ok with this but not my argument. I mean that my work is more valuable than some other work.
>normative nonsense. we can pay people for vocational training rather than them having to take on debt as we do nowYou need to pay them after they finish learning. I need them to earn more when they get a job.
>you mean like a licensing system? you just said you hated regulations. which is it?I mean rigorous testing before accepting into programs, nothing to do with stupid government licensing
>typed on a mass-produced keyboard or touchscreen. we should have well-made things though, I agree. down with planned obsolesence!Not like I have a choice. I dont want to live in a shack.
>not real capitalism!Feudalism was real capitalism.
>absolutely utopian. I would suggest you start a business and learn how the economy actually worksGo to hell. Your communist utopia is the real utopia. You cant even come to agreement on how to run a communist economy.
>good luck attracting capitalOnce we get rid of bankers and financial regulations, capital will become cheaper.
>we are in agreement on these things. communists also love wealth, hate poverty and love freedomthen why do communists worship poverty, hate wealth and make fun of freedom loving people?
No.1784526
>>1784523Thanks for reminding us why gulags are a necessity
No.1784532
>>1784441autistic liberals get the bullet too.
No.1784540
>>1784535<no need to kill something that kills itselfI hope Im not messing up the thread. No communist managed to convince me that communism will lead to an increase in living standards. They even point to china, only for another communist to say that china is not real communism. (they were dongists or something)
No.1784546
>>1784543Tell me your understanding of the ECP.
No.1784549
>>1784546The Soviet union put price controls on consumer goods those are known to cause shortages. Computers can calculate the supply and demand. I can't give you a math equation I have my own ideas of how that could be achieved like using the internet spy infrastructure that is currently used for advertising in search engines and social media.
No.1784560
>>1784543There is no economic calculation problem. The notion that there is just liberalism.
No.1784562
>>1784549>NSA is so Based!<I don't want that internet spy infrastructure.Why were there price controls? Who owned the stores and dealers?
No.1784564
>>1784560You can also have rationing but it's a primitive form of economic planning
No.1784565
>>1784562The government did ofcourse.
>Why were the price controlsTo control inflation
No.1784568
>>1784562Don't pretend you actually clean the cookies on your PC.
No.1784588
>>1784540>No communist managed to convince me that communism will lead to an increase in living standardsit literally did, and it was widely accepted until the late 70's or so that the great strides made in the USSR between 1930-1960 or so were the direct result of planning. the Soviet economy grew immensely while the West suffered through the Depression
as for China, under Mao life expectancy grew ½-1 year per year for years on end:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNLE00INCHN>dongists:DDD
No.1784620
>>1784565So why didn't they supply the stuff that was in shortage? If you control the whole supply chain wouldn't that be easier?
>Capitalism supplies a > b [stuff in stores]>Communism supplies [mega complicated equation] still shortage>>1784568I try but it was a political statement. I want them to sell phones with removable batteries again. I hate the NSA.
>>1784588explain this then.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNLE00INRUS No.1784628
>>1784620uyghur NSA is a drop in the ocean of the botnet, most of cookies have a commercial purpose.
No.1784638
>>1784620you mean how it took 20 years to recover from the 90's?
No.1785007
>>1785003Welll yes under socialism(communism) you do not want people to save because that could be turned into capital. Money is for consumption.
No.1785012
>>1785007and I should support this because…
No.1785016
>>1785012Because as a result everyone would get more money.
No.1785101
>>1785003>>1785007I've always found expiring labour vouchers/credit to be one of Cockshott's weirder proposals. Labour credit doesn't circulate anyway, so I'm not sure how it could be used to accumulate capital. Though it's been a long time since I read Towards a New Socialism, so there may have been another reason for it that I have forgotten.
>>1785012It's one idea proposed by a handful of people, if people living in a socialist society didn't want it, then it wouldn't be implemented.
No.1785104
>>1785101It's simple. If the labor vouchers don't expire they can be hoarded even if they're destroyed upon use. It'd take longer to hoard bit it could be hoarded nonetheless. Better safe than sorry.
Also unless the world becomes socialist at the same time(which could be if robotics replaces labor) there'd be a need for a harder currency for international trade maybe.
No.1785108
>>1785104I've been reading back over the savings section of TaNS again, and I don't think this is the actual reason. He mentions that accumulation of lbour credit would "disrupt the plan", but he actually proposes a mechanism for people to be able to convert vouchers into savings. It's in the Macroeconomic Planning chapter.
https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf No.1785112
>>1785108What would be the point of savings? Just buy what you need. There'd still be pensions I assume.
No.1785115
>>1785112Purchasing goods of higher value such as a car I would assume. You're right in noting that there would be less reason to save over all though, If there are generous pensions and housing is social, then two of the biggest reasons for saving have been eliminated.
No.1785119
>>1785115I wanna live in my own house.
Social housing should be a temporary measure to accumulate for private house construction
No.1785120
>>1785115Cars should be discouraged anyways. Should self driving become a thing there'd be less of a reason for them to private and mostly use for interstate travel where its impractical to build trains.
No.1785122
>>1785119If you live in the house and you can do whatever you want with it it's yours…
No.1785125
>>1785120It was just an example of a high value good, I assume there'd be other things to save for (such as expensive modifications to your apartment/house).
>>1785119Social housing under socialism wouldn't really be the same thing as shitty housing projects projects under capitalism.
>>1785122This.
No.1785126
>>1785125There ought to be home owners association for each neighborhood. If you want to fix your house talk to the HOA.
No.1785127
>>1785120>>1785122>>1785125I like my SUV. Also i dont hate on commie blocks because the alternative was siberian weather in shacks. But be honest guys, would you live in appartments where you have to smell the pinoy cooking upstairs? No scientific advancement can stop the pervasive smell of pinoy cooking.
No.1785131
>>1785127It's irrational to believe there'd be commie blocks when there's more houses than people in most countries. Should more housing be built why would it be commie blocks. There's no urgency in the present day like back in the day. It'd be a while before we even have to worry about lack of housing.
No.1785136
>>1785127I don't see why housing would need to be commie blocks, they were built because of a housing shortage in the soviet union (and were actually only meant to be temporary). We aren't going to bulldoze the suburbs to build inferior housing.
That said I've spend most of my adult life living in shitty apartments. I'd settle for not having to pay a landlord, and have decent air-conditioning and insulation.
No.1785292
>>1784662>Is frustrating that nobody here seems to have expertise in this subjectwhat, linear algebra? plenty of posters ITT know it
No.1785295
>>1785292LinAlg as the professionals say
Where the fuck am I?
No.1785303
>>1785292Just because you know linear algebra doesn't mean it makes you an expert in a subject that requires linear algebra
No.1785390
>>1785007>you do not want people to save because that could be turned into capitalthat's not how capital works. moreover some schemes suggest rewarding people for saving, because those savings can be used for investments that lead to more productive MoPs. both Cockshott and Zachariah have suggested this IIRC
>>1785127there's no reason we couldn't mass produce individual houses. in fact prefab houses are a thing. homeownership also tends to be higher in socializing economies. cuba and china come to mind. in the USSR plenty of people had dachas in addition to say an apartment. rents were also incredibly low - too low according to people like Vladimir Kossov
>>1785295>>1785303 No.1785410
also
>>1785303 is right in that no institutional knowledge for this stuff exists today. it's something we have to consciously grow
No.1785430
>>1785127I live in a siberian town in a commie block built in late 50s. I don't smell anyone's cooking because even back then they knew what vents are for. Just don't build walls out of cardboard. Appartments are much better because htey free the space for communal places like parks and stuff.
Unless you specifically try to make a photo where appartment block looks shitty, it's a great place to live
No.1785431
>>1785101May be money expire with products that were consumed or were degraded, if not consumed. What produced is consumed same year. If you did not consume and saved money, the not consumed product degraded. Next year, same numer of products produced, but since you've saved money, there is more money than products to consume.
No.1786445
>>1785431>What produced is consumed same year. If you did not consume and saved money, the not consumed product degraded. Next year, same numer of products produced, but since you've saved money, there is more money than products to consume.Yeah i think this is the actual reason for expiring labour tokens. Still, as
>>1785390 has mentioned C&C do provide a mechanism for saving. I wonder why such a mechanism isn't meant to produce the same result with regard to the inflation of labour tokens.
No.1786644
>>1785430Those are not commie blocks tho. Sorru man, I like my suburbs but I think we can do better. Im a wide open field type of guy who wants to put his SUV on a bullet train to travel to big city and I want this big city to be car-free but with moscow metro style trams and stuff. Like in that Tucker video.
No.1787175
>>1784523>Yes they did. Everyone gets paid 1 hour labor credit for 1 hour of work independent of the nature of work.Different anon here. You can work more or less hours. You also have to keep in mind that there's some variation in these hypothetical systems, for example in TANS they proposed 3 different grades of hours worked based on some average performance. It's kind of pointless to talk about these things if you don't seem to have a stable definition of capitalism (referring to that first post).
No.1787339
>>1787175Why is it that capitalism is so easy but communism is so hard? Everything in capitalism revolves around profit (an actual tangible variable). Everything in communism revolves around abstractions that are not quantifiable. You are proposing a system so complex that nobody can come to a definition of what communism means materially and yet
>i dont have stable definition of capitalismI do actually:
>private ownership of everything>private people decide on everything>each persons subjective decisions collide, the truth comes out and so on>Truth can only come from post-factum interactions>You cannot plan for truth>Only this interaction between private persons yields the discovery of truthPlease learn praxeology, you need it for communism to work.
No.1787345
>>1785003Update:
After thinking, the calculation c*delta*M1 is correct, but the way it is used would imply that delta*M1+delta*M2+delta*M3 = 1, which is a very strawmanned assumption.
A more correct formula would imply that c is an endogenous variable that is not properly defined in the formula and yet treated as exogenous.
No.1787359
>>1787339Because capitalism is decentralized complexity whereas communism is decentralized complexity.
Not that capitalism is not complex with it's high speed trading and derivatives and what have you.
No.1787361
>>1787359Communism is centralized complexity typo
No.1787366
>>1787361>Centralized complexity. Maybe that's the problem. You are asking too much of people. People who when finding out about centralized rules, purposefully begin breaking them.
No.1787367
>>1787339why is it that feudalism is so easy but capitalist is so hard? everything in feudalism revolves around reciprocal legal and military obligations (an actual tangible arrangement). everything in capitalism revolves around the value form that hides these obligations. you are proposing a system devoid of divine order
No.1787374
>>1787367>implying I am against feudalismMind you, feudalism was real capitalism
No.1787681
>>1787339>Why is it that capitalism is so easy but communism is so hard? Everything in capitalism revolves around profit (an actual tangible variable). Everything in communism revolves around abstractions that are not quantifiable. You are proposing a system so complex that nobody can come to a definition of what communism means materiallyWhat C&C propose in TANS is significantly less complex that the actual implementation of capitalism that we live under. Capitalism only looks simple on paper when you're talking about market exchange, private property and capital accumulation. There's an incredible amount of emergent complexity that results from these things (stock markets especially).
No.1787689
>>1787681stock markets aren't
real capitalism
No.1787690
>>1787681Why are we trying to figure out how to do capital allocation when companies like blackrock do so automatically with algorithms already?
60% of trading is done with computers automatically…
>Capitalism is le simple No.1788012
>>1726292 &
>>1772704 &
>>1773668(me, again)
How should the allocation system be named that
directly works with DERA tables and wish lists only and with neither budgets nor prices? Can someone here come up with something that can get abbreviated to CAL or NGED?
No.1788220
>>1787681>>1787690I already explained many times how I hate financialization and you keep ignoring the essence: stock market is communism. The whole idea of publicly traded companies is communism. Why was Chick-fil-a able to resist the woke crowd? Because the founder on his deathbed didn't want the company to become publicly traded. Only true private enterprise is capitalism. In this sense, feudalism is also real capitalism that was replaced by retards who thought they were better capitalists but ended up destroying the substrate that reproduced them. the "glorious" revolution and the french revolution were giant mistakes in history.
No.1788224
>>1788220The stock market is capitalism
The stock market dates back to the dutch east indie company during the Renaissance
No.1788228
>>1788224Dutch east india company. Whatever.
Btw did you know that company was more profitable than the entire us stock market today?
No.1788231
>>1788220Award for the single most retarded post in the history of this imageboard. Congrats.
No.1788248
>>1788220I will add that I like this anon's honesty. it's not often you see petty bourgeois aspirations expressed this clearly. I like to call it the Smithian fantasy, that an economy could be nothing but petty manufacturers, merchants and so on, all sovereign and where success is entirely due to personal grit. historical reality is something different of course. as Dragulescu and Yakovenko have demonstrated, such a state of affairs thermalizes
No.1788262
>>1788224Sure. "Capitalism". The Soviet Union had a monopoly on foreign trade. Does that mean it's capitalism?
Also, based Soviets for defaulting on foreign debt in 1918. Bankers and financiers deserved it. Sad they still needed foreign investment from britain and france. It would have been epic if they did communism without foreign debt.
>>1788231Go to hell retard.
>>1788248Maybe if you positioned communism as something that could realize that fantasy, people would support it. You commies look at what bad stuff "capitalism" is doing and are like: "we gonna do it better and faster".
<"capitalism" destroying private businesses>We will destroy all of it for PrOgReSs! <"capitalism" destroying families>We will do that too! <"capitalism" destroying religion>We will destroy it even more!<"capitalism" destroying freedom>What is freedom?Now you understand why a fascist revolution is infinitely more likely than a communist one? With friends like you who needs enemies.
No.1788278
>>1788262Your religion is just a way for you to ennoble poverty, just like how the South used religion to justify slavery, your family is just a way for you to pass on your legacy, which is why most right wing leaders cheated on their spouses or abused their kids, and your private property is exclusively for you and your cronies; the masses cannot have private property, otherwise they will tend to their property instead of working for you as cheap labour and since actual private ownership by the masses over their land will obstruct businesses from accumulating Capital and exploitating the land (you notice that private property advocates always try their best to restrict other people from having property, by imposibg arbitrary eligibility limits). Of course a fascist revolution is more likely, since it is reinforcement of the Status Quo and all the powerful entities that benefit from said status quo.
No.1788290
>>1788278Me:
>I want people to have propertyCommunist:
>"capitalists" are destroying other people's property claims. I will destroy property as a concept! So progressive!Be honest, you don't want people to have property. That's why you constantly fetishize commie blocks and public transit. For you it's not enough to build said blocks and transit. You want to forbid private homes and cars or make them really inaccessible for average people.
You hate religion because it gives people a collective identity. You want atomized individuals so they become robots with predictable demand. You cannot stand the beautiful irrationality of free people trying to make the best of life.
No.1788294
>>1788290Karl Marx didn't hate religion that was technically Bakunin. Not fond of the mind bug aspect of anarchism… Anarchism is kind of creepy.
Anyways it seems weird to me that people think there would be even be a need to build commie blocks when most countries have more houses than people I think. How many commie blocks do you see in former east Germany for example.
No.1788297
>>1788294Okay maybe east Germany did have commie blocks
Cuba doesn't though er
No.1788304
>>1788294I don't have issues with commie blocks as a necessity. I have issues with them as an end goal. Glass tower 1 bedroom condo apartments that get turned into communal apartments because of stupid govt and big business is the 21st century commie block. Even WSJ made a puff piece on it when they interviewed young students and they be like "oh our parents lived in socialist countries, now we have to live like them because rent is too high".
Woman, what the soviets did out of necessity, your "capitalism" is doing as an objective.
No.1788343
>>1788304Dumbest fag on this site and that's saying something.
No.1788349
>>1788343Elaborate. I always back up my statements with reasons.
No.1789133
This thread sure has been derailed.
>>1788349Not that anon, but you're all over the place. You've literally stated that feudalism is capitalism (a society in which there were massive fucking guilds regulating the trades, and where market relations took a backseat to social obligations). You've also said that publicly traded corporations are communist - which is straight up bizarre because the stock market is the first thing to go when property is socialised.
No.1789183
>>1789133socialism is when people cooperate and stuff
No.1790436
>>1789133>market relations took a backseat to social obligationsExactly, that is how capitalism is preserved. If market is god, then it will eat itself.This is not so much a theoretical mishap as a historical one.
>Based soviets for defaulting on loans and shutting down stock market No.1790799
>>1790206Destroyed in seconds
No.1790827
>>1790790>For economic planning to succeed we just need to find the right aesthetic.What the hell went wrong with this episode?
No.1790836
>>1790827exploring aesthetics can be interesting, but yeah - the problem is actually implementing this stuff, not making it look pretty
No.1790888
>>1790836The German Sonic fan didn't even come up with a new or even remixed aesthetic
>Frutiger Aero n' shieeeetFrutiger Aero was the utopian aesthetic of capitalism overcoming the contradiction of environmental damage. His exhibit is literally worse than a redditor's solar punk mood board.
This man has brought shame on Germany, General intellect unit, Zoomers, and 7 generations of his ancestors.
No.1791050
>>1790838This one works:
https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/>>1790888Where should we look for design inspiration? I say Otl Eicher and Jef Raskin.
No.1791077
>>1790436>Exactly, that is how capitalism is preserved. If market is god, then it will eat itself.At this point I'm wondering how/why you're an ancap and not say, a mutualist.
No.1791305
>>1791077Because I don't understand mutualism. I don't even know what it is to be honest. And I hold the primacy of the individual. I like freedom you see.
No.1791317
>>1791050BLAME!
>But BLAME! is post-apocalypticOf course it is. Stories as successful commodities must conform to capitalist realism, that it's easier to image the end of the world as the end of capitalism.
But image what it would have been like to live in the megastructure while it was still under human control.
No.1792003
>>1791305>Because I don't understand mutualism.I'm not going to derail this thread further into a discussion of mutualism, but you could always read a book about it:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/philosophy/index.htm No.1792208
Post-growth economy is such a stupid term. It's for the ecology-obsessed what balanced budget is for the inflation-obsessed.
A proxy value is an approximation of the value you care about. Never measure a proxy value unless you have a reason. Never target a proxy value unless you have a reason. It might be much cheaper to measure a proxy value than taking a direct measure, that would be a reason. Don't just avoid the direct way by default. What's the matter with you, are you too shy? Economic growth in how mainstream economists understand it correlates strongly with pollution. But economic growth is not the same as pollution. Economic shrinking together with increased pollution is not an impossibility.
We need hard limits on pollution. We will see what will happen within these limits.
No.1792332
>>1792208most degrowthers have a non-Marxian understanding of growth. in Marxism growth just means accumulation. we can accumulate in a direction compatible with environmental constraints. in fact the severity of the climate situation suggests that the rate of investment must
increase to combat global heating, not decrease
No.1792564
>>1792332>we can accumulate in a direction compatible with environmental constraints. in fact the severity of the climate situation suggests that the rate of investment must increase to combat global heating, not decreaseyou don't need marxism for that as most mainstream center left socdems and liberals agree with this and want green investments
No.1792759
>>1792564green investments do jack shit as far as CO2 removal is concerned. you can't invoost without a comprehensive in-kind planning system in place
No.1792848
>>1792759>green investments do jack shit as far as CO2 removal is concerned. you can't invoost without a comprehensive in-kind planning system in placedeveloping the Green MOP and carbon removal equipment technology under capitalism is objectively progressive
No.1792875
Why is it always shitty solar cells and windmills instead of effective nuclear energy?
No.1792890
>>1792848maybe. it very much depends. without a planning system in place it is nothing but subjectivist speculation
>>1792875PVs are fine. take the transmission pill
this too is a question we need a planning system in place to answer. there is a tension (pun intended) between transmission and local generation No.1794352
Is Marx's Fragment on Machines discussed much on these threads? I'm not a regular participant so I wouldn't know. If not, it should be seriously and earnestly discussed. This uncompleted feature of his work presaged the digital economy and the development of AI we directly experience today. Reading it now I am shocked at how prescient it is. Marx was literally right bros.
https://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf No.1794815
Cockshott was interviewed in The Platypus Affiliated Society
https://platypus1917.org/2024/03/01/you-cant-leave-it-all-to-the-market-an-interview-with-paul-cockshott/>we formed what was essentially a Bordigist split influenced by Gwyn Williams, a Marxist historian from Wales who was familiar with Bordigaleftcom Cockshott confirmed
>no, you can’t actually measure surplus value! You can’t measure organic composition of capital because these are defined in terms of units of labor timePaul veering amusingly close to the crying zoomer wojak meme
I also see Paul is continuing to push AI nonsense
No.1795189
>>1794815>I also see Paul is continuing to push AI nonsenseWhat exactly do you mean by AI nonsense? He literally states that the planning methods outlined in TANS aren't considered AI by current standards.
No.1795360
>>1794815>Paul veering amusingly close to the crying zoomer wojak memeI don't understand what you mean by this. Do you believe his position is like the guy on the left?
<no, you can’t actually measure surplus value! You can’t measure organic composition of capital because these are defined in terms of units of labor timeHe paraphrases that as a
position he disagrees with and then says:
<You can do concrete economic statistics, in terms of surplus value, organic composition, etc.>I also see Paul is continuing to push AI nonsenseWhat he says:
<The planning method that we proposed in Towards a New Socialism and “Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques” uses what in the 80s were called “artificial intelligence techniques,” but you wouldn’t call them that now; they’ve become standard computing techniques. These deep neural networks are all based on large linear algebra systems. In a sense, they’re analogous mathematics, but we were thinking of it at a considerably smaller scale — smaller than that which is being solved now by artificial intelligence techniques. You don't need such huge computational resources for planning as you do for a lot of AI. No.1795379
>>1795189>What exactly do you mean by AI nonsense? He literally states that the planning methods outlined in TANS aren't considered AI by current standards.it's an interior point method. I mean the stuff further down the interview. but perhaps I misread that as Paul implying we can do "AI" because it's all linear algebra anyway. but NNs aren't linear transforms, convexity and understandability goes out the window
in other contexts Paul seems willing to extend personhood to "AI". there's an interview (I forget which one) on his channel where he seems to suggest AI can have feelings
>>1795360>He paraphrases that as a position he disagrees withyes that's my point. Paul is pointing out that his critics are the crying wojak
No.1795381
>>1795379s/interior point method/barrier method/
No.1795424
>>1795379>but perhaps I misread that as Paul implying we can do "AI" because it's all linear algebra anyway.I'm pretty sure you misread him.
No.1796199
>>1795424actually it's more his recent rexeets babbling about ChatGPT being AGI
No.1796207
>>1796199WTF, you got a link?
No.1796233
>>1794352Marx appears to anthropomorphize machinery
>it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker>The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite>The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefullythis is all nonsense. machines cannot act with purpose. machines are not subjects. it is rather the bourgeoisie that act through the machinery, which thus
seems to have a will of its own
>The hand tool makes the worker independent – posits him as proprietor. Machinery – as fixed capital – posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated.this is by no means necessary. there is reason it can't be the opposite. independent manufacturers can afford CNC machines, and wage labourers may well work with hand tools. cheap CNC machines of course didn't exist in Marx' time
>As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks downis this really Marx suggesting that if labour is shifted away from large industry and manual labour then exploitation seizes to be? surely it isn't..?
>>1796215>a student is no different from a glorified Markov chain No.1796280
>>1796233>machines cannot act with purpose.Thermostat.
>wage labourers may well work with hand toolsMarx isn't saying they can't.
>rest of postIn that text Marx uses the term "machine" in a specific way so that what he says about them is true :P (I'm in general not a fan of recycling ordinary terms to now have specific meaning, because it leads to complains from skimming people that something is a wrong conclusion, when that stuff isn't even meant as conclusion, it's exposition of the specific meaning.)
No.1796286
>>1796233> student is no different from a glorified Markov chainCoulda told you that 20 years ago anon!
No.1796779
>>1796233>a student is no different from a glorified Markov chainI imagine spending a large portion of your life marking shitty student reports could give that impression.
>this is all nonsense. machines cannot act with purpose. machines are not subjects. it is rather the bourgeoisie that act through the machinery, which thus seems to have a will of its ownDefine "purpose". Also the bourgeoisie don't act through shit, it's the workers that control machines.
No.1797003
>>1796779>it's the workers that control machinesdo they? if the workers decide to start using the machines for their own purpose rather than the machines' owners' purpose, what happens then? sure the workers "control" the machines in the most base sense. but as far as the relations of production are concerned, it is the bourgeoisie that controls the workers, and the machines are a mere appendage of the bourgeoisie/capital
it may be tempting to for example believe that a thermostat controls the temperature of a room, but it doesn't.
I control the thermostat, and therefore
I control the temperature of the room
>>1796783I am well aware that machines are dead labour
No.1799060
Anyone read Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani? could be a useful read.
No.1799061
>>1799060>could be a useful readHow so. The thread is about how to do economic planning. If productivity of making X is high enough, there is no need to carefully plan how to use X responsibly. If productivity of making just about anything is high enough, there is no point to economic planning anymore. From what I heard about Bastani's book, it just postulates such a scenario will happen, without any basis.
No.1799072
>>1799061I've not heard that before.
It's a reading suggestion, and am looking for others opinions, thanks.
No.1799481
>>1799061I'd say there's still a need to plan. no matter the length of the working week you still want to make reasonable use of the available labour power
another way to put this is that there will never be full automation. you still need people to maintain and program the machinery
No.1805164
does anyone have the pdf of classical econophysics? I have it at home, but I'm on vacation right now and need to look something up. would be much appreciated
No.1805615
>>1797003If the thermostat is automatic, you control it only by setting its initial state. Otherwise it controls the temperature by itself. Your labor input is thus limited to setting it up, but not running it.
No.1806018
>>1805615>Otherwise it controls the temperature by itselfthis is teleologically sus imo. but in some sense we could take either position, axiomatically. we can define "control" to be a labour process or not, and argue from there. but Marx makes a distinction between work and labour, and I think a similar distinction is to be made here
>Your labor input is thus limited to setting it up, but not running itwords written by someone who has never had to service a thermostat
No.1806125
>>1806018>If you have an automated thermostat, the SNLT for controlling temperature is reduced as opposed to manually controlling the furnace, checking thermometer etc.>Improving design reduces need for servicing and thus also SNLT.>>1806009Cockshott lost me when he endorsed Assembly Theory.
Quantum computers are total nonsense. They are analog random number generators.
No.1806176
>>1806125>Improving design reduces need for servicing and thus also SNLTyep
>Quantum computers are total nonsense. They are analog random number generators.the same is true of all analog systems. what we are interested in, in quantum computing, is distributions of these random numbers
personally I am skeptical that quantum supremacy is possible, and the reason why boils down to noise and the limited number of times you can perform any measurement and get meaningful results out of them in the face of drift
No.1806191
>>1806176That channel has interesting vids on quantum theory and relativity. I take everything with a grain of salt so I will not comment on relativity since i don't know it. However the quantum theory vids make sense. Just how the LVT was abandoned for political reasons in economics, quantum theory was brought in to deal with aether problems (also economically related).
<that stargate sg-1 episode where an advanced alien race solved quantum physics and integrated it with the rest of physics to capt. Carter's amazement. No.1806217
One of the conditions for equilibrium in many marxian economic theories is profit-rate equalization across sectors. It is often argued that since this doesn't happen, something must be wrong with those marxian theories.
There are many responses but one I haven't yet seen proposed is that the differentials in profit rates might be on account of "tunneling." This is a business practice wherein a capitalist who is under scrutiny for high profits in a critical sector will disguise their profits as costs. It is rampant in healthcare in the United States, see
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32258 . A typical example: a private nursing home is owned by a capitalist who also owns a real estate firm. The capitalist has the nursing home sell its property to the firm, only to rent it back. The nursing home's margin of profit now appears slimmer, its cost of constant capital now seemingly higher.
Does anyone know of detailed forensic accounting that tries to account for profit rate nonequalization via tunneling? E.g., large private equity firms engaged in "diversifying" their holdings nominally to reduce risk while actually funneling profits into the sectors with the most lax regulation.
No.1806465
>>1806217But can't you just turn that around and argue that more often super profits are camouflaged as normal profits, meaning actual profit rates are actually more dispersed still? So the model with profits equalizing would be even more wrong than what it looks like at first glance.
Take on the view of the capitalist with the high profits: High profits no matter where you make them lead to interest from other capitalists in your part of the economy, interest that you may not want (more competition); and it invites interest from government (coming up with some special tax just for what you are doing), and last but not least, interest from your own employees. They will be more bold if they think you won't bolt.
No.1806537
>>1806217I don't see why we need complicated theories like that to explain profit rate dispersion
different industries have different OCC. because what goes into commodities has a technical character, no amount of accounting tricks (moving money capital around) can get you away from that. if the present technical structure of the economy requires large amounts of inputs with high OCC, that is simply a fact of life even Porky has to live with. it is only if OCC can somehow be lowered in those industries, or if they can somehow be made obsolete, that profit rates can equalize
No.1806540
>>1806125it disappoints me to see this here so much that i actually watched the whole 20 minute video which oddly defers the supposed debunk of superposition to the last 3 minutes - which is basically
> classical field theory (waves) has superposition - waves can pass through each other> interpret wave packets as billiard balls> billiard balls cant pass through each other> problem?Billiard balls, at low energies (speeds), have a "debroglie wavelength" which is much smaller than the balls - so qm actually doesn't predict they will pass through each other. If we had single atoms, however, this is possible and we have things like the double slit experiment. Not to mention that the wave equation being modeled by the web applet they showed would only describe a single free particle - no interactions!
they have a pretty odd view - apparently believing in the wavefunction, but they seem to think schrodinger wave mechanics is classical… atoms have a wavefunction, and wavefunctions have superposition… so atoms can have superposition. ez
im not going to watch their video on photons, but we most certainly DO have a definition of a single photon (or a single electron etc) and its called the fock state n=1. The schrodinger equation he loves so much is the description of a single particle.
maybe they should look at an introduction to quantum mechanics book on libgen instead of youtube explainers.
No.1806550
>>1806540If you look through the rest of the channel you'll see that he's a UFO crank too.
No.1806581
>>1806550average UFO denier:
>particles can totally pass through one another>a billiard ball is actually a wave>ebrbrbrbrbraverage UFO enjoyer:
>all of QM is fake>quantum objects actually behave in a classical fashion>I'm off to do butt stuff with hermiod. later! No.1806698
>>1806537If some sectors have higher profit rates than others then no capitalist in their right mind will put their investment in that low-profit sector absent some scheme to bring the real profit up. We see this when an industry dies out, but many industries which do not die out still appear to have differential profit rates. The contradiction that must be answered is then: how could a low-profit-rate sector be consistently reproduced over several M-C-M' cycles given that each capitalist is trying to maximize their own M'/M?
There are many potential answers to this but differing OCC cannot be one of them, since it leaves open the question of why any particular capitalist would choose to hold the bag owning a low-profit-rate, necessary industry while the others enjoy higher profits in more lucrative sectors. If it turns out, on the other hand, that a stake in these low-profit-rate sectors provides an owner with unique investment opportunities in other, high-profit-rate sectors then the contradiction is totally resolved.
Now, it remains completely possible that in the long-run some sectors really do atrophy and a crisis occurs which must be addressed. But we should still have some understanding of a quasiequilibrium state in which low-profit-rate sectors continue to receive investment.
No.1806712
>>1806465I think your logic is perfectly sound: investment gold rushes in high-profit sectors do happen. To me, it seems that the long-run behavior is that those sectors' real profit rates regress toward a mean. Silicon valley over the last few decades of course comes to mind. There probably is an incentive for capitalists who find themselves pre-established in these sectors to attempt to disguise their real profit rates from other capitalists or to exaggerate investment risks in order to prolong their advantage. However, concluding that the model with equalizing profits is "wrong" without having some answer as to why on earth a capitalist would decide to invest in a sector with a long history of a low profit rate would be neglectful. If tunneling is a large effect, and we know that it is for some industries, then we can understand how large differentials in profit rate can persist in spite of profit-maximizing behavior: those differentials are in some cases illusory.
No.1806805
>>1806698>If some sectors have higher profit rates than others then no capitalist in their right mind will put their investment in that low-profit sector absent some scheme to bring the real profit upthe point is that capital has technological inertia
>There are many potential answers to this but differing OCC cannot be one of themit's the opposite; OCC is the only answer
>why any particular capitalist would choose to hold the bag owning a low-profit-rate, necessary industrybecause they have to. the use-values produced are necessary for other parts of capital to function
No.1806857
>>1806805The discussion will probably be more productive if you respond in full, rather than the point-by-point fashion popular on such websites as Reddit.com. Your logic does not pertain to the long-run, quasi-equilibrium regime because that is exactly the one for which we neglect such inertial effects. Of course we expect to see some capitalists holding the bag, suffering low (or even negative) profit rates for some time: the problem is to explain why any of them would choose to do this over the long-term.
In the case of the nursing home industry it becomes clear that this is not what is going on. The profits realized by capitalists who use tunneling are much higher than what are actually reported. The real OCC is very low so the real profit is very high, although on the books it may appear that the OCC is very high so the profit is very low. We would be in error if we attributed the ownership arrangement here to any inertial effect; the owners are in fact involved in a lucrative scheme.
No.1807089
>>1806857>the problem is to explain why any of them would choose to do this over the long-term.I don't think it's correct to talk of any individual Porky "choosing" what to do here. capital is an emergent phenomenon
>In the case of the nursing home industry it becomes clear that this is not what is going on. The profits realized by capitalists who use tunneling are much higher than what are actually reported. The real OCC is very low so the real profit is very high, although on the books it may appear that the OCC is very high so the profit is very low. We would be in error if we attributed the ownership arrangement here to any inertial effect; the owners are in fact involved in a lucrative scheme.shouldn't such tunneling lead to RoP equalization? the only other possibility is that the holding companies this money is likely being smuggled into will have very high RoP, I think
No.1810013
>>1809661That's Italian, not Spanish.
No.1810019
>>1809910maybe he is using AI voices, kek
No.1810218
>>1810214A man's gotta make man noises
No.1810354
>>1810218OT but obligatory
>relatively popular left pod>co-host wheezes loudly into the mic, everything else squeaks and creaks>audience very tolerant for many episodes>eventually chat asks her to oil the chair because it almost sounds like a duck>oh I have a duck in a box right here, I rescued it a few weeks ago No.1811515
GIU published their last episode, due to real life issues getting in the way of producing more
http://generalintellectunit.net/e/111-exit-code-0/>In which the show ends, and Kyle & June reflect on the project.>Thank you all. No.1811792
>>1811515God damnit. This and "It's Not Just In Your Head" are kill ;_;
No.1811802
Just finished reading the introduction to Towards a New Socialism. The language around Stalin seems awfully moralizing, I'm not a big fan of the concept of "authoritarianism", though it is true that there was a cult of personality around Stalin (even if Stalin himself said it was against his wishes). I'll keep reading it, and I hope it's still relevant to current day economics. I've heard a few bad things about Cockshott so my expectations are low.
No.1811991
7 Reasons for Caring About Labor Time / Arduousness / Effort
These three aspects must be distinguished when investigating precisely what it means how much work something takes; which I won't do in this text, but for serious discussion we need a matrix where each of these aspects gets paired with the 7 points below. And for each such pair ask yourself whose judgement of work amount should count: individual, co-worker group, people from the branch of industry, some other third party.
The 7 points in no particular order:
1. To ration consumer items for the consumer by labor time (this price may change in the short term when there are extreme cases of over- or undersupply).
2. To ration for an entity. Even when users don't personally pay, such prices could exist for entities with budgets that give these items to consumers on a needs-estimation basis by bureaucrats so they choose between things that are similar in effect for the issue at hand based on cheapness (not the sole criterion of course).
3. To appeal to the civic spirit. Even if a user item is neither rationed by price to the consumer directly nor to some entity handing the item to the consumer, it simply is good practice to inform people so they may take this into consideration and self-limit out of consideration for society, just like people might want to know about pollution associated with things, whether they have to pay for them or not.
4. To reward workers for how much work they do with an income bonus.
5. To change who gets assigned to do what.
6. To switch between production methods for the same or similar thing based on how much work the methods require in tests.
7. To estimate how long a step takes in a process with dependencies. (You care how long it takes until the bus arrives and how long the ride takes, you care whether you pay for it or some entity pays for you or whether it's your uncle doing it unpaid.)
Self-styled radicals talk about a lower phase and a higher phase of communism (jargon taken from the Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx), sometimes they talk about the higher phase as if it were like flipping a switch, and a few talk about directly going to the higher phase (I guess these are the communistest of communists in their self-image). But when you look through this list, and if you are honest about this, you have to admit that there will remain some of these reasons for reckoning with labor time even in a future society totally different from ours. Even a hundred years from now.
No.1812116
>>1811991you don't judge labour effort, you measure it
judgement/politics only enters the equation when it comes to distribution (points 1, 2, 3 and 4), which is what Marx talks about in Gothakritik. it would be the height of utopianism to think we could do away with labour time accounting even in higher-phase communism, for the same reason we can't do away with accounting for coal, trees, steel and all other things that inevitably have a limited supply. no level of productive forces will get you away from such in-kind limitations, and so points 6 and 7 will always remain in effect, and probably 5 as well (+/- the cost of training)
No.1812735
>>1812116IMHO there should be an element of subjective individual judgement of the most extreme type, I mean self-reporting with no argument or data required aside from "I feel that way", maybe as a very small influence for some of the seven points, but not zero for any of them.
Points about price 1, 2, 3: Imagine the statements by the workers themselves can influence what the price of the things they make will be. It doesn't look to me like that would cause a big problem, especially if these self-reports have no effect on remuneration for those making them. The price of a thing and remuneration for those making it can be completely separate topics in a system where the means of production are held in common. But I said that every point can have an element of self-evaluation, so…
Point 4 (remuneration): This is one of the less obvious ones. Just claiming your work is very hard
after you got assigned to it should not increase your remuneration of course, such a procedure is too easy to abuse. The solution is to fuse this question with
Point 5 (assignment procedure). You get asked how a given budget for remuneration of tasks you are qualified for should be split between them
before you get assigned.
Point 6 (switching production methods): Now here it has to be admitted that people often work in groups, so an individual worker cannot steer what will happen. But the choice should lie with the people doing the work and their subjective opinions, with no need to justify their choice to some superior. Moreover, it does not need to be the case that only one method is chosen by majority of the group of workers. If the opinions are very polarized and the scale of production is big enough, people can split into different teams using different production methods based on how they feel about working under these conditions.
Point 7 (timing dependencies): Another non-obvious one. Surely here it is the real time that matters, and not how long it feels. But when there is a lot of time until your output is needed as an input for some process other people do, why not allow yourself to work at a slower pace (if nobody else is waiting eagerly for their turn to use the tools you have)? Likewise, you may work at a faster pace than usual without a need to do that, just so you can go home earlier if you feel that way. Why not indeed. A problem with having this option arises when remuneration is strictly per hour worked. If work intensity is recognized properly, there is no problem here. (Also, there's no problem if your income is completely decoupled from your work contribution.)
Suppose there are some tight timing dependencies and you going much slower screws up things downstream, surely that should be forbidden? I'm actually not 100 % behind forbidding this. If it affects a small amount of people downstream working on low-priority luxury stuff I think it shouldn't be a big deal.
No.1812741
>>1812735>IMHO there should be an element of subjective individual judgement of the most extreme type, I mean self-reporting with no argument or data required aside from "I feel that way", maybe as a very small influence for some of the seven points, but not zero for any of them.you're confusing an is for an ought. we expect political struggle over remuneration (distribution) in lower-phase communism. I suspect we'd struggle over distribution in higher-phase communism also (but not remuneration since it by definition doesn't exist then)
>Imagine the statements by the workers themselves can influence what the price of the things they make will bethis sounds like market "socialism". the value of a product isn't determined by the workers, but by the labour process itself
>But the choice should lie with the people doing the work and their subjective opinionsabsolutely not. the production processes that can be used are objectively determined. you are not to step outside the constraints set by the polity. this doesn't mean there isn't some wiggle room of course, but under no circumstance is any workplace to engage in anarchic production. unless you think we shouldn't give a shit about emissions etc
No.1812755
>>1812741>you're confusing an is for an ought.I explicitly stated the whole post as an ought from the first sentence:
IMHO there should be… The rest of the post is about logical compatibility between elements in a certain configuration.
>this sounds like market "socialism".There is no self-financing so how could you get the impression.
>the value of a product isn't determined by the workers, but by the labour process itselfI don't understand what you mean. I said the
price of a thing could be set in a way influenced by statements of the workers about how much work (including intensity) it takes to make it.
>anarchic productionRead the paragraph about point 6 again. Point 6 was only about
choosing between production methods for the same or similar thing based on how much work the methods require. This is neither about changing to produce something else entirely nor about producing a different quantity than what the big plan asks for.
No.1813073
>>1812755>I said the price of a thing could be set in a way influenced by statements of the workers about how much work (including intensity) it takes to make it.but why? and which workers are you talking about here exactly? those producing final goods or those producing intermediate goods?
if a price can be hung on something then this implies profit. hence why I mention market socialism. compare this to schemes we've seen ITT where for example it is up to each workplace to distribute labour vouchers however they see fit
>Point 6 was only about choosing between production methods for the same or similar thingthis very much depends on the thing. there's a vast difference between say fulfilling an order for waterjet cut parts given a certain amount of raw stock, and a chemical plant fulfilling an order using vastly different kinds of inputs. for example, gasifying garbage vs gasifying bituminous coal
it isn't interesting (to me at least) to think about cases where workers have a lot of leeway. what's interesting are the cases where workers
don't have much leeway. workplaces that are on the critical path
>based on how much work the methods requireI expect workers to be maximally lazy. the best worker is a lazy worker who works smart rather than hard. but this requires leeway which isn't always there. which is why I emphasize is-s rather than oughts. we can make all kinds of normative statements, but this isn't useful IMO
No.1813547
>>1813073>which workers are you talking about here exactly?The work going into something means the direct and indirect inputs.
>if a price can be hung on something then this implies profit.Again, I do not assume self-financing entities. What income flows to the workers and what the prices are of the things they make can be set by completely distinct policies (for example the split in TANS with costs of job training adding to products but not incomes). Their income does not come out of sales.
>it isn't interesting (to me at least) to think about cases where workers have a lot of leeway.Point is: If an entity has leeway between production methods for the same or similar thing, that should be leeway for the workers there. Some entity having leeway to choose between production methods will be leeway for the managers unless this is an explicit policy.
>I expect workers to be maximally lazy. the best worker is a lazy worker who works smart rather than hard. but this requires leeway which isn't always there. which is why I emphasize is-s rather than oughts. we can make all kinds of normative statements, but this isn't useful IMOI need to have a more precise idea what actual argument you are trying to communicate here. You seem to believe that what is spelled out in
>>1812735 is more likely to be abused than your system that you didn't spell out, and actually you don't have a system, it's just based on vibes?
No.1813614
>>1813547>The work going into something means the direct and indirect inputs.this is kind of the opposite of what I asked. the workers aren't the work
>What income flows to the workers and what the prices are of the things they make can be set by completely distinct policiesbut why? for what reason would you price something different from the cost of making them, wages included? if not profit then I can only assume you mean indirect taxation
>Point is: If an entity has leeway between production methods for the same or similar thing, that should be leeway for the workers thereI mean, yeah, we're talking about socialism here so that's implied
>You seem to believe that what is spelled out in >>1812735 is more likely to be abused than your system that you didn't spell out, and actually you don't have a system, it's just based on vibes?I'm not spelling out any system. doing so would be utopian
No.1813684
>>1812735<Imagine the statements by the workers themselves can influence what the price of the things they make will be.>>1812741>the value of a product isn't determined by the workers>>1812755<I said the price of a thing could be set in a way influenced by statements of the workers about how much work (including intensity) it takes to make it.>>1813073>which workers are you talking about here exactly>>1813547<The work going into something means the direct and indirect inputs.>>1813614>this is kind of the opposite of what I asked. the workers aren't the work😡
No.1825053
I have a very specific idea about transformer AI and I don't like to hear what you think about ChatGTP and the like in general (we have had quite a few threads about that and they have all been shit), but specifically about what I'm describing.
Decades ago, there was speculation that the internet would massively democratize things because television is one-way communication and the internet is not. People are both senders and receivers, and that means equality and democracy! (Actually, the internet wasn't the first such hype. Some people used to believe the same thing about amateur radio.)
The problem with that argument isn't just capitalism ruining things. It is possible for an individual to bring sound or text or pictures to the attention of a big group of simultaneous receivers, but it is not possible for an individual to pay attention simultaneously to more than two or three people. It is a technical problem.
So far, it has only been possible to sensibly fuse thousands of voices for very specific and restricted speech: People answer yes or no to a question. People enter a single value and we take the mean (or the median if we worry about tactical exaggeration). People rank a few items (here we already face a lot of controversy how to aggregate this because of Condorcet cycles).
The current AI hype is mostly just mumbo-jumbo about statistical stuff, but that statistical stuff seems decent enough to give a roughly accurate fused expression of thousands of statements that are written in normal prose and to guess when a topic is controversial and generate a handful averaged statements from within the "factions".
So it becomes possible for an individual to listen to a million people within one moment.
No.1825126
>>1825053AI is sort of fine if you accept that it's just statistics
using it to extract the "mood" of a population sounds interesting. the black box nature of most "AI" these days is a problem though, compared to say building a Markov chain out of all those responses
No.1825254
Can someone explain the logistics of why socialist economies such as cuba isn't using cybersocialism already?
I think socialism both has its advantages and disadvantages, and one of its major problems is the planning being unable to account for how much everyone needs precisely I think. That problem leads to shortages. However, socialism has many advantages as well, such as equality, low risk of losing job, guaranteed employment, high floor for quality of life, everyone is provided for. That sounds like paradise to me and I'd like to live in a society like that, only without an authoritarian government breathing down our necks, like the USSR had. Another problem the USSR had was a lot of corruption apparently, can someone explain where that came from? Apparently it got so bad that legitimately ahead of time projects such as OGAS (Soviet Internet Idea) never came to fruition because of the corrupt bureacrats.
I don't really see socialism in the form of planned socialism working well as a successor to capitalism. I see it more as an alternative system.
Would cybersocialism reduce the shortages, increase the quality of life, in theory? Because honestly, I can't wait to see what it can do in practice. Same with libertarian/democratic socialism. I don't want to get my hopes up for nothing. Until then, I'll just advocate for systems that are tried and tested rather than ones that just theoretically work.
No.1825255
>>1825254Cuba has almost no natural resources. It doesn't really matter what economic system they use when all they have to export is tobacco and cigars.
No.1825259
>>1825255I didn't consider that at all
No.1825261
>>1825259Yeah. It's a common problem for the Caribbean countries. I think Cuba is doing pretty well considering the circumstances, I just hope they can hold out until the embargo ends (night only be when the USA collapses at this point).
No.1825273
>>1825254>Can someone explain the logistics of why socialist economies such as cuba isn't using cybersocialism already? institutional inertia
party disinterest
lack of software
geopolitical reasons
>Another problem the USSR had was a lot of corruption apparently, can someone explain where that came from?the onus is on you to demonstrate this supposed corruption
there were perverse incentives in place, leading to what some sources liken to a game of poker played between Gosplan, its ministries and workplace managers. then you have tolkachi operating in the gray market to paper over deficiencies in planning via barter
>Apparently it got so bad that legitimately ahead of time projects such as OGAS (Soviet Internet Idea) never came to fruition because of the corrupt bureacrats.this was more due to its cost rather than any corruption. Glushkov also wasn't a good political economist, if Elena Veduta is to be believed
>Would cybersocialism reduce the shortagesyou can formulate the system so that supply must always exceed demand, including safety margins. the USSR never did this
>increase the quality of lifeif there's sufficient labour, materials and political will then I don't see why not
No.1825327
>>1825273Good explanation
>you can formulate the system so that supply must always exceed demand, including safety margins. the USSR never did thisThis should theoretically put an end to the shortages, and sounds like a very smart idea
No.1825330
>>1825327it's not free though, since if you add say 10% safety margins at every level and you don't need them, then ten levels up you're producing 160% more than you need to. this gets attenuated by the amount held in reserve in storehouses, so perhaps it's enough to say "keep one month's supply extra just in case" or something like that
No.1828733
Interview with Paul Cockshott, just what the basics of what he is about (in Italian):
https://www.legauche.net/interviste-presentazioni/intervista-a-paul-cockshott/ No.1831470
Cyber socialism gives me hope of socialism finally working well. But sadly, just like libertarian socialism and many types of socialism such as market socialism, it's mostly untested. It should be tried out somewhere in the world and if it succeeds and performs better than aes in the world, I'll be a full supporter of the system.
No.1831497
https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/xtsz0b/cybersyn_towards_a_new_socialism_cybernetic/This makes a whole lot of sense to me. I wonder if it would work in practice though, even if the theory is good. I don't want to get my hopes up for nothing.
No.1831523
>>1831470we need the software for it, and we need some number of users to test the software, since writing software in a vacuum is kind of pointless
>>1831497time will tell
No.1833097
This thread of belief is infantile. Obviously we are heading at least in the short to medium term into cyberfeudalism not cybercommunism. There are more valuable things to discuss about the future than these utopian dreams, namely innovations in new forms of resistance, organisation, etc (given that the old ones are so clearly and thoroughly dead and useless).
No.1833228
>>1833097>anfem flagWhy do the worst posters always use this flag?
No.1833235
>>1833228oppositional defiance and schizoid tendencies
No.1833251
>>1833097>This thread of belief is infantile>cyberfeudalism>There are more valuable things to discuss about the future than these utopian dreams I have nothing against anfem, but like, this post was cringe and not based.
No.1833258
>>1833251utopianism is not scientific and bad
No.1833259
>>1833258Cockshott doesn’t even actually like Marx and in a Hegelian sense HATES science and dialectical understanding. This is why he’s like “Markov process chains bro” he’s dreaming up a hypothetical system of governance without even thinking about whether it is possible or how it’s a necessary part of the development of history.
No.1833698
>>1833259>Cockshott doesn’t even actually like Marx and in a Hegelianisnt anfem poster supposed to be anti hegelian? wtf?
No.1833764
>>1833698is anfem poster then new leninhat?
No.1834071
>>1833259If you're referring to cybernetic planning, it's simply an attempt at trying to find a way to actually implement in-kind calculation, something that is required for a moneyless planned economy to actually function. I fail to see how his recommendations in TANS are utopian, given that they are based on a critique of the soviet union - something that actually existed. He isn't simply conjuring a blueprint out of thin air as the utopians did, he's analysing something that actually existed and then making recommendations as to how that thing could be made to move away from commodity production.
Also fuck Hegel.
No.1835122
>>1834519i think you kind of misunderstand cockshott, cybercommunism etc. TANS for example wasn't about projecting some society of the future or imagining it out of nothing like Auguste Comte, it was written in the late 80s to the 90s when the USSR was falling. So it was one hand written as a refutation of anti planning anti communist arguments both in their classic form (right-libertarian ECP) and newer arguments by people like Alex Nove.
On the other hand it was actual a policy prescription for the USSR that would have been meant to literally be implemented to save the USSR economy from descending back into capitalism. However by the time it got published the USSR had already fallen. So it wasn't a hypothetical but rather an actual policy paper for what was at that time a contemporarily existing polity.
I don't think most cybercommunists think that its inevitable rather its just a series of good arguments against right wing libertarians who claim socialism is impossible. Cockshott's strength is in these arguments not as an analyst and I wouldn't take his sparse ideas on praxis very useful either.
The Markov process shit is just him trying to find an alternative to modeling change over time to hegelian dialectics as he regards it as unrigerous and pseudo-rational. This is a holdover both from his own background as a natural scientist in an english speaking country and the background positivism that comes with that training as well as the fact that he's heavily influenced by Althusser who is sort of the poster child of marxist anti-hegelianism.
No.1835365
>>1835122Right but this is my problem, trying to 'fix the USSR' is a stupid endeavour because in historical hindsight it was obviously doomed. Cockshottians, like other marxists who are stuck in the past, are only interested in eternally critiquing 'what went wrong with the soviet union' instead of looking at the conditions of today's society. In this way the 'multipolarists' are at least a bit more respectable than Cockshott.
The Markov process shit (modelling change) is fine as a scientific endeavour, but it isn't a valid alternative to a science of logic (dialectics is just one part). There's nothing really reflexive about the logical rules there which is the important thing about Hegel's method. I think Marx's use of dialectics is probably unrigorous, but to dismiss Hegel is to dismiss a Science of Logic itself.
In fact even to say 'Hegel is unrigorous and pseudo-rational' is already thinking thinking about itself and is already to engage in dialectics.
No.1835378
>>1835365>Cockshottians, like other marxists who are stuck in the past, are only interested in eternally critiquing 'what went wrong with the soviet union' instead of looking at the conditions of today's society.Would you say the same of marx critiquing the paris commune? I mean that was obviously doomed as well. Why not learn from mistakes of past attempts? Besides, as
>>1835122 pointed out, the point of Cockshott's writings aren't so much to provide a new strategy for overthrowing capitalism, but to refute anticommunist bullshit - something which is necessary as anti-communist rhetoric creates a barrier to communist organisation.
No.1835385
>>1835365>Right but this is my problem, trying to 'fix the USSR' is a stupid endeavour because in historical hindsight it was obviously doomed. Cockshottians, like other marxists who are stuck in the past, are only interested in eternally critiquing 'what went wrong with the soviet union' instead of looking at the conditions of today's society.Yes but in the neoliberal era of 1991-2016ish a Cockshott like figure was absolutely needed to refute end of history neoliberal and other right winged american libertarian bullshit.
Basically the left had no answer to the calculation problem and that actually made Cockshott's work MORE important because while the USSR existed, people didn't really take that sort of shit seriously, because how can you claim socialism is impossible while there's still this supposedly socialist USSR/eastern block which is also a huge threat to the west.
But after the fall of the USSR american rightoids started doing victory laps and claiming this proved Mises/Hayek were right and along and no one should ever try socialism ever again. You even had supposed socialists and members of the left/labor parties not only advocating market socialism rather than planning but even starting to argue against social democracy.
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