/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>1822904
What's the point in counterfactuals? Voodoo economics has nothing to offer. Bourgeois economists constantly make incorrect predictions with no accountability.

Realistically nobody here is a professional economist, to adequately answer these questions requires multiple books.

>>1822953
>to adequately answer these questions requires multiple books
Can you recommend me some?

>neoclassical economics
>planning
pick one

>>1823058
>>1822904
I think I should leave them here

>>1827453
>r/neoliberal
By Allah, do they know? The hadith meant it for themselves. They're the ones who are greedy and hoarders.

>>1822966
Gwgenstandpunkt

>>1827453
>neolibs for the first time discovering Marx has a kind of fascination with capitalism
it's also not like Marx is against price control per se, but pointing out it's no path towards communism

Look up Abba Lerner.

The short answer is data. That was Cybersyn's goal. Equipping every major factory with a computer that transmitted inputs and outputs of that day back to a central mainframe.
Socialist calculation has to utilize surplus value differently than capitalist calculation and to do so the first task is the replicate what is essentially an obfuscated function in the capitalist mode of production.

Good thing planned economies have nothing to do with communism. Cockshott is a fucking retard who believes shit like value being a biological process (instead of a social one).

I just realized another thing with OP's question
>1. there are no significant shortages or surpluses of goods
this is nonsensical to neoclassicals since they assume a general equilibrium at all times. their analysis starts with assuming supply = demand
>>1827798
>Good thing planned economies have nothing to do with communism
explain how a communist economy is supposed to work if not through coordination in kind (which is what planning is). the only other option is coordination by value. is there some third category that is neither use-value nor value?
>Cockshott is a fucking retard who believes shit like value being a biological process (instead of a social one).
no he doesn't. he asserts that value is transhistorical however (which we can, axiomatically)

>>1827798
"market socialist" retard detected

>>1827798
Indeed. Paul Cockshott:
<Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc., and in this sense both human labour. They are merely two different forms of the expenditure of human labour-power.
This is a very reductive and mechanical materialism. The very type of bourgeois thinking that Marx and Engels smashed to pieces!

>>1827868
this is either high levels of mental retardation or bait

>>1827875
It's a Marx quote so what do you think it is.

>>1827854
>if you dont like my capitalism masquerading as communism you must like this other capitalism masquerading as communism
lol?

>>1827811
>value is transhistorical however
absolutely imbecilic lol

planning is already a feature of imperialist capitalism. global revolution allows commodity production to be superseded by social planning on a world scale, you dont need central planning nor star trek-level technology to do this

>>1828260
communist planning is centralized you dolt. it can't be anything but fully centralized, or else you must resort to exchange
>absolutely imbecilic lol
if we define value == SNLT then value being transhistorical follows, unless you think there is some mode of production where labour is not social? where labour is deliberately squandered?

>>1828264
Socialism is the social appropriation of the means of production and their operation in accordance with a conscious plan of the producers themselves. It is the abolition of private property and with it exchange, wage-labour, etc. None of this requires "central planning", whatever that means.

>>1822904
>1. there are no significant shortages or surpluses of goods
Why would you want that? You want to have at least some surplus in reserve in case something happens. Just control the supply available to people (through a plan) and any "natural effects" can be controlled.
>2. goods and services are distributed more or less according to utility
democratically plan the economy, since utility is vague and subjective and the only way to really determine it is to have everyone's input
>3. investment in new industries and firms is done at least as efficiently as in stock markets
so better than terribly inefficiently?
that's a disappointingly low bar, considering how frequently important and well-functioning industries get gutted by CEOs and shareholders selling the companies off in a pump and dump scheme, and how often the stock market crashes due to absurd speculative scams.

>If neoclassical economics were completely true
It isn't, and it wouldn't matter if it was because it only applies to capitalism and doesn't imagine any alternative. To ask how you could construct communism within a framework that assumes only capitalism is possible is nonsensical.

>but it seems to use the labor theory of value as a load-bearing assumption
LTV was more or less understood at least as far back as the classical Greek philosophers, and nobody questioned it until Marx showed everyone what it implies about class struggle. Only then did nervous porkies go hunting for some alternative theory, any alternative theory that they could shill to undermine the basically universal agreement on LTV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism#Marginal_Revolution_as_a_response_to_socialism
<The doctrines of marginalism and the Marginal Revolution are often interpreted as a response to the rise of the worker's movement, Marxian economics and the earlier (Ricardian) socialist theories of the exploitation of labour. The first volume of Das Kapital was not published until July 1867, when marginalism was already developing, but before the advent of Marxian economics, proto-marginalist ideas such as those of Gossen had largely fallen on deaf ears. It was only in the 1880s, when Marxism had come to the fore as the main economic theory of the workers' movement, that Gossen found (posthumous) recognition.

>>1828275
how do you propose workers coordinate their actions if not through a world-encompassing planning system?
>conscious plan
no human can be conscious of the entire world plan. no workplace nor collection of workplaces can be conscious of more than a fraction of the plan. to summarize modern planning theory, the choice comes to one of two things:
>a decentralized system of meetings (the Soviet model)
or
>a fully centralized automatic planning system
or some combination of the two. all serious proposals for communist planning feature a high degree of centralization and automation. without this you must put a bunch of middlemen in the loop. middlemen who will have a tendency towards acquisitiveness, as history shows

>>1828278
>You want to have at least some surplus in reserve in case something happens.

With climate change disrupting food production already we really do need to start scientifically and effectively putting aside "winter stores" for when there is an inevitable disaster. I don't think the cheese mines will last all that long in the event of a true, modern famine.

>>1828260
>if you dont like my capitalism masquerading as communism you must like this other capitalism masquerading as communism
How is central planning capitalist? If money, classes, market exchange and the separation between firms are abolished, how can the system still be regarded as capitalist?

>>1828660
"everything I don't like is capitalism and I won't tell you why I don't like planning" is my guess

>>1832028
Probably, I had thought that maybe they were a leftcom that objects to planning in terms of money, but Cockshott is very much against that so I'm at a loss as to what their problem is.

>>1828660
I'm too busy at the moment to set out a detailed case, but I feel like I should put out this general thought:
1. In most practical implementations of planning, money, classes, market exchange, and the separation of firms aren't so much abolished as they are obfuscated. You can argue separately whether they still constitute capitalism as-such anymore, but that's not much consolation if you expected more when you implemented them.
2. If you go to work every day to be paid in labour vouchers, they're still basically money. Maybe more like company scrip than real money, but nothing so exciting as the idea of actually abolishing monetary exchange or scarcity-administered-by-wallet: The technical distinction between telling me I can't have a Dreamcast because I don't have enough money, and telling me that I can't because I don't have enough non-exchangable-non-investable-non-M-C-M' labour vouchers is not quite so relevant as the fact I'm not going to be playing Sonic Adventure any time soon.
3. If you have the division of labour, you're likely to have some kind of class system. Maybe not proletarians and bourgeoisie, but still something likely to lead to resentment. Planners themselves are likely to find themselves with the upper hand under such a system, with democratic consent for their actions stemming not from what people really want - (I don't want to be told what to do) - but from what the planners input themselves. (Much as how, under capitalist democracy, election results generally flow from the desires of capitalsts.) That clashes of interest between the people who plan what workers will do and what workers will do should arise seems fairly obvious, let alone distinctions between industries, levels of employees, etc. (If your manager at Walmart is a proletarian, and you're a proletarian, but there are no longer shareholders, does doing what the manager tells you suddenly become enjoyable?)
4. Finally: factories, groups of factories, industries, etc, are likely to be separate for planning purposes even if they're all officially subsidiaries of Proletariat Inc. Each one can then be expected to engage in firm-like behaviours, competing for status and resources, trying to procure advancement for those within it, etc, etc.

contentious thought within:
If you look specifically at the Soviet Union, particuarly if you do so idealistically (in the sense of an optimistic attempt to concieve of a better future, not the general Marxist insult), a big picture view of the USSR shows a state trying to drive industrial and economic development - which amounts to accumulating capital - and - ideally - then giving the surplus beyond what's needed for the next round of economic development to workers. From a practical life-structure point of view, the distinction between this and life under a generous capitalist welfare state is not quite so large as one would hope. (both even progressively collapse in the 1980s-90s.) And from an "anthropomorphising capital" kind of view, you might just say it was just a less efficient method of capital accumulation that got out-evolved.

Put as much resources as possible into automation, which assuming the labor theory of value isn't true, would be fine. We factorio in this house.

>>1828275
Okay well, you got a better plan than central planning?

>>1832058
these people don't like TANS style planning either in my experience. leftcoms just seem to whine endlessly
>>1832064
>2. If you go to work every day to be paid in labour vouchers, they're still basically money
no they're not. money circulates, vouchers do not
>scarcity-administered-by-wallet
that's literally the definition of lower-phase communism in Gothakritik
>planners
this is just the standard Austrian myth about planning. this nonsense goes away when you realize it's possible to have everyone have a say in the planning process
>a state trying to drive industrial and economic development - which amounts to accumulating capital
no it doesn't. if it's not used for the purpose of valorization then it isn't capital

>>1822904
>according to utility
ew

>>1832064
>If you go to work every day to be paid in labour vouchers, they're still basically money. Maybe more like company scrip than real money, but nothing so exciting as the idea of actually abolishing monetary exchange or scarcity-administered-by-wallet: The technical distinction between telling me I can't have a Dreamcast because I don't have enough money, and telling me that I can't because I don't have enough non-exchangable-non-investable-non-M-C-M' labour vouchers is not quite so relevant as the fact I'm not going to be playing Sonic Adventure any time soon.
There's an inherent equalisation in using labour vouchers so I'm not really sure this point stands - the amount you'll be able to consume would be pretty similar to everyone else, assuming you work the same hours. You may not be able to immediately consume as much as you want but it'd still be an improvement on the way our society works where large sections of the population are locked out of buying certain products due to the gross inequalities present.

>If you have the division of labour, you're likely to have some kind of class system. Maybe not proletarians and bourgeoisie, but still something likely to lead to resentment. Planners themselves are likely to find themselves with the upper hand under such a system, with democratic consent for their actions stemming not from what people really want - (I don't want to be told what to do) - but from what the planners input themselves. (Much as how, under capitalist democracy, election results generally flow from the desires of capitalsts.) That clashes of interest between the people who plan what workers will do and what workers will do should arise seems fairly obvious, let alone distinctions between industries, levels of employees, etc. (If your manager at Walmart is a proletarian, and you're a proletarian, but there are no longer shareholders, does doing what the manager tells you suddenly become enjoyable?)
Unless the planners are able to allocate themselves more consumer good I don't see this being much of an issue either. If they're paid in labour vouchers their income will be the same as everyone elses, implying that they can't use their positions for surplus extraction, and provided there is sufficient democratic oversight they shouldn't be able to assign themselves resources through other means either. As for your point about elections - there's a reason Cockshott is opposed to them and instead proposes the use of sortition combined with direct democracy.

>Finally: factories, groups of factories, industries, etc, are likely to be separate for planning purposes even if they're all officially subsidiaries of Proletariat Inc. Each one can then be expected to engage in firm-like behaviours, competing for status and resources, trying to procure advancement for those within it, etc, etc.
I expect their would be similar competition for resources between branches of industry as exists in today's large corporations - this hardly makes them separate firms however. And I expect this to be true even in the higher phase of communism - there's simply no way around the fact that resources are fundamentally limited. Decentralising planning won't make this any less true - in fact I think higher degree of decentralisation would actually make make things worse in this regard.

>>1832087
>these people don't like TANS style planning either in my experience. leftcoms just seem to whine endlessly
It really depends on the type of leftcom - Bordiga proposed system was actually very technocratic. In theory they should have very little to object to in Cockshott's proposed system of planning (other than that they would find it unacceptably democratic lol).

>>1832093
>this hardly makes them separate firms however
What you call the units doesn't matter, when they still have the defined group whose exploitation is measured and reflected to them with value tokens, according to their willingness to sacrifice themselves, and a bunch of desacralized Christian morality about submissiveness to a coordinator class-in-denial creaming it all off.
You do know that *Capital* is a warning, not an instruction manual, right?

>>1832241
So what's your alternative to people having to do some kind of labour?

We'd need to establish the mechanisms by which neoclassical economics would be true, and the labor theory of value would be false. Like, would there be something fundamentally different in bhysics / math in such a realm to make this the case?

Would this be an Arknights "everything is the same but you can't make gunpowder" sorta deal or a Kerbal Space Program "This engine works if you speed up time to make physics less accurate" sorta deal?

>>1832272
these people never offer some kind alternative, all they do is whine and repeat Austrian talking points

as others have pointed out, it's data, but i also kind of want to challenge the idea of market economies being the opposite of planned economies in the first place. market economies exist within collectively-owned or built infrastructure, though that ownership may be in practice truly exercised by an elite few, it needs to be at least open to the public and provide the conditions necessary for trade. they're also not spontaneous operations that come to life through a creative spark, the planning still exists, it's just done by separate entities as opposed to a centralized administration. the key difference is the purpose and scale of the planning involved, a corporation like walmart for example plans enough for a small country on its own. it doesn't take a lot of abstraction to imagine that one could simply take over walmart's planning system and reorient it based around need rather than profit extraction. different kinds of data extraction may have to be adopted, but it's not really a problem, it just might be more complicated than just using money as an accounting unit. i don't think you even have to care that much about minor inefficiencies since without debt-oriented infinite growth around private property backed by violence, you don't have to close down the enterprise, and i would argue that centrally planned economies are more efficient and crisis-avoidant anyways, look at china right now and look at how fast the ussr managed to industrialize. the bigger problem capitalist society faces is about the distribution of stuff and the constant collapses it produces through inequality, surplus value extraction, and the endless pursuit of profit at all cost. we produce a shit ton of stuff, and we could produce more in more efficient ways, but the problem is more about rampant rates of exploitation and the way private property keeps resources away from the people who actually need them like homeless people living in areas with tons of empty homes.

>>1832087
>money circulates, vouchers do not / no it doesn't. if it's not used for the purpose of valorization then it isn't capital
"That's a great technical distinction, but where's my Dreamcast?"
I wouldn't say my critique has much alignment with the Austrian critique: They generally seem to imagine that since you can vote with your wallet, capitalism offers more freedom than planning. My critique would be to say that capitalism already involves a high degree of planning and that historical experience (Japan, Korea, France, etc.) shows planning to - if anything - improve capitalist outcomes. (A past affinity for capitalist planning is prescisely why I'm skeptical of the value socialists put on it) Giving everyone a say in the process is a great idea in theory, but in practice you're going to run into all of the problems that come with any organisational structure - give everyone a vote and some must lose, go for consensus and you'll run into three problems: some people don't care, some people will agree to things to avoid social awkwardness, and some will dominate the discussion. (contra-Austrians, this is one reason capitalist planning has it easier: you don't have to worry about democracy beyond the level of "parliament signed off on the plan")
I'm not saying those are unresolvable issues, mind you, but they are present.

>>1832093
I'm mainly in agreement, hence the short reply. My main thoughts would be:
That the question of income-differentials is left fairly open: A lot of people on this board will be quick to tell you that communism doesn't mean total equality or to refute the idea that it means a doctor and a cashier get the same wage. S
And that even if planners couldn't give themselves extra resources directly, they would still have power - which might be enough to make for intra-group/class antagonism under that mode of social organisation. If we make the same income but I get to tell you what to do…
(And I think really that's where I find tension with planning: It's somewhat difficult to integrate self-direction with, philosophically. You can do a lot to resolve each little practical case, but fundamentally part of the idea behind it is being at ease with letting someone else make the decisions - or with you making the decisions and others following…)

>>1832485
you're arguing from a fiction of what socialist planning actually is. a fiction that seems very similar to the Austrian one

>>1832485
A planner has power sure but so does a doctor or even like, a janitor. Every occupation can fuck with you if they decide to be assholes, you just have to have standards and regulations to keep things sensible

>>1832608
we don't even need a job like "planner" any more. that position came into being for computational-technical reasons. it makes as much sense as having human computers nowadays

>>1832272
All I'm saying is that subsidiaries of a firm behave enough like firms themselves when set in internal market relations that the sociological correlates of firm theory can be presumed to hold.

>>1832241
>You do know that *Capital* is a warning, not an instruction manual, right?
No one is suggesting it was, however Marx did propose labour vouchers in the critique of the gotha program:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

<Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

<What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

<Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

>>1832610
This is sort of true, though you would need people to oversee the planning system, as well as carry out the plan - implying there would be some degree of managerial oversight.

>>1832595
Nearly all socialist planning is, at current, fiction. I can't respond to a broad-based charge of being "austrian" (except by restating that generally Austrians believe planning doesn't work, I believe planning works but isn't particularly liberatory, and that most attempts at participation either won't work as intended - the ol' anarchist discussion circle - or aren't democratic - representative democracy, voting with your wallet, sortition…) and I obviously can't give more specific critiques without discussing a specific system.

Now you might say that's fine, it's better than what we've got now - probably true - but we wouldn't pretend for a moment that a revolution in human freedom had been delivered by a hypothetical social democratic country with 60% public ownership and a chunk of private industry's shares being held by workers, all co-ordinated by a planning board, rather than a difference-of-degree in a system where you're still basically yoked to churning out commodities and services that you don't care about (perhaps each month you even have to attend a boring meeting you never speak at where you discuss whether to make more red or blue widgets…) so that you can exchange that toil for access the ones you do care about and the line can go up.

>>1832608
It's not necessarily that they'd be fucking with you, it's just a conflict of interests. If completion of a plan demands overtime, but you don't want to work overtime, you're in conflict.

>>1832610
Being told what to do by a computer is about the only thing I can imagine more miserable than being told what to do by someone else.

>>1832991
>I believe planning works but isn't particularly liberatory
if "liberatory" for you means the total abolition of all hierarchy, then I doubt it's actually possible. This is one of those issues where I actually agree with the Bordigists - the abolition of commodity production will necessarily involve hierarchy to some extent - something I'm not especially bothered by. I'm yet to see anyone make a clear and coherent proposal for a system that involves the elimination of both commodity production and hierarchy at the same time. It's always the same vague anarchist "gift economy" shit, something that I think is untenable and would rapidly devolve back into commodity production.

>Now you might say that's fine, it's better than what we've got now - probably true - but we wouldn't pretend for a moment that a revolution in human freedom had been delivered by a hypothetical social democratic country with 60% public ownership and a chunk of private industry's shares being held by workers, all co-ordinated by a planning board, rather than a difference-of-degree in a system where you're still basically yoked to churning out commodities and services that you don't care about
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

>If completion of a plan demands overtime, but you don't want to work overtime, you're in conflict.
Reduction of labour hours is a central feature of pretty much every proposal for a communist system I've seen, I find it more likely that the plan would be updated to reflect the need for more time rather than overtime being forced upon people. Not having the treat of bankruptcy hanging over the heads of branches of industry makes this possible, unlike today where missing deadlines forces overtime to occur.

>>1832991
planning is a tool that can be used for many purposes. obviously we desire to use it for workers' liberation. that's a given
>Being told what to do by a computer
literally can't happen. no machine can order a human around; this is a central point in Capital. what appears to be relations between things is really relations between people
someone will be telling you what to do, and we should desire that someone to be the final consumer (needs), since all other forms of labour would be unproductive and we should not squander labour power
the role of the planning system is to facilitate the fulfillment of needs, preferably without squandering natural resources or labour power. no mechanism has been put forth so far that can do this besides calculation in kind