This all does boil down to the question "How does communism allocate scarce goods?" to which "There won't actually be scare goods." is not an adequate answer.
The answer would actually be “democratic decision making to solve a collective action problem” but people seem to be unhappy with that answer because it’s not specific enough, despite also not being specific as to what resource is scarce beyond “people want live in same city because”or “why can’t I go to concert?” Or “why can’t I own priceless cultural treasure?”
So… the reason it’s “not specific enough” is that it’s a bad fucking answer. In capitalism the reason we do not meet basic needs is not because capitalism lacks the basic productive capacity to do so but because people do not vote for it. The failure of capitalism is the failure of democracy. So if you’re like “communism will be better because of democracy”* unlike capitalism wherein that shit happens by necessity then like… how could anyone respect your answer?
*please ignore all the times everyone has said that we won’t use democracy
This all does boil down to the question "How does communism allocate scarce goods?" to which "There won't actually be scare goods." is not an adequate answer.
The answer would actually be “democratic decision making to solve a collective action problem” but people seem to be unhappy with that answer because it’s not specific enough, despite also not being specific as to what resource is scarce beyond “people want live in same city because”or “why can’t I go to concert?” Or “why can’t I own priceless cultural treasure?”
I'm unhappy with that answer because democratic decision making doesn't guarantee communist outcomes.
It doesn't stop power and class structures from forming.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
...how on earth do you have a market in a classless, moneyless, stateless society?
Are we bartering goods and services directly for preferred real estate?
Classless and stateless yes
Moneyless, well…
- Existential Comics, “Anarchist Monopoly”
Lanz. On Page 1, you literally agreed with a post that described communism specifically as a classless, moneyless, stateless society. So yes, I'm using the definition you agree with.
Unless you no longer find that definition accurate?
I'm not gonna speak for Lanz, but there are about as many unique forms of communism as there are communists.
They can range from "idk we'll get post-scarcity and things will automatically sort themselves out" to having market systems that aren't that far off from capitalism, and everything in between.
Hell by and large my own personal position tends to fall somewhere around Market socialist
I’m just particularly tired of treating the whole of Communism as being authoritarian vanguardism and at least make the effort to understand it better
This all does boil down to the question "How does communism allocate scarce goods?" to which "There won't actually be scare goods." is not an adequate answer.
The answer would actually be “democratic decision making to solve a collective action problem” but people seem to be unhappy with that answer because it’s not specific enough, despite also not being specific as to what resource is scarce beyond “people want live in same city because”or “why can’t I go to concert?” Or “why can’t I own priceless cultural treasure?”
So… the reason it’s “not specific enough” is that it’s a bad fucking answer. In capitalism the reason we do not meet basic needs is not because capitalism lacks the basic productive capacity to do so but because people do not vote for it. The failure of capitalism is the failure of democracy. So if you’re like “communism will be better because of democracy”* unlike capitalism wherein that shit happens by necessity then like… how could anyone respect your answer?
*please ignore all the times everyone has said that we won’t use democracy
Except by its nature, Capitalism is anti-democratic. It is an inherently oligarchic mode of ownership. The reason Capitalism isn’t meeting basic needs is because it is not in the interest of the ownership class to do so, and so they extend effort, historically and contemporarily, fighting any effort to do so in order to secure a captive labor force and entrench class divisions. They are then able to parlay their class solidarity with the agents of government to act as a bulwark against democratic reform.
This all does boil down to the question "How does communism allocate scarce goods?" to which "There won't actually be scare goods." is not an adequate answer.
The answer would actually be “democratic decision making to solve a collective action problem” but people seem to be unhappy with that answer because it’s not specific enough, despite also not being specific as to what resource is scarce beyond “people want live in same city because”or “why can’t I go to concert?” Or “why can’t I own priceless cultural treasure?”
I'm unhappy with that answer because democratic decision making doesn't guarantee communist outcomes.
It doesn't stop power and class structures from forming.
Is guaranteed outcomes a reasonable standard? Can anyone actually meet that?
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
Zag, markets and trade are not exclusive to a capitalist mode of production
So I was writing up a whole thing about this and the process of working through has actually helped me realize something interesting about communism.
For a market to exist you have to have two parties willing to trade a good or service to the other. As communism dissolves private property, this would be personal property. However, since private property (capital, the means of production) is required to create personal property, and since private property is held in common, then what reason is there for either party to willingly trade their personal property when the commune will determine the amount of personal property they receive? Well, if the utility they parties derive from good/service A is greater than good/service B such that they're willing to pay the market "price" (note this does not have to be money, a common misconception) to forego their own stock of good/service B (which was determined by the commune) to acquire good/service A that they have greater utility for, then you can still have a reasonably efficient market mechanism for those two parties. Whether said market mechanism scales well I think depends on the instruments of trade. For example, money under capitalism is inherently the price exchanged for your provision of labor -- this is true whether you own the means of production or not, as the means of production is acquired through accumulated savings and time. Under communism where money would not inherently be the price for the exchange of labor, but rather could be the price pegged to something necessary to all people -- say food -- it would be reasonable to me to keep money as a uniform unit of exchange in communism just for ease of facilitating these markets where you can still get a pareto optimal outcome.
This all does boil down to the question "How does communism allocate scarce goods?" to which "There won't actually be scare goods." is not an adequate answer.
The answer would actually be “democratic decision making to solve a collective action problem” but people seem to be unhappy with that answer because it’s not specific enough, despite also not being specific as to what resource is scarce beyond “people want live in same city because”or “why can’t I go to concert?” Or “why can’t I own priceless cultural treasure?”
I'm unhappy with that answer because democratic decision making doesn't guarantee communist outcomes.
It doesn't stop power and class structures from forming.
Is guaranteed outcomes a reasonable standard? Can anyone actually meet that?
No but when the question is basically "how do you not slide back into classism and power structures when distributing scare resources?" the answer needs to be more involved than just "democracy".
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
This all does boil down to the question "How does communism allocate scarce goods?" to which "There won't actually be scare goods." is not an adequate answer.
The answer would actually be “democratic decision making to solve a collective action problem” but people seem to be unhappy with that answer because it’s not specific enough, despite also not being specific as to what resource is scarce beyond “people want live in same city because”or “why can’t I go to concert?” Or “why can’t I own priceless cultural treasure?”
I'm unhappy with that answer because democratic decision making doesn't guarantee communist outcomes.
It doesn't stop power and class structures from forming.
Is guaranteed outcomes a reasonable standard? Can anyone actually meet that?
No but when the question is basically "how do you not slide back into classism and power structures when distributing scare resources?" the answer needs to be more involved than just "democracy".
Yeah its something communists have pondered and writen about at long length. There's notions of continual revolution for instance, where you dont wholly dismantle the earlier reorganizing entities that built the communist system in the first place.
I think in the end all systems with humanitarian inclination ultimately rely on the diligence of their members though. Liberal capitalism being no different.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
I'd love to hear about any new ideas but you need to explain how this is actually beneficial. I assume by Workplace Democracy you mean the workers running a company as a co-op and deciding business strategies by popular vote. Explain why this is actually better for both the workers and society in real terms (i.e. not talking about class warfare).
Because nothing is stopping you from starting your own companies that are worker co-ops. If it's really a better business model you'll succeed and the idea will prevail as a common and eventually predominant style, right?
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
I'd love to hear about any new ideas but you need to explain how this is actually beneficial. I assume by Workplace Democracy you mean the workers running a company as a co-op and deciding business strategies by popular vote. Explain why this is actually better for both the workers and society in real terms (i.e. not talking about class warfare).
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
Yes, like transitioning to a system where businesses are fully worker owned, a la co-ops, etc., averse to the private ownership structures under capitalism.
Because people keep telling me in this thread that a better, more equitable world isn’t possible, and cite as their reasons Van Gogh’s artistic output, the Beatles, and apparently that not everyone can live in New York City, Seattle or the Grand Canyon.
Literally nobody in the thread has said a better world isn't possible.
Please don't strawman us.
"We are skeptical of your utopia" is not the same as "what we have is the theoretical optimum."
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
With the big caveat that workers act like shareholders and don't make direct decisions.
Office politics suck, create informal hierarchies, and, frankly, most people have opinions without expertise.
I pity the IT department of a co-op where workers decide on the IT policy democratically, for example. Imagine: a world where everyone has the same power over security and infrastructure as execs... That's a nightmare.
Og, isn't a command economy that distributes the default and a market to trade the distributed defaults just a very inefficient but hopefully benign state capitalist welfare economy? The only problem you're solving is who gets to decide what a person is allowed to have, with the answer being "the regime that controls the means of production".
Og, isn't a command economy that distributes the default and a market to trade the distributed defaults just a very inefficient but hopefully benign state capitalist welfare economy? The only problem you're solving is who gets to decide what a person is allowed to have, with the answer being "the regime that controls the means of production".
I think excessive central control does put you at greater risk of a state capitalist system. Its probably still better for some goods. An increased emphasis on worker owned co-ops in far left wing economic theory is a pretty direct result of lessons learned from the USSR.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
Zag, markets and trade are not exclusive to a capitalist mode of production
So I was writing up a whole thing about this and the process of working through has actually helped me realize something interesting about communism.
For a market to exist you have to have two parties willing to trade a good or service to the other. As communism dissolves private property, this would be personal property. However, since private property (capital, the means of production) is required to create personal property, and since private property is held in common, then what reason is there for either party to willingly trade their personal property when the commune will determine the amount of personal property they receive? Well, if the utility they parties derive from good/service A is greater than good/service B such that they're willing to pay the market "price" (note this does not have to be money, a common misconception) to forego their own stock of good/service B (which was determined by the commune) to acquire good/service A that they have greater utility for, then you can still have a reasonably efficient market mechanism for those two parties. Whether said market mechanism scales well I think depends on the instruments of trade. For example, money under capitalism is inherently the price exchanged for your provision of labor -- this is true whether you own the means of production or not, as the means of production is acquired through accumulated savings and time. Under communism where money would not inherently be the price for the exchange of labor, but rather could be the price pegged to something necessary to all people -- say food -- it would be reasonable to me to keep money as a uniform unit of exchange in communism just for ease of facilitating these markets where you can still get a pareto optimal outcome.
Huh. I need to sit with this more.
The history and philosophy of Labor Vouchers/Labor Notes/Labor Cheques may be of interest to you, Oghulk.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
I'd love to hear about any new ideas but you need to explain how this is actually beneficial. I assume by Workplace Democracy you mean the workers running a company as a co-op and deciding business strategies by popular vote. Explain why this is actually better for both the workers and society in real terms (i.e. not talking about class warfare).
More equitable distribution of profits
More direct experience with the ins and outs of the operation of the business, including safety needs that are unprofitable for the shareholders (See: Abbott and the current formula shortage, where the C-Suite opted for stock buy backs instead of new equipment and maintenance.).
This all does boil down to the question "How does communism allocate scarce goods?" to which "There won't actually be scare goods." is not an adequate answer.
Some scarcity is material. Some of it is because we've built economic systems that incentivize making it so.
Doesn't matter. Some scarcity will still exist no matter what and therefore communism must be able to deal with it.
It's not like there aren't solutions. Some of them aren't great, but saying it'll be first-come, first-served, or distributed on a lottery or rotating basis or something and some people will just be SOL is a reasonable answer. I mean here and now it's basically if you can't afford it you can suck it and learn to live without.
That's not actually capitalism's answer. It's that the person who needs or wants it the most will pay the most and it will be sold to the person who pays the most, thus efficiently distributing scarce goods to those who will get the most value from them. Yes in practice this breaks down a bit when there are vast differences in how much money any given person even has.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
With the big caveat that workers act like shareholders and don't make direct decisions.
Office politics suck, create informal hierarchies, and, frankly, most people have opinions without expertise.
I pity the IT department of a co-op where workers decide on the IT policy democratically, for example. Imagine: a world where everyone has the same power over security and infrastructure as execs... That's a nightmare.
Like I said, the bare minimum here.
Formulate the democratic arrangement of the workplace in question to your discretion, so long as it maintains a democratic and equitable character for all those working under it.
Except by its nature, Capitalism is anti-democratic. It is an inherently oligarchic mode of ownership. The reason Capitalism isn’t meeting basic needs is because it is not in the interest of the ownership class to do so, and so they extend effort, historically and contemporarily, fighting any effort to do so in order to secure a captive labor force and entrench class divisions. They are then able to parlay their class solidarity with the agents of government to act as a bulwark against democratic reform.
So if we get rid of private property then people will no longer have reason to utilize a democracy to their own ends?
I find that unconvincing since like… people do that all the time. And also because how those interests are expressed kind of matter. Like… what if people legitimately choose capitalism? Or legitimately choose to not supply enough housing? Or legitimately choose to throw some people out of their houses so that others can live there. Or to guillotine people. Would that just “not be communism” and so we cannot criticize it?
Moreover and expressed many pages ago. If communism is the action for which the system chooses and not (just) the system then you need to explain the action which makes the system communist.
Og, isn't a command economy that distributes the default and a market to trade the distributed defaults just a very inefficient but hopefully benign state capitalist welfare economy? The only problem you're solving is who gets to decide what a person is allowed to have, with the answer being "the regime that controls the means of production".
Not necessarily. In my construction the commune does not have to be a state. The distinction between what I constructed and a capitalist welfare economy is the ownership of private property (capital, means of production). The commune can vote on what the means of production will be used for. Say the commune has preferences for two goods, apples and oranges, so instead of trying to find the exact number of apples and oranges that will satisfy everyone and produce that amount, you just vote on splitting production between the two goods (50/50) and then people trade on the market for their exact preference. From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
Of course, things get more complicated when you get to larger numbers of goods, services, etc. But on its face it's reasonable.
From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
This is wrong. In order to guarantee an efficient allocation of goods you must allow production of apples and oranges to scale with prices. And while you may be Pareto efficient you’re strictly utility inefficient.
If they do not you’re vulnerable to corner solutions (thus ruining even Pareto efficiency) especially when multiple goods are involved.
Goumindong on
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
Og, isn't a command economy that distributes the default and a market to trade the distributed defaults just a very inefficient but hopefully benign state capitalist welfare economy? The only problem you're solving is who gets to decide what a person is allowed to have, with the answer being "the regime that controls the means of production".
Not necessarily. In my construction the commune does not have to be a state. The distinction between what I constructed and a capitalist welfare economy is the ownership of private property (capital, means of production). The commune can vote on what the means of production will be used for. Say the commune has preferences for two goods, apples and oranges, so instead of trying to find the exact number of apples and oranges that will satisfy everyone and produce that amount, you just vote on splitting production between the two goods (50/50) and then people trade on the market for their exact preference. From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
Of course, things get more complicated when you get to larger numbers of goods, services, etc. But on its face it's reasonable.
let's extrapolate and say that it's exactly 50 apples and 50 oranges that are produced to fit your framework
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
Og, isn't a command economy that distributes the default and a market to trade the distributed defaults just a very inefficient but hopefully benign state capitalist welfare economy? The only problem you're solving is who gets to decide what a person is allowed to have, with the answer being "the regime that controls the means of production".
Not necessarily. In my construction the commune does not have to be a state. The distinction between what I constructed and a capitalist welfare economy is the ownership of private property (capital, means of production). The commune can vote on what the means of production will be used for. Say the commune has preferences for two goods, apples and oranges, so instead of trying to find the exact number of apples and oranges that will satisfy everyone and produce that amount, you just vote on splitting production between the two goods (50/50) and then people trade on the market for their exact preference. From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
Of course, things get more complicated when you get to larger numbers of goods, services, etc. But on its face it's reasonable.
let's extrapolate and say that it's exactly 50 apples and 50 oranges that are produced to fit your framework
what happens when the demand is for 85 oranges?
I think it would be reasonable to say that the production should match the aggregate demand for the product. Knowing that is half the problem with communism and this doesn't solve that.
Og, isn't a command economy that distributes the default and a market to trade the distributed defaults just a very inefficient but hopefully benign state capitalist welfare economy? The only problem you're solving is who gets to decide what a person is allowed to have, with the answer being "the regime that controls the means of production".
Not necessarily. In my construction the commune does not have to be a state. The distinction between what I constructed and a capitalist welfare economy is the ownership of private property (capital, means of production). The commune can vote on what the means of production will be used for. Say the commune has preferences for two goods, apples and oranges, so instead of trying to find the exact number of apples and oranges that will satisfy everyone and produce that amount, you just vote on splitting production between the two goods (50/50) and then people trade on the market for their exact preference. From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
Of course, things get more complicated when you get to larger numbers of goods, services, etc. But on its face it's reasonable.
let's extrapolate and say that it's exactly 50 apples and 50 oranges that are produced to fit your framework
what happens when the demand is for 85 oranges?
The problem is the paradigm only permits a zero-sum outcome. It has no room for “we plant more orange trees to meet continued demand”
Which again, is the problem with a lot of these hypotheticals; they have no room for the idea that maybe things don’t actually have to be zero sum, or that we’re actually closer to solving our scarcity problems than we like to think we are not by some magical means, but just by the fact that our society and technology has advanced enough to meet the needs of everyone on the planet, and that scarcity at this point is largely artificial scarcity driven by the monopolization of resources by Capital.
See again: The constant food waste we produce, the constant waste of clothing in fast fashion, the way we’ve turned housing from a thing for people to live in but an investment vehicle where countless potential units of housing sit empty as their owners wait for value to accrue enough for a massive payout, etc.
The Grapes of Wrath once more grow heavy on the vine, and that’s before we get into the mismanagement under capitalism like we’ve seen with the Abbott formula crisis, of Nimbyism preventing the construction of equitable housing, etc. etc. etc.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I guess that's convenient to avoid explaining your position in concrete terms but it begs the question how you'll convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
That everyone has their basic needs provided for is part of socialist and communist philosophy. Not the case with capitalism.
Capitalism, by design, only cares about scarcity as it pertains to generating maximum profits for those in control. As long as line goes up, fuck how the average person's quality of life is.
Communism cares about reducing scarcity in as equitable manner as possible. Being unable to immediately and entirely generate a post-scarcity society does not mean the mode is doomed to fail, nor that the more immediate accomplishments and societal improvements that would come about do not deserve acknowledgement.
That certain things might still have greater demand than can be supplied is not a repudiation of the system, if it is still providing for basic demands better than the alternative.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
This is wrong. In order to guarantee an efficient allocation of goods you must allow production of apples and oranges to scale with prices.
Can you elaborate on this.
Let there be a well formed utility function U such that dU/df is positive and (dU/df)^2 is is negative. IE this means that for any individual person they prefer having 2 apples more than 1 apple but they prefer going from 1 Apple to 2 apples less than going from 0 apples to 1 apple. But we do not specify if 1 Apple is worth more than 1 orange or even 2 oranges.
If we allow that there is an equal distribution of goods then the trade outcome will be Pareto* efficient but if we allow a third good, labor, to have a price between all three where people can work apples or oranges depending on whether or not people want apples or oranges more then utility is increased. Trivially it should be clear that if apples/oranges is Pareto that apples/oranges/labor is also pareto. And also that at worst apples/oranges/labor produces the same outcome as apples/oranges. This unless a/o/l produces exactly the same amount as the distribution you voted on its utility increasing.
*meaning that you cannot make anyone better off without making someone else worse off
Edit: so this is a bit basic. The actual constructions involve a social utility function that is the weighted sum of everyone’s utility function and the proofs involve showing that there exists weights for any initial distribution of goods. As an IFF statement which means there exists an initial distribution of goods for any weights. This is both the (simple non expanded) basis for markets but also a basis for redistributive taxation.
The language that communism and capitalism 'care' about different things is deceptive.
They don't care about anything. They'll just do what they do when you input the actions of people into their framework.
Garbage in will get garbage out. Actually, since communism is more delicate and isn't built to eat garbage, it won't spew out garbage, it'll fly apart completely and you'll end up pulling your capitalism back out of the closet and it'll be a whole ass mess.
Put good stuff in and...who knows, we've never tried it with either.
Also, Lanlaorn, I think that if your opinion, as indicated in your earlier post, is that “class warfare is not a thing,” then honestly there’s little reason for us to engage with each other, because our fundamentals are that at odds with each other. If that is your position, we believe in fundamentally different ideas regarding society’s organization and the social pressures that drive its behavior to actually come to terms.
I guess that's convenient to avoid explaining your position in concrete terms but it begs the question how you'll convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
Because ultimately I am aware that the point of debate between ideological partisans is never to actually move the other’s needle; otherwise they wouldn’t be ideological partisans.
You don’t believe class warfare is a thing. Meanwhile, I do, and believe history is rife with it, from the muscle hired by Capital to beat and kill labor strikers, to the widespread policies that they pursue at the federal level that result in the immiseration of the lower classes, to other historic events like, say, the Battle of Blair Mountain, where the forces of mine owners literally dropped cobbled together bombs constructed of leftover WWI munitions on the miners.
So again, you think that Class Warfare isn’t real, and I think history is full of it’s evidence, including being quite literal at points
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
Og, isn't a command economy that distributes the default and a market to trade the distributed defaults just a very inefficient but hopefully benign state capitalist welfare economy? The only problem you're solving is who gets to decide what a person is allowed to have, with the answer being "the regime that controls the means of production".
Not necessarily. In my construction the commune does not have to be a state. The distinction between what I constructed and a capitalist welfare economy is the ownership of private property (capital, means of production). The commune can vote on what the means of production will be used for. Say the commune has preferences for two goods, apples and oranges, so instead of trying to find the exact number of apples and oranges that will satisfy everyone and produce that amount, you just vote on splitting production between the two goods (50/50) and then people trade on the market for their exact preference. From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
Of course, things get more complicated when you get to larger numbers of goods, services, etc. But on its face it's reasonable.
let's extrapolate and say that it's exactly 50 apples and 50 oranges that are produced to fit your framework
what happens when the demand is for 85 oranges?
I think it would be reasonable to say that the production should match the aggregate demand for the product. Knowing that is half the problem with communism and this doesn't solve that.
i'd think it's more than half of the problem. a planned economy has to know exactly how much of everything is needed for everyone all the time for ever and ever amen.
and then be able to shift to meet the changes in needs.
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
This is wrong. In order to guarantee an efficient allocation of goods you must allow production of apples and oranges to scale with prices.
Can you elaborate on this.
Let there be a well formed utility function U such that dU/df is positive and (dU/df)^2 is is negative. IE this means that for any individual person they prefer having 2 apples more than 1 apple but they prefer going from 1 Apple to 2 apples less than going from 0 apples to 1 apple. But we do not specify if 1 Apple is worth more than 1 orange or even 2 oranges.
If we allow that there is an equal distribution of goods then the trade outcome will be Pareto* efficient but if we allow a third good, labor, to have a price between all three where people can work apples or oranges depending on whether or not people want apples or oranges more then utility is increased. Trivially it should be clear that if apples/oranges is Pareto that apples/oranges/labor is also pareto. And also that at worst apples/oranges/labor produces the same outcome as apples/oranges. This unless a/o/l produces exactly the same amount as the distribution you voted on its utility increasing.
*meaning that you cannot make anyone better off without making someone else worse off
But allowing that third good (labor, to work for apples and oranges) contradicts the construction in that it A. adds a third good and B. would not be possible without a vote of the commune on how the means of production is used.
Demand also varies a ton based on trends that aren't predictable, including demand through advertising or word of mouth even without advertising
Also generating demand for something where it wasn't before isn't necessarily bad.
A ton of pretty useful stuff requires advertising to generate demand for it simply because it isn't necessarily really obvious and advertising is often needed to get past that hump for a ton of people
Like most people can think of their parents just ignoring something because they refuse to consider that some new innovation might be better
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
This is wrong. In order to guarantee an efficient allocation of goods you must allow production of apples and oranges to scale with prices.
Can you elaborate on this.
Let there be a well formed utility function U such that dU/df is positive and (dU/df)^2 is is negative. IE this means that for any individual person they prefer having 2 apples more than 1 apple but they prefer going from 1 Apple to 2 apples less than going from 0 apples to 1 apple. But we do not specify if 1 Apple is worth more than 1 orange or even 2 oranges.
If we allow that there is an equal distribution of goods then the trade outcome will be Pareto* efficient but if we allow a third good, labor, to have a price between all three where people can work apples or oranges depending on whether or not people want apples or oranges more then utility is increased. Trivially it should be clear that if apples/oranges is Pareto that apples/oranges/labor is also pareto. And also that at worst apples/oranges/labor produces the same outcome as apples/oranges. This unless a/o/l produces exactly the same amount as the distribution you voted on its utility increasing.
*meaning that you cannot make anyone better off without making someone else worse off
But allowing that third good (labor, to work for apples and oranges) contradicts the construction in that it A. adds a third good and B. would not be possible without a vote of the commune on how the means of production is used.
Yes but those provisions mean that the vote on how production is used is inefficient compared to utilizing prices to determine productivity…
That is what you asked me to show. Labor is the production (technically labor apples and labor oranges, I could have been more precise we should have four goods with a limiting constraint that La + Lo = constant but this produces the same results) thus it’s almost certainly better when the market also determines the ratio of labor
For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
Goum, could you please give us your definition or Capitalism, or at least what the core tenets are in your view?
Because if you think “worker ownership of the means of production” is capitalistic instead of socialistic in nature, I think we are rapidly grinding tire rims on asphalt here
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For the Communism skeptical, a question: could any of us get you on board with at least Workplace Democracy? Like, the most bare minimum of worker self-management socialist thought?
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
Goum, could you please give us your definition or Capitalism, or at least what the core tenets are in your view?
Because if you think “worker ownership of the means of production” is capitalistic instead of socialistic in nature, I think we are rapidly grinding tire rims on asphalt here
Capitalism will quite cheerfully integrate co-ops into the bulk of firms producing any given good. They're just not usually competitive because they typically lack the (wait for it) capital to achieve the same kind of economies of scale as corporations.
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So… the reason it’s “not specific enough” is that it’s a bad fucking answer. In capitalism the reason we do not meet basic needs is not because capitalism lacks the basic productive capacity to do so but because people do not vote for it. The failure of capitalism is the failure of democracy. So if you’re like “communism will be better because of democracy”* unlike capitalism wherein that shit happens by necessity then like… how could anyone respect your answer?
*please ignore all the times everyone has said that we won’t use democracy
I'm unhappy with that answer because democratic decision making doesn't guarantee communist outcomes.
It doesn't stop power and class structures from forming.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Hell by and large my own personal position tends to fall somewhere around Market socialist
I’m just particularly tired of treating the whole of Communism as being authoritarian vanguardism and at least make the effort to understand it better
Except by its nature, Capitalism is anti-democratic. It is an inherently oligarchic mode of ownership. The reason Capitalism isn’t meeting basic needs is because it is not in the interest of the ownership class to do so, and so they extend effort, historically and contemporarily, fighting any effort to do so in order to secure a captive labor force and entrench class divisions. They are then able to parlay their class solidarity with the agents of government to act as a bulwark against democratic reform.
Is guaranteed outcomes a reasonable standard? Can anyone actually meet that?
So I was writing up a whole thing about this and the process of working through has actually helped me realize something interesting about communism.
For a market to exist you have to have two parties willing to trade a good or service to the other. As communism dissolves private property, this would be personal property. However, since private property (capital, the means of production) is required to create personal property, and since private property is held in common, then what reason is there for either party to willingly trade their personal property when the commune will determine the amount of personal property they receive? Well, if the utility they parties derive from good/service A is greater than good/service B such that they're willing to pay the market "price" (note this does not have to be money, a common misconception) to forego their own stock of good/service B (which was determined by the commune) to acquire good/service A that they have greater utility for, then you can still have a reasonably efficient market mechanism for those two parties. Whether said market mechanism scales well I think depends on the instruments of trade. For example, money under capitalism is inherently the price exchanged for your provision of labor -- this is true whether you own the means of production or not, as the means of production is acquired through accumulated savings and time. Under communism where money would not inherently be the price for the exchange of labor, but rather could be the price pegged to something necessary to all people -- say food -- it would be reasonable to me to keep money as a uniform unit of exchange in communism just for ease of facilitating these markets where you can still get a pareto optimal outcome.
Huh. I need to sit with this more.
No but when the question is basically "how do you not slide back into classism and power structures when distributing scare resources?" the answer needs to be more involved than just "democracy".
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Like unions being good, worker owned co-ops being better?
Yes i already agree with that.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Yeah its something communists have pondered and writen about at long length. There's notions of continual revolution for instance, where you dont wholly dismantle the earlier reorganizing entities that built the communist system in the first place.
I think in the end all systems with humanitarian inclination ultimately rely on the diligence of their members though. Liberal capitalism being no different.
I'd love to hear about any new ideas but you need to explain how this is actually beneficial. I assume by Workplace Democracy you mean the workers running a company as a co-op and deciding business strategies by popular vote. Explain why this is actually better for both the workers and society in real terms (i.e. not talking about class warfare).
Because nothing is stopping you from starting your own companies that are worker co-ops. If it's really a better business model you'll succeed and the idea will prevail as a common and eventually predominant style, right?
More equitable distribution of profits
Yes, like transitioning to a system where businesses are fully worker owned, a la co-ops, etc., averse to the private ownership structures under capitalism.
Literally nobody in the thread has said a better world isn't possible.
Please don't strawman us.
"We are skeptical of your utopia" is not the same as "what we have is the theoretical optimum."
With the big caveat that workers act like shareholders and don't make direct decisions.
Office politics suck, create informal hierarchies, and, frankly, most people have opinions without expertise.
I pity the IT department of a co-op where workers decide on the IT policy democratically, for example. Imagine: a world where everyone has the same power over security and infrastructure as execs... That's a nightmare.
I think excessive central control does put you at greater risk of a state capitalist system. Its probably still better for some goods. An increased emphasis on worker owned co-ops in far left wing economic theory is a pretty direct result of lessons learned from the USSR.
The history and philosophy of Labor Vouchers/Labor Notes/Labor Cheques may be of interest to you, Oghulk.
More direct experience with the ins and outs of the operation of the business, including safety needs that are unprofitable for the shareholders (See: Abbott and the current formula shortage, where the C-Suite opted for stock buy backs instead of new equipment and maintenance.).
That's not actually capitalism's answer. It's that the person who needs or wants it the most will pay the most and it will be sold to the person who pays the most, thus efficiently distributing scarce goods to those who will get the most value from them. Yes in practice this breaks down a bit when there are vast differences in how much money any given person even has.
Like I said, the bare minimum here.
Formulate the democratic arrangement of the workplace in question to your discretion, so long as it maintains a democratic and equitable character for all those working under it.
So if we get rid of private property then people will no longer have reason to utilize a democracy to their own ends?
I find that unconvincing since like… people do that all the time. And also because how those interests are expressed kind of matter. Like… what if people legitimately choose capitalism? Or legitimately choose to not supply enough housing? Or legitimately choose to throw some people out of their houses so that others can live there. Or to guillotine people. Would that just “not be communism” and so we cannot criticize it?
Moreover and expressed many pages ago. If communism is the action for which the system chooses and not (just) the system then you need to explain the action which makes the system communist.
Not necessarily. In my construction the commune does not have to be a state. The distinction between what I constructed and a capitalist welfare economy is the ownership of private property (capital, means of production). The commune can vote on what the means of production will be used for. Say the commune has preferences for two goods, apples and oranges, so instead of trying to find the exact number of apples and oranges that will satisfy everyone and produce that amount, you just vote on splitting production between the two goods (50/50) and then people trade on the market for their exact preference. From that you get a market-efficient allocation of goods through common ownership of the means of production.
Of course, things get more complicated when you get to larger numbers of goods, services, etc. But on its face it's reasonable.
This is wrong. In order to guarantee an efficient allocation of goods you must allow production of apples and oranges to scale with prices. And while you may be Pareto efficient you’re strictly utility inefficient.
If they do not you’re vulnerable to corner solutions (thus ruining even Pareto efficiency) especially when multiple goods are involved.
let's extrapolate and say that it's exactly 50 apples and 50 oranges that are produced to fit your framework
what happens when the demand is for 85 oranges?
Can you elaborate on this.
I think it would be reasonable to say that the production should match the aggregate demand for the product. Knowing that is half the problem with communism and this doesn't solve that.
The problem is the paradigm only permits a zero-sum outcome. It has no room for “we plant more orange trees to meet continued demand”
Which again, is the problem with a lot of these hypotheticals; they have no room for the idea that maybe things don’t actually have to be zero sum, or that we’re actually closer to solving our scarcity problems than we like to think we are not by some magical means, but just by the fact that our society and technology has advanced enough to meet the needs of everyone on the planet, and that scarcity at this point is largely artificial scarcity driven by the monopolization of resources by Capital.
See again: The constant food waste we produce, the constant waste of clothing in fast fashion, the way we’ve turned housing from a thing for people to live in but an investment vehicle where countless potential units of housing sit empty as their owners wait for value to accrue enough for a massive payout, etc.
The Grapes of Wrath once more grow heavy on the vine, and that’s before we get into the mismanagement under capitalism like we’ve seen with the Abbott formula crisis, of Nimbyism preventing the construction of equitable housing, etc. etc. etc.
I guess that's convenient to avoid explaining your position in concrete terms but it begs the question how you'll convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
Capitalism, by design, only cares about scarcity as it pertains to generating maximum profits for those in control. As long as line goes up, fuck how the average person's quality of life is.
Communism cares about reducing scarcity in as equitable manner as possible. Being unable to immediately and entirely generate a post-scarcity society does not mean the mode is doomed to fail, nor that the more immediate accomplishments and societal improvements that would come about do not deserve acknowledgement.
That certain things might still have greater demand than can be supplied is not a repudiation of the system, if it is still providing for basic demands better than the alternative.
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But there is nothing not capitalist about worker owned coops.
Let there be a well formed utility function U such that dU/df is positive and (dU/df)^2 is is negative. IE this means that for any individual person they prefer having 2 apples more than 1 apple but they prefer going from 1 Apple to 2 apples less than going from 0 apples to 1 apple. But we do not specify if 1 Apple is worth more than 1 orange or even 2 oranges.
If we allow that there is an equal distribution of goods then the trade outcome will be Pareto* efficient but if we allow a third good, labor, to have a price between all three where people can work apples or oranges depending on whether or not people want apples or oranges more then utility is increased. Trivially it should be clear that if apples/oranges is Pareto that apples/oranges/labor is also pareto. And also that at worst apples/oranges/labor produces the same outcome as apples/oranges. This unless a/o/l produces exactly the same amount as the distribution you voted on its utility increasing.
*meaning that you cannot make anyone better off without making someone else worse off
Edit: so this is a bit basic. The actual constructions involve a social utility function that is the weighted sum of everyone’s utility function and the proofs involve showing that there exists weights for any initial distribution of goods. As an IFF statement which means there exists an initial distribution of goods for any weights. This is both the (simple non expanded) basis for markets but also a basis for redistributive taxation.
They don't care about anything. They'll just do what they do when you input the actions of people into their framework.
Garbage in will get garbage out. Actually, since communism is more delicate and isn't built to eat garbage, it won't spew out garbage, it'll fly apart completely and you'll end up pulling your capitalism back out of the closet and it'll be a whole ass mess.
Put good stuff in and...who knows, we've never tried it with either.
Because ultimately I am aware that the point of debate between ideological partisans is never to actually move the other’s needle; otherwise they wouldn’t be ideological partisans.
You don’t believe class warfare is a thing. Meanwhile, I do, and believe history is rife with it, from the muscle hired by Capital to beat and kill labor strikers, to the widespread policies that they pursue at the federal level that result in the immiseration of the lower classes, to other historic events like, say, the Battle of Blair Mountain, where the forces of mine owners literally dropped cobbled together bombs constructed of leftover WWI munitions on the miners.
So again, you think that Class Warfare isn’t real, and I think history is full of it’s evidence, including being quite literal at points
i'd think it's more than half of the problem. a planned economy has to know exactly how much of everything is needed for everyone all the time for ever and ever amen.
and then be able to shift to meet the changes in needs.
But allowing that third good (labor, to work for apples and oranges) contradicts the construction in that it A. adds a third good and B. would not be possible without a vote of the commune on how the means of production is used.
Also generating demand for something where it wasn't before isn't necessarily bad.
A ton of pretty useful stuff requires advertising to generate demand for it simply because it isn't necessarily really obvious and advertising is often needed to get past that hump for a ton of people
Like most people can think of their parents just ignoring something because they refuse to consider that some new innovation might be better
Yes but those provisions mean that the vote on how production is used is inefficient compared to utilizing prices to determine productivity…
That is what you asked me to show. Labor is the production (technically labor apples and labor oranges, I could have been more precise we should have four goods with a limiting constraint that La + Lo = constant but this produces the same results) thus it’s almost certainly better when the market also determines the ratio of labor
Goum, could you please give us your definition or Capitalism, or at least what the core tenets are in your view?
Because if you think “worker ownership of the means of production” is capitalistic instead of socialistic in nature, I think we are rapidly grinding tire rims on asphalt here
Capitalism will quite cheerfully integrate co-ops into the bulk of firms producing any given good. They're just not usually competitive because they typically lack the (wait for it) capital to achieve the same kind of economies of scale as corporations.