/edu/ - Education

It seems like most socialists are either Marxists who support comprehensive state planning, or anarchists who support either cooperative firms or informal local economies.

Isn't this a false dichotomy, though? Different institutions have different strengths and weaknesses. Non-centralized institutions are necessary to deal with major collective action problems, like for instance climate change, but can come with a small number of failure points. One could imagine a world where SOEs produce public goods and homogenous commodities at scale, while smaller cooperatives form to produce more differentiated or experimental products.

I suppose a difficulty this introduces is that unlike everyone both owning and working for the state, or everyone both owning and working for their cooperative, this produces a seeming worker-owner split, with everyone owning the state but only some working for it. But there might presumably be a way to fix this with the way the state funds new cooperatives and collects back surplus from successful ones, which would seem to be necessary to avoid independent capital accumulation in an economy of just cooperatives anyway; and there may be aspects of the labor/ownership split that are physically inevitable per Critique of the Gotha Program (it cannot ever be the case that the only people who benefit from labor are the laborers, etc.)

Probably people have already done the math on this, or shown ways you could do it or why you couldn't, but I'm an ignoramus, so I'm posting this here.