/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Cockshott's cybersocialism is drastically missing the point. The purpose of planning wasn't to micromanage every possible thing, but to plan major industry and distribution. In the conditions of the USSR, the government was the only way people could have nice things, because there was no capital and industry had to be built.

If you don't want runaway accumulation, you could - using today's electronic banking - track any account with too much money and put a wealth tax on every account, all the assets you own. The concept of a wealth tax exists now in liberal societies. People are going to have some property of their own, and have to in order to live. The problem is using that property exploitatively, and the only way you stop that is to eliminate the need of predatory rent arrangements. That's why you'd have more social housing, limits on how many housing units you can own, what you can charge for rent, and the ability to enforce those laws. Again, it's not alien to existing law or an intractable problem to enforce. But the greater question is having enough housing units, meeting what people want out of those housing units, and so on. If you're giving people an entitlement to social property, it's implying some individual right to social property, not "you live entirely by society's rules and we dictate what you can do and what you will be". The latter isn't a communistic idea, but a fascistic one that seeks to abolish eveything outside the state. It's curious how this became the commonly accepted conception of socialism, rather than some practical that people would actually want. In the USSR, the state owning property wasn't a matter of excluding people or putting them through a rigamarole to prove they get something of quality. The state built the homes for social ends, and so it made sense to people that they were to be used for social ends and were not to be rented. The state put restrictions on rent extraction, rather than the state having an overbearing need to tell you that you only get one commieblock apartment and micromanaging that. I think if the USSR were in different conditions, like not being on a permanent war footing and having diversified its economy, its planning model would have been different, and likely less different from something you would recognize today. There were other factors which led to stagnation in the Soviet planning system, many of them tying to capitalist elements preparing for restoring private property and needing to obscure that the social plan was not working for the people any more. Emphasizing bureaucratic waste and managerialism makes sense if the idea was to set up accumulation again while maintaining public support by continuing the generous subsidy to workers. The funny thing is that post-Stalin reformers kept saying they were going to reduce bureaucracy and liberalize to an extent, yet they'd make the bureaucracy and managerialism bigger and worse every time, including with Gorby - until Gorby broke the system, perhaps on purpose, and begged the IMF to wreck the country.

Of course the idea of cybersocialism is to automate the managerial task so we're not doing this - but the simpler solution is to just not micromanage what people can exchange, and answer the bigger question of what we are producing and how we are distributing it. If people can get what they want through allocation a lot easier than bartering or buying at market, would they sell stuff, especially hard-to-replace stuff?

There is a big problem with black markets, when people sell their state-issued computer or car for heroin and this leads to problems - and even if you hardwire the terminal to a housing unit, people will pry it out to get the thing they can sell, if that's what they have to do. There are workarounds (give them a freebie or two, then if they start suspciously losing their computers, they get a loaner and are told if you lose this one, it's on you). But there are always ways to manipulate a plan - someone might use terroristic threats to game the system to make it unworkable, smashing your computer regularly to drain society's resources and making you pay for it if you have the aforementioned policy. Ultimately you have to secure the peace so that you don't have malevolent actors doing egregious shit like that, and that's the real question you're asking when you get into the finer details of planning.

That is, you don't just assume people are not malevolent at all or are naturally good, or that people will be made good by having virtue pressed inside them like some industrial process. You have to be willing to punish malevolence once it gets out of hand, but also understand how others are wronged. You need a sense of justice, and that's exactly what utilitarianism fucks with, what Fabian socialism intentionally manipulates to produce a distorted, inverted ethos of what would be necessary for a prosperous socialist society.

>>454577
>There are workarounds
I think the best solution to those kind of problems are letting the state cover only part of the costs. Like singapore.

I agree broadly with your point, but the state should ideally be the employer of first resort. And cockshott style large plans are nevertheless necessary for that. After that, its fine if theres some parallel structures. Like how education is a state service but if you want private school its outside the system*. And of course, essential vs inessential is to be determined by the community beyond some universal charter like "no exploitation".

*the private education is actually a really productive example here. The problem is that if too many people start putting their kids in private school, they no longer want to fund public schools, and public schools fall more and more behind. Eventually being lost. Thats why a large huge state economy is needed in the first generation at least.

The synthesis is to make the system resilient to change. Capitalism always gets back up because no matter how bad it gets, people don't have an alternative to just going to work for a wage. This is why the local level is so important. People have to trust communism more than they trust any communist party or state. Just how today people trust capitalism(as a social relation) more than any one capitalist or state.

>>454577
The actual solution isn't to manage what people want but let people decide for themselves through democracy and bottom up planning. People just obsess over this false dichotomy as if it has any mert. We can use computers to do complex mathamtics, and we should, and this can help us plan the economy but ultimately some.level of horizontal democracy is going to be necessary

>>454579
Public schooling, so far as it did teach, fulfilled its function of establishing technocratic classes, which became more or less castes. Everything from 1960 on was very conscious of a future mission of preparing the population for this caste system, very intentionally. It was not an accident that a ridiculously large bureaucracy was created to breathe down everyone's neck, and not an accident that maladaptive teachings were encouraged. (This applies to a lot of private schools, many of them are somehow worse than public schooling because no one actually gives a shit about standards.) Schools go so far out of their way to not teach that they don't provide free textbooks, when it would be comically easy to deliver to every family textbooks on all core subjects. This would be an extremely low-cost thing you could do to raise test scores and educational outcomes drastically - tell people what is expected of them, and encourage them to do it on their own time. Schooling is full of so many lies and cruelties that it difficult to imagine this is useful for teaching anything. Everyone I knew learned on their own time, and there was enough inertia that knowledge could sort of perpetuate. Basically, once there was mass literacy at the basic level, that was about the high point of what compulsory schooling would accomplish. Everything else is pretty much pure inertia, and even with this, basic literacy was well over 90% before public schooling, and the apparent rise in literacy in the backwards parts of the world had more to do with someone actually looking at the peasants for the first time in history, then any genuine effectiveness of the schooling method.

>>454571
>The presenter brings up a very strong example of wanting to sell an old guitar, and paul sidesteps the problem by appealing to the idea of a barter and gift economy.

I agree that it does feel a little bit like Cockshott evaded the question, but you can build a cyber-barter-system. You can use a computer program to solve for optimal series of barter exchanges.

The problem that a barter economy tries to solve is the following: If you have shoes and want to trade them for bacon, and I want your shoes, but i only have apples to trade, i first have to find a way to trade my apples for bacon, before i can trade with you for the shoes. When i try to trade my apples for bacon, the bacon-guy might only want to trade for a shovel, so now i have to find a way to trade my apples for a shovel, so i can trade the shovel for bacon, so i can trade the bacon for shoes. Basically i have to set up 50 trades in order to get the stuff i want.

At this point the market guy glibly interjects why don't you use money as intermediary, and the answer to that is that we made that switch in the past and as a result we now have capitalist mega corporations that want to dominate every facet of our lives, and we have no say in politics because the capitalists who won the market economy, used money to bribe every government they could find. Basically the people standing on our necks, use money as a weapon to keep us down. So we should really strive to make a system that works well without using money, because it has proven to be such a dangerous thing to our liberty.

Cockshott has solved how to organize production without money and markets, and his stuff will work better than what capitalists do, but we still need to find a way to replace the second hand market with a socialist system that is at least as good and preferably better than what a system with money can do. And we can do this with cybernetic-bartering.

Remember the problem of bartering, that you have to trade for 50 different things you don't want before you get to trade for the stuff you actually want, well that can be made a painless process as well. If everybody enters the stuff they have for barter and the stuff they want from barter into a database, we can use a computer algorithm to calculate the optimal series of barter exchanges to make sure everybody gets what they want. For modern computers it is absolutely no problem to calculate this with brute force try and error and get a result that is very close to optimal. We still have to do a little guess-work to determine the level of depreciation of second hand objects. This part is the same as for markets, however since there is no way to make a profit in this barter system, the incentives for fraud are lower. And it has to be said that there is a lower threshold where the effort of doing all this is worth it. For very cheap second-hand goods it is more effective to just use a gift economy. The cyber-bartering would be reserved for objects like a fancy musical instrument.

There is a lot more that could be said here like how gaming the system or how systemic value attribution bias can be prevented, but this post is already too long, so I'm ending it here. This isn't my ideas i'm just relaying somebody else's, I might be posting a detailed paper with maths in the cybernetics thread, if i can remember the filename.

>>454609
The thing is micro exchanges will happen under a socialist and communist economic system. Petty exchanges of goods are not our concern nore should they be. Our realm is the realm of macro economic control of the economy via rational and planned systems and methods.

No one gives a fuck about two fags exchanging a watch for a pair of sunglasses.
Who cares? It's none of my concern. What I am concerned with is owning shit people need like houses and selling it at a profit or owning places of work. That's what concerns us.

>>454609
Money and markets have existed for thousands of years before capitalism. We aren't dominated by them, we are dominated by capitalism. Capitalism's value expansion is more useful for a greater amount of people than previous modes of production. So whatever comes next has to be better at serving people.

I'm saying that because at the individual level, having cash-on-hand and immediate decision making, is more effective than having to enter the details of a transaction into a form. Plus the bigger issue of transactions on entirely new ventures that are beyond the form. New paradigms, innovation, etc.. This is exactly why having the means of production(including financing risk) in the workers hands can defeat capitalism. You don't need the new idea to be profitable for a capitalist to invest. Instead, an individual, a small group of individuals, or a commune, could agree to do it based only on social need.

But you lose that advantage if the control over production is completely centralized. People need access to credit. Not capitalist credit. I don't mean it in any idealistic or romantic sense. Very practically in all communities big and small "I owe you one" is a large part of the economy.

And the easiest solution is what cockshott already is doing in another place. Let everyone exchange labor notes. As long as theres no exploitation of labor in the production process(which is something that has to be policed, like slavery), the circuit of capital won't happen and capitalism can't come back. Not anymore than serfdom can come back now.

>>454617
You also could make it so the labor not s are only tied to your person and only you can spend them.

>>454616
>The thing is micro exchanges will happen under a socialist and communist economic system. Petty exchanges of goods are not our concern nore should they be.
Fair enough but why shouldn't we try to invent money-less economic tools for that too.

>I'm saying that because at the individual level, having cash-on-hand and immediate decision making, is more effective than having to enter the details of a transaction into a form.
Cybernetic bartering was meant as replacement for ebay where you trade in second hand goods. In general the socialist cybernetic planning system uses labor vouchers instead of money that does have immediate decision making like cash, it's just that the labor vouchers don't circulate like money, that means they are destroyed after they were used for a purchase.

>Plus the bigger issue of transactions on entirely new ventures that are beyond the form. New paradigms, innovation, etc.. This is exactly why having the means of production(including financing risk) in the workers hands can defeat capitalism. You don't need the new idea to be profitable for a capitalist to invest. Instead, an individual, a small group of individuals, or a commune, could agree to do it based only on social need.
The socialist cybernetics system will enable workers to have control over their workplace, that doesn't need money based financing. In fact a economic accounting system that uses accounting based on material resources and human labor input will be much better for this. But this isn't really related to trading second hand goods, because that doesn't involve any production.

>But you lose that advantage if the control over production is completely centralized.
In socialist cybernetics the only thing that will be centralized somewhat is calculating the economic planning, but the control over that will be collective. The places where people work will be less concentrated than in capitalism because cybernetics doesn't use anything like firms or companies, since there are no capitalists that need to put workers into economic boxes that can be bought and sold.

>People need access to credit. Not capitalist credit.
Why would we have credit in socialism ? Credit means making dept, why would we even bother having a negative number in our accounting system, there are no negative amounts of good or services, and there is no negative labor either.

>And the easiest solution is what cockshott already is doing in another place. Let everyone exchange labor notes. As long as theres no exploitation of labor in the production process(which is something that has to be policed, like slavery), the circuit of capital won't happen and capitalism can't come back. Not anymore than serfdom can come back now.
No you don't understand the reason why labor notes can't be exchanged between people, it has nothing to do with preventing exploitation, the reason is that labor notes can't be a commodity with a market value. They represent an objective measurement of time. One hour has to be one hour. If you make labor vouchers exchangeable like money it will have fluctuating value like money and then you are going to have a situation where one hours = 55 minutes one day and 65 minutes the next day. That will screw up our attempts at making the economy use labor-power as efficiently as possible. That's not just pedantic economism, it's very important because people really hate it if you waste their time.

If you want to have peer to peer transactions, i guess that's fair, but we can find a moneyless solution for that too. These days not a lot of that is happening anymore, so I'm a bit short on real world examples to base this on.

I hope you understand my motivation here, there is an ideological struggle about inserting money and markets into socialism, and we should at least ideologically have a vision of socialism without any money in it, because the people that are abusing power to attack us and strip us of our dignity as humans are using financial power to do that. And this is about ideologically reducing that power to zero.

>>454644
These situations already occur within cockshotts system and it doesn't make them commodities.

For example, if there's suddenly less sales of a certain shirt for whatever reason. First the shopkeeper lowers the labor price of the shirt which simultaneously sends a signal back to the production line to lower production. But if absolutely no more shirts are sold, then there's going to be a waste of shorts and a debt that society at large has to take on to cover. The production in the meantime is switched to something else, but the workers in that sector don't themselves take on the loss of labor, they're still given their notes for the work that turned out to not be needed.

So in the same way, if you give smaller entities access to credit and its just lost, the loss can be mitigated at various levels before the society wide one. individual, group, city, county, state, etc..

An hour of labor would remain an hour of labor, its just that a few, instead of everyone, would be responsible for allocating their labor unproductively. Which allows for faster and greater fluidity at these lower levels, not having to wait until everyone in the entire society agreed to include it into the grand plan.

For anyone familiar you are with military doctrines, there's a similar debate on how much top-down micromanaging should happen versus freedom to deviate at the lower levels where officers would be more aware of opportunities that need immediate decisions.

>>454676
>For example, if there's suddenly less sales of a certain shirt for whatever reason. First the shopkeeper lowers the labor price of the shirt which simultaneously sends a signal back to the production line to lower production. But if absolutely no more shirts are sold, then there's going to be a waste of shorts and a debt that society at large has to take on to cover. The production in the meantime is switched to something else, but the workers in that sector don't themselves take on the loss of labor, they're still given their notes for the work that turned out to not be needed.

The reason why this will work and not affect workers, is because on the system as a hole these instances will cancel out. And thus the system can maintain labor time values for workers. The workers that just happened to work the production chain with the less or more popular shirt design will not be punished or rewarded for random changes in consumer preference while the system is still able to adapt to changing consumer preference.

>So in the same way, if you give smaller entities access to credit and its just lost, the loss can be mitigated at various levels before the society wide one. individual, group, city, county, state, etc..
>An hour of labor would remain an hour of labor, its just that a few, instead of everyone, would be responsible for allocating their labor unproductively. Which allows for faster and greater fluidity at these lower levels, not having to wait until everyone in the entire society agreed to include it into the grand plan.
>For anyone familiar you are with military doctrines, there's a similar debate on how much top-down micromanaging should happen versus freedom to deviate at the lower levels where officers would be more aware of opportunities that need immediate decisions.

No this is not about management styles, like top down or micromanagement , there is not going to be management in socialist cybernetic systems, the Soviet technical intelligentsia that managed Soviet firms betrayed the proletariat, when they let the Soviet Union be dissolved. We're not going to repeat the mistake of allowing stratification to happen, there can be no group of people whose interests become separate from the interests of the proletariat.

What you are talking about will also cause differential payment per labor-hour, that means labor becomes a commodity again, whose price is determined by market forces. Just NO . Individual people can get bonus payments and these bonus payments can be collected by taxation. So that income inequality requires political consent, and the political system will be based on sortition democracy so that income equality will require statistically representative majoritarian consent, that de-facto ensures that the system will always tend toward low wealth and income inequality regardless what anybody tries to do to fuck it up. If you look at the world now it has become clear that liberty breathes relative economic equality.

To answer the debt question when we start the transition to socialism there will be a debt jubilee for workers, while capitalists will have to service their debt for as long as capitalist economic structures remain. Once a socialist cybernetic system is fully operational (after 30 years of transition), there will be no more debt. Go have a look at what happens to individuals or groups that have to pay back debt, it's clear as day that those people were made the designated sacrifice. It's the very opposite of fluidity, it's a very rigid trap.

You do not need a financial debt mechanism to allow for spending resources and labor time on trial and error for new goods and services. We could do a lottery system where entrepreneurially spirited people can get a chance to pursue things that nobody else believes in.