On Market Socialism Anonymous 18-05-23 23:54:09 No. 17350
market socialism needs to be tested more in my view, but I think it can work if it's combined with a form of central planning alongside it
Anonymous 19-05-23 01:02:28 No. 17355
Socialism For All has a playlist on cooperative economics and market socialism that's worth listening to (although the debates are terrible and the commentary on them can be skipped):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufXA59IiYU&list=PLXUFLW8t2snsQe7oVQawwz1f8skr2_1Iz If there's one video I'd recommend out of that whole list it would be vid related. A number of issues arise in practice, but the biggest lesson is that market systems are not conducive to building solidarity in society at large. Workers in cooperatives are still incentivized to maximize their own profits with all the problems that brings.
Anonymous 19-05-23 03:32:39 No. 17365
>>17350 I agree in so far with the assessment on the Zapatistas, but lets not fool ourselves into thinking that markets will exist under socialism.
At best, it can exist under a DOTP to ensure that resources, excess goods and currency etc can be regulated, allocated and designated where necessary.
Anonymous 19-05-23 05:53:31 No. 17371
Look, if /leftypol/ were to become the People's Central Committee of whatever country tomorrow, I doubt the mighty central planning initiatives will organize themselves magically out of nowhere, even with Richard Dickblast as the newly appointed Minister of the International Economy.
Anonymous 19-05-23 06:42:58 No. 17373
>>17372 I agree with this criticism, and honestly I think the material conditions are basically already ripe for late-stage communism, but sadly it's not like we can turn a switch.
All I'm suggesting is that instead of repeating "markets icky" then posting 300 replies in the "was the NEP proof that the USSR was state-capitalist?" bait thread and coming up with various sorts of cope, you should have a simpler program in mind: make the commons free for all, reduce labour time as much as possible, and make (scientific) knowledge and means of production widespread and easily available to normies.
Central planning of mass production is absolutely crucial for this program, but there are always little corner cases there and there in realpolitik.
Anonymous 19-05-23 06:48:43 No. 17374
>>17373 (me)
Also we can envision more decentralized, federal forms of planning production and distribution, even with a cybernetic system giving basic quotas to direct these for different "communes". I don't have anything concrete to suggest right now, but the way to organize a socialist society is not set in stone.
Anonymous 19-05-23 07:52:23 No. 17381
>>17376 is this bait? lol
>So we are just supposed to continue with economic policies that have ended up with socialist countries collapsing and dissolving? So you mean "market socialism" i.e. the reintroduction of capitalism and coubter-revolution?
Anonymous 19-05-23 09:19:19 No. 17385
>>17384 Why do you believe that is "the pragmatic solution"? Market economies have most of the problems planned economies have and plenty more than them, they are also far less efficient and more prone to crises. And importantly they naturally produce welath disparity and are antithetical to building a socialist society and socializing production
Read a book
>>17369 Anonymous 19-05-23 09:19:44 No. 17386
Profits are bad and you should be ashamed for having profits. The goal is to produce an output at a price level that justifies production at that level (covering costs). Having to lower prices below the cost-covering price just to get rid of excess stock is a failure, but so is having to raise prices above the cost-covering price because you have no buffer stock and waiting lines are forming. That's right, if the thing you produce is in high demand you should be punished for that! To be precise, you should only be punished here for not communicating anticipation of higher demand. If you do communicate this but don't get more resources because of other people not believing you, that's not your fault. And the punishment for you, the person, is something entirely different from punishing the "firm". After all, the "firm" has to expand when demand is high.
>>17371 >Make basic necessities such as housing, water, food, and so on, public and free or extremely cheap, no more than the cost of maintenance Result: Labor power will appear as very cheap in the calculations, creating the illusion that it is sensible to replace machines with direct labor when it is not sensible to do so.
Anonymous 19-05-23 09:59:04 No. 17391
>>17385 We have thousands of years of experience from market economics but roughly 60 years experience of fully planned economy and even that experiment failed horribly. Communist movement cant afford more failures our enemies will use against us.
When the economical base is secured we can let utopians have their small scale social experiments on planned economy.
Anonymous 19-05-23 10:14:05 No. 17396
>>17394 No I do not. Please use your big boy words to explain how if that is the case
Waiting:
Anonymous 19-05-23 21:26:26 No. 17402
>>17350 It has been tested extensively; American labor unions attempted to make cooperatives to undermine capitalism that way. In any case, they were starved for resources by cooperation between the monopolists and the railroads, resorted to the same abysmal work conditions and cost-cutting in order to remain competitive and were killed by their own workers rebelling against that, or maintained the cushion but fell as a result.
Under market competition, someone has to win. And when they do win, they take the market share of the loser. Repeat until they're no competitors remaining, or the few companies that do remain find it more beneficial to stop competing. A small "Socialism Incorporated" breaking down this system when its already in its late stages is about as likely as your usual urban bodega overthrowing Walmart. No wonder the concept of them is advertised so often by the capitalists themselves.
This book could give you more detail on it.
Anonymous 19-05-23 21:41:23 No. 17403
>>17397 I bet the residents miss it now
What was called stagnation was a steady 2 percent growth in the economy compared to the usual steady 5 percent growth for socialism
Anonymous 19-05-23 21:41:47 No. 17404
>>17350 >market socialism needs to be tested more in my view Been tried, ends up like this.
Marker "socialism" contains in it the core of capitalism. Capitalism is the rule of capital, not the rule of capitalists. It incentivizes in all its being the creation of a new ruling class. Any company competed away and every company that wins is forced by competition to recreate class structures of ownership. Keeping equality of opportunity and egalitarian outcomes goes against the very mechanism used to regulate the economy, thus undoing either your economic system or your social system.
Market "socialism" is capitalism.
Anonymous 19-05-23 21:43:15 No. 17405
>>17402 >It has been tested extensively; American labor unions attempted to make cooperatives to undermine capitalism that way. In any case, they were starved for resources by cooperation between the monopolists and the railroads, resorted to the same abysmal work conditions and cost-cutting in order to remain competitive and were killed by their own workers rebelling against that, or maintained the cushion but fell as a result. Burgers do be like that
Look at their positively rabid response to Huawei succeeding
Anonymous 19-05-23 21:54:38 No. 17406
>>17405 (me)
locally they were effectively chased out of the country probably due to burger sanctions and our vassal status to the burgersharts just after their local stores held elections
Anonymous 20-05-23 05:15:22 No. 17407
>>17350 Market "socialism" is just a parasite on the flank of capitalism. Its success can only be when capitalism is producing high profits and not during a crisis of capitalism. A more accurate term is just "welfare capitalism".
Marx's critique of capitalism that the rich are meanies who won't give out welfare. But that the fundamental laws which govern capitalism push for constant growth and when growth is stymied capitalism must fall into crisis and the workers must suffer that the hardest.
Market "socialism", worker's coops, etc can't escape the capitalist "business cycle".
Anonymous 20-05-23 12:07:16 No. 17418
>>17402 >resorted to the same abysmal work conditions and cost-cutting in order to remain competitive and were killed by their own workers rebelling against that, or maintained the cushion but fell as a result This understanding of co-ops is common among MLs and leftcoms and Rosa Luxemburg also reasoned like this about them, and I am sure you and Foner and the girl reading this have real-world
anecdotes supporting the viewpoint.
But as far as I know both the working conditions are better in co-ops and their survival rate is better than that of the normal business type. The main reason why they are so few co-ops out there is not a high "death rate", but a low "birth rate".
>>17404 >Capitalism is the rule of capital, not the rule of capitalists. It's both. You are not marxister than others for talking like this. The capitalists act as a self-aware class.
Anonymous 20-05-23 13:32:09 No. 17419
The Zapatistas have evicted peasants from their communes for not towing the party line as well as being operated through a somewhat vanguard organization, so the notion that there’s much difference in regards to government between them and the Soviets is not much. What sets them apart is just how unsuccessful they are in establishing relevant reach outside Chiapas even with existing for nearly three decades at this point and basically being meek in the face of Mexican police and militias gunning their members down. Even outside of markets being shit and basically reinventing the transitional programme of Trotsky or the worst ideas of Bukharin (ie the guy whose ideas won out in the Warsaw pact in the 1980s and China today with needs of “reform” and avoiding class conflict) in preventing movement towards socialism, which has been beaten to death enough by the variety of posters here who know better, the Zapatistas just don’t do much of anything and are not a model for social change. Now, for some real pointers on how to organize, let’s take these excellent examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021–2023_Eswatini_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_South_African_National_Shutdown (this article ignores how the communist NUMSA did a lot of heavy lifting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Nile_clashes_(2022–2023) Shit like this and the fact that communists in Africa don’t pussy out in calling themselves communists in heavily Islamic or Christian nations should be something adopted here. Then you got protests and strikes in Lebanon or Iran where the want to abolish markets is something seen as a positive because they are on the losing end of capitalism.
Anonymous 21-05-23 07:59:18 No. 17430
>>17391 > thousands of years of experience from market economics Liberalism is like 300 years old, nice Orwellian brainwash attempt
>even that experiment failed horribly I can't believe Edison's workers failed to make a lightbulb, everyone knows that light has failed everytime its been tried
>Communist movement cant afford more failures our enemies will use against us. <Noun. pick-me girl (slang, derogatory) A woman who asserts that she is unlike (and sometimes better than) most other women, in order to gain attention, approval, or validation from men. Unique IPs: 50