This thread is for the discussion of cybercommunism, the planning of the socialist economy by computerized means, including discussions of related topics and creators. Drama belongs in /isg/
ReadingTowards a New Socialism by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell:
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer
Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina
Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and The Human Use of Human Beings (1st edition) by Norbert Wiener
Economic cybernetics by Nikolay Veduta
People's Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
Economics in kind, Total socialisation and A system of socialisation by Otto Neurath (Incommensurability, Ecology, and Planning: Neurath in the Socialist Calculation Debate by Thomas Uebel provides a summary)
Active writers/creatorsSorted by last name
>Paul Cockshotthttps://www.patreon.com/williamCockshott/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVBfIU1_zO-P_R9keEGdDHQ (
https://invidious.snopyta.org/channel/UCVBfIU1_zO-P_R9keEGdDHQ)
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/http://paulcockshott.co.uk/https://twitter.com/PaulCockshott (
https://nitter.pussthecat.org/PaulCockshott)
>Cibcom (Spanish)https://cibcom.org/https://twitter.com/cibcomorg (
https://nitter.pussthecat.org/cibcomorg)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCav9ad3TMuhiWV6yP5t2IpA (
https://invidious.snopyta.org/channel/UCav9ad3TMuhiWV6yP5t2IpA)
>Tomas Härdinhttps://www.haerdin.se/tag/cybernetics.htmlhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5fDgA_eHleDiTLC5qb5g8w (
https://invidious.snopyta.org/channel/UC5fDgA_eHleDiTLC5qb5g8w)
>Elena Vedutahttp://www.strategplan.com/en/about/veduta.phpVarious videos on YouTube but no channel of her own
>Dave Zachariahhttps://www.it.uu.se/katalog/davza513One video on Paul Cockshott's channel
Podcasts>General Intellect UnitPodcast of the Cybernetic Marxists
http://generalintellectunit.net/Previous threads in chronological orderhttps://archive.is/uNCEYhttps://web.archive.org/web/20201218152831/https://bunkerchan.xyz/leftypol/res/997358.htmlhttps://archive.ph/uyggphttps://archive.is/xBFYYhttps://archive.ph/Afx5ahttps://archive.is/kAPvRhttps://archive.is/0sAS2>>1943048There wasn't much aside from someone uploading Thomas E. Uebel's article
Incommensurability, Ecology, and Planning: Neurath in the Socialist Calculation Debate, 1919–1928 with a flaming comment misrepresenting the article as some epic own of market socialists.
<That money calculation was not necessary for economic rationality, that no market was needed at all, does not follow from the mere fact that in some cases production decisions are undertaken for social need, not profit. Since this is obvious and yet Neurath held to both theses, interpreters must consider whether he thought on independent grounds that the rational employment of production goods could be ensured entirely by in-kind considerations. Let us call this idea the “strong in-kind calculability assumption.” It is to be distinguished from Neurath’s observation about how the goals are established around which decisions according to social need were taken. This—call it the “weak in-kind calculability assumption”—says that monetary calculation is not sufficient in all cases for rational economic decisions. By contrast, the strong in-kind calculability assumption says that alternative uses of production goods can be assessed as fully as is required for rational decision making by quantitative in-kind labor and production technology statistics—money calculation is not even necessary for rational economic decision making.
<On the textual evidence so far we cannot conclude that Neurath mistakenly derived the possibility of a moneyless economy from the fact that money calculation is not ubiquitous in economic decisions. Rather, it appears that his strong in-kind calculability assumption traded on the future achievement of a research program called “calculation in kind.” Despite the addition of Neurath’s true but inconsequential observation of the abuse of the market principle by the arbitrary factor of production pricing for transactions within large corporations (e.g., [1935] 1987, 94–95), this is about the best that can be done for Neurath’s planning argument on the extended traditional story.
>>1945668I hadn't thought of taxing workers not being useful for decreasing trade deficits before
>increase taxes on workers (or decrease benefits)>workers have less money to spend>get less taxes from VAT and such>the end result is zero-sumdo I have this right?
>>1945841Untrue. Workers having less money means that by default they consume less foreign imports. An offset in tax revenue does not change this equation.
Part of Venezuela's problems come from the fact that Chavez boosted wages above productivity and workers used their cash to buy a lot of foreign imports which was ok when oil prices were high but when they fell the economy shipwrecked.
>>1945770>applies it to nature as a wholenot sure what you mean by this but Cockhott takes value to be SNLT axiomatically, just like David Harvey. we sometimes get value critics sperging out ITT over this, who of course can never say what value
is if it isn't SNLT
>>1950326Not a single new idea in this. Not well-written. Verbose. Early on, a paragraph literally repeats. Mentioning ChatGP will make the paper age like milk.
More general problem: I don't see the point in arguing with Austrians. They are fringe and the reason they have any presence at all is because they are funded by vested interests. These vested interests
donot__care about the quality of counter-arguments to their position, because their position is a charade to begin with.
<[Some Austrian jackoff] proposes that, in attempting to formulate the ‘target set’ of final goods, the planners would not only have to consider already invented products, but also an uncountably infinite number of potential future products, including vacations to Mars which are not offered at this time (…) However, the demand side question does not necessarily have to be formulated in this way. As Cottrell et al. (2009) point out, a decentralized market system could not consider an infinite number of products either.Who is your audience. Do you think this gives a lightbulb moment to anybody.
>>1950326on a more serious note, there is nothing new here, as
>>1951109 also points out. Dapprich also doesn't seem to be aware of the work of Zachariah et al, or of O'Brien et al. he just brings up Kantorovich's "objective valuations" (they aren't objective, they're very much political) as a supposed counter to the Austrian argument, but somehow even more STEM-brained than Kantorovich
everyone ITT probably agrees that the Austrians are immensely retarded, but to claim that their epistemological argument is addressed by mere improvements in computation and gesturing towards Kantorovich to me seems like nonsense. it also completely misses the social aspect of all this, which the Austrians cleverly dodge by claiming it's about "knowledge" rather than power. somehow it's the owners of firms that know best, not the workers on the floor. in a similar fashion, Dapprich lets Wenzel and Phelan's argument that "property owners bear the costs, risks, and potential profits of innovation" stand, rather than challenging the notion that the bourgeoisie takes any risk at all, given that what they "risk" is surplus value expropriated from the workers in the first place
Dapprich does bring up one interesting point: that the debate is likely to shift to the demand side as the Austrians have less and less justification for their position. not that they'll ever be "convinced", because that's not the point of the Austrian position. much like neoclassical economics, Austrian economics exists to justify whatever it is that Porky does
>>1959637Well at least Cockshott got that thing right.
>you can't claim that the highest revolutionary potential list in the most advanced, most well-paid sections of the working classAh yes, the non-proletarian workers, those with reserves and property must see communism as a necessity instead of the immiserated proletariat.
I have no idea how you even came to this conclusion from what Cockshott said.
>>1960170would be great if you attached the paper
cockshott merely points out that capital tends to reorganize society rather than somehow reverting to some precapitalist mode of production. in other words, Trotskyism is a doomsday cult. which is very true
>audio fails halfway through first video>second video cuts out before he's doneamazing editing by dr. cockshott
>>1960178>Also, a farmer is someone who owns land, idiot.so? they still use less productive MoPs and therefore produce less value per hour worked. "marxists" who propose unequal exchange think that somehow a worker that only produces 5 minutes' worth of social labour per hour is somehow entitled to 1 hour's' worth of social labour
cockshott points out in
>>1959637 that it is those sections of the working class that are able to negotiate for the best conditions and for the highest wages that are also the most class conscious. these also tend to be those workers who occupy critical positions within capitalist economies. they are not le exploited congolese coltan miners or whatever, who are easily replaced (and should be replaced) with machinery
>>1963354I think Cockshott's analysis is largely correct here. I'm not sure what twitter drama he is referring to, but I suspect its people trying to draw an arbitrary distinction between classical antiquity and US chattel slavery. By this standard the US didn't really become capitalist until the late 19th century and the last remnants of semi feudal relations weren't really abolished until sharecropping finally disappeared starting in the 30s/40s and finally dying in the 1950s/60s which is also not coincidentally when the civil rights movement started gaining steam.
If this is actually true then it would imply that the civil rights movement was a bourgeois revolution of sorts.
>>1966495It is beyond anybody's ability to have a high-detail understanding of the entire topic of running the economy. You can have something to say about it anyway, and there are two ways (aside from saying you give up, but we won't do that here):
1. A super-fuzzy description of the entire thing.
2. Actually doing precisely a tiny subset of the entire thing.
I admit I only went through the slides without listening to any of the talks, so correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems to me
all of the speakers are doing the first thing only.
>>1976000it's kind of hard to talk about specifics until we get some kind of experiment going
nice digits btw
>>1945770>>1947576Let me enlighten you then.
Cockshott thinks "value" is transhistorical. He makes the mistake of conflating the two following things:
>The objectively measurable property of how long and how much labour, on average, it takes a group of people to produce some thing>This property being the main driver of economic activity, around which the entire economy is optimised and revolves. This would be "Value" in the marxist sense.With these definition seperated, capital v Value is not transhistorical. Feudal economies did not optimise their entire production around Value. Peasants did not weigh their decisions on what to grow, what to hunt, what to weave, on the Value of those products. They chose what to produce based on what they needed, the Value of it had a very marginal role insomuch that it only mattered in terms of the home industry (weaving, sowing, etc) that they would sell in cities and towns to buy that which they could otherwise not make themselves. Similarly, the Lords of feudalism did not decide what to produce based based on either of the two definitions.
SNLT did not play a guiding role in feudal economies. Neither did it in the ancient world, nor in classical slave societies, neither did it in hunter gatherer times. In capitalism, Value exists, because all production is done for exchange, and all production is done by labour-as-commodity, and thus all production is optimised to minimize costs, thus optimised to minimize labour and maximize exhange value, leading, through competition and shifting capital investments, to exchange value converging on SNLT, which leads to the emergence of the phenemonon that the Value of a thing IS the SNLT, under capitalism.
It is funny that cockshott makes the argument that Value is transhistorical, even though he himself explained that slave societies did not develop labour saving machinery precisely because labour was not a commodity.
Cockshott makes the argument that Value was transhistorical, and also that it will be transhistorical into future socialism and communism, because "we will want to minimize labour costs".
What cockshott gets wrong here is that capital v Value exists under capitalism because capitalism ONLY optimises for labour, in the end, and all other externalities are ignored. Communism will optimize, of course in part, also to minimize labour costs, but it will also plan for other things, such as maximum polution quotas, set targeted proportions of labour. Additionally, we may purposefully plan a proportion of products which are not "Pareto efficient". Cockshots proposed systems often naive assume that (under his faux market system) prices should equal costs, thus distributing labour allocation according to the same principle as capitalism, but there is no real reason for this other than preventing black marketeering. There is no real reason why a communist society, for example, should produce funko pops, or cigarettes, or whatever, or produce just a few resource intensive luxery toilets, or expensive medical screening. The whole point is that we can choose to distribute production according to what we want, and that we are no longer constrained by the logic of commodity production (and thus Value).
While his system of mimicking Value based production is a good way to simplify the transition, build our first stage of socialism, prevent black marketeering and take the decision making out of the burocracy into a mindless (and thus "incorruptable" algorithm), this is not a hard rule. We can (and should eventually) break from Value logic, as Value logic is just an emergent force from capitalism. SNLT did not fully dictate the life of peasants, it did not dictate the lives of slavers, it did not dictate the lives of hunter gatherers, even though all did basic calculations in terms of how long stuff takes, and it does not have to dictate communist economies.
Value is the property of generalised markets, in which through commodified labour and generalised production for exchange, the Value society attributes to a product is SNLT. There is a reason Marx chose the word "Wert" (how much something is worth, aka its value). It is a property of capitalism that the value of something became its SNLT. It has not always been this way, and it will not always be this way. Capital v Value is not transhistoric.
>>1976451>it's another "value critic confuses value and exchange-value" episodeit's all so tiring
>slave societies did not develop labour saving machinery precisely because labour was not a commoditythe labour
power wasn't, but the labourer themselves were. are you suggesting that latifundia squandered their slaves' labour power? that the slaver doesn't seek to maximize the profit gained from his slaves? acquiring slaves in Roman times required costly military campaigns. chattel slavery in the US was also a costly affair
the notion that slave societies didn't develop labour saving machinery is also false. the cotton gin was in wide use in the American South. slaves are expensive, and a good slaver is one that makes the best use of his slaves. the notion that technology remained largely unchanged until the industrial revolution is ahistorical
>>1976464>>it's another "value critic confuses value and exchange-value" episodeIn a perfectly competitive market prices are equal to value. If a market is not perfectly competitive prices diverge from value and thus the distribution diverges from value optimal distribution which cockshot wants to achieve with his system. Your reply is a non sequitur, i never claimed prices are value, it's just a smokescreen because prices being equal to value as an optimum is an explicit assumption made in cockshotts models.
>LatifundiaPerhaps read because that's why I explicitly said slave society of antiquity. Colonial slave societies existed in the early stages of capitalism, and operated to a capitalist logic even if it owned slaves.
>>1976470Value is an emergent property of free market competition and commodified labour, which causes the valuation, ie the exchange ratio of commodities being produced, to converge to the SNLT.
SNLT is an objective (ie transhistorical) property, since you can always calculate it, but Value itself is the phenemenon where society values a commodity, in its exchange value to other things, at the level determined by the SNLT, this pheneomenon is not transhistorical.
>>1976490>>1976490Not sure what kind of gotcha you're trying to pull.
Is one gramme of gold the same as 4 20 dollar bills and a 5 dollar bill, just because under the current condition, one expresses itself in the other? Is the water in a river always going to be a river or does the river seize to be a river at some point?
Value is an emergent behaviour and property of a market, not an emergent property of a thing. It is the property of the market that drives all production to optimise such that the exchange Value is pushed towards the Value, because commodifying all production and making all production production for exchange causes all production to try and minimize labour spend and maximize exchange per labour spend, causing the prices to converge to the SNLT, because that is the equalibrium.
Value is the description of this process. It is not a thing that is objective in nature, it is a force that springs from markets and commodified labour, a force that changes those markets and shifts that labour. It is not transhistorical.
SNLT exists always, as it is simply a calculation over the current state of any society, even those without commodity production. Hunter gatherers making leather boots has a SNLT. But Value does not always exist, because Value only exists once products become commodities in a marketplace where labour is a commodity. Value is the exchange rate regulated by generalized commodity production. Hunter gatherer leather boots have no Value, they are not exchanged, people do not think of them in terms of exchange value per hour worked, people do not optimize for exchange value per hour worked, it has no exchange value because it is not exchanged for another commodity, it is made for use. So too in feudal society, where most production was done for use, not to sell.
Just like gold has weight, and apples exist, it isn't until you have markets that you can speak of "an apples worth in gold". Before then, you just have gold, and apples, and people got apples by farming them. And got gold by finding it. Value only exists when the economy is based around farming apples to exchange for other things, and mining gold to exchange for other things.
To bring it back, Marx chose the word "Wert" on purpose. What is gold worth to a hunter gatherer? What can he do with it? Nothing. It has no value under that stage of economic development. Similarly, the value of pickled kale and preserved cheese to a peasant is not expressed in terms of other objects, but in the fact that it will feed them for the winter or in that the lord demanded such and such amount of grain or cheese. The labour time invested in the gold or in the apples or kale or cheese has no impact on its societal-economic value under hunter gatherer or feudal conditions. Its value is that it will feed the farmers, it will feed the lord, it will feed the soldiers.
Only under capitalism, with generalised commodity production, and labour-as-commodity, that the societal-economic value os something, its worth, its Wert, becomes equal to the labour time invested in it, exactly because for the first time, the majority of all production is done only to maximize exchange value gotten in return, while minimizing labour costs, which leads to its price converging on the average labour costs. Only under capitalism, is the value of something equal to its SNLT, because only under capitalism do people view things they make not as things for themselves, but merely as potential other things through exchange.
>>1976536>>Value is an emergent behaviour>>Value is the description of this processIs the same
>>exchange Value is pushed towards the ValueMust say "exchange value is pushed towards the SNLT"
Not contradictory, perhaps you should read and respond with equal effort instead of lazy non-responses.
>>1976960>sellingyou do know what a commodity is, right?
there's also another thing I didn't notice at first:
>>1976867>peasants do not produce for profityes they do. in classical political economy there are three sources of revenue: wages, profit and ground rent. peasants do not typically earn wages, which means the money gained by selling their surplus is profit, ground rent or (most likely) both. but you know what class
doesn't earn profit? the proletariat
I will also point out here that tenant farmers existed in medieval times. not every peasant was a serf
am I also to believe that lords of the manor didn't sell any of the goods produced by the peasants working their land?
Truth:
>>1976459>A pre-capitalist caste village with totally borked proportions of roles will shrink, possibly even collapse.Strawman:
>>1976465>You make the mistake of thinking that making an economic distribution somehow magically equal to perfectly competitive market purchasing is the only "sensible proportion".>>1976468>In a perfectly competitive market prices are equal to value.That does not account for differences in organic composition of capital.
>prices being equal to value as an optimum is an explicit assumption made in cockshotts models.And why not. If the means of production are not split up and apportioned between different entities by a market, there is no need to compensate for organic composition.
>>1976867>Value doesn't exist in feudal economiesHuman time as a resource has not been in infinite supply at any point in history. Do you believe that
how long it takes to do something had no relevance before some special point in history. I'm pretty sure it matters to bees how long it takes to do something. Do you think it is because the bees now live under capitalism? You remind me of sociologists from the USSR claiming homosexual behavior is caused by capitalism. So capitalism made some penguins gay!
You keep on making the mistake (already identified in post
>>1976459) of claiming SNLT doesn't have any effect on anything (though people may calculate it as a hobby or something) until some point where it suddenly does, like a switch flipping. Marx says right in the preface of Capital Volume I that "the human mind has sought in vain for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of" the value-form. It makes sense even for a lone person stranded on an island to measure labor time. The strength of labor time's influence varies depending on social formation, but it affects decisions in any society.
>>1976986I didn't claim feudalism had generalized commodity production. what I'm saying is that the law of value still applied. even in feudal times there was an expected price associated with a commodity, and it was considered immoral by Thomas Aquinas to underpay or overcharge for things. Aquinas in particular is likely the originator of the law of value, which he called
just price>>1976988"for the most part" isn't "all of it". the grain etc sold by lords of the manor are still subject to the law of value. it doesn't fucking go away just because commodity production isn't generalized
>>1977029>grain wasn't fungible in feudal timesholy shit. this gets even funnier when you realize grain was used as commodity money for centuries in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia
at this point I'm convinced value critics are just glowies trolling
you are confusing two issues. The reason the law of value does not apply to surplus grain produced by feudalism is precisely because it was NOT regularly produced. again,
>>1977038 bad harvests were incredibly common and creating a regular absolute surplus of grain to the point of people able to regularly export it is not something you can literally point to any feudal era european kingdom or state of doing.
Now we are leaping from the existence of famines to concluding non-existence of wheat as a commodity and the complete irrelevance of labor time, somehow.
>>1977037>I'm convinced value critics are just glowies trollingMethinks narcissistic personalities plus sunk-cost fallacy. Somebody like Michael Heinrich will not go back after decades and admit he was full of shit the whole time.
>>1976958>are you seriously suggesting peasants don't engage in commodity production? that peasants' markets don't exist?Yes
>>1976985>>peasants do not produce for profit>yes they do.No they dont. Read a history book.
>>1976994>That does not account for differences in organic composition of capital.Non-sequitor, neither does Value or cockshots models, because they are models. Even capitalism doesnt have perfect Law of Value because differences in labour composition and exploitation (which cockshot has shown to be calculated after exploitation leading to distortions in optimum labour usage).
>Human time as a resource has not been in infinite supply at any point in history.>Do you believe that how long it takes to do something had no relevance before some special point in history.1. For the most part it did not
2. Things were not values for how long they took to make because people for the most party didnt produce for exchange and you couldnt or didnt buy most that you used
3. You need storable food like potatoes or onions. You need clothes. Farmers did not make tons of clothes to try to sell for onions even if they were really quick as making clothes, because there was no place or infrastructure or societal ways to do so, since all farmed their own food.
>You remind me of sociologists from the USSR claiming homosexual behavior is caused by capitalism. So capitalism made some penguins gay!Ad hominem, shut the fuck up
>You keep on making the mistake (already identified in post >>1976459) of claiming SNLT doesn't have any effect on anythingMaybe you should learn to fucking read
>>1977009> even in feudal times there was an expected price associated with a commodity, and it was considered immoral by Thomas Aquinas to underpay or overcharge for things.Prices in feudalism for the few commodities that did exist were set mostly by tradition and law and not market forces, commodity production in feudal society was dominated by guilds or prices were highly regulated by the nobility to ensure stability.
Also what this person said
>>1977029 >>1977031>>1977037>holy shit. this gets even funnier when you realize grain was used as commodity money for centuries in Ancient Egypt and MesopotamiaAncient egypt had a feudal-like quasi-planned agricultural economy. Peasants were largely self sufficient, a tithe was levied based on the amount of land, based on the fertility of the land, in natura. Grain only became a commodity at the point that the burocracy and aristocracy sold it off in the comparatively small market economy sector. At this point, the value of said grain was completely detached from any measurement of labour that went into it. If you know anything about agriculture on small plots of land, you know that you cant just "do more work" and pull more grain out of the same dirt. It stops at some point. A fully functional currency system wasnt found in egypt until the latest eras. Same goes for mesopothamia, which famously did all of its accounting in kind.
Impressive to call people glowies while you yourself post from ban-evasion proxies.
>>1977073>and yet grain fetched a socially determined priceMost products you could buy in the ancient world fetched a POLITICALLY determined price. Bread is famously price and size regulated from rome to egypt to pre victorian england. See what i wrote on guilds too. Prices werent "determined in the marketplace" except for very very very few economically irrelevant luxery products. The SNLT had very little impact on prices, it was all politics.
>so we supposedly have use-value and exchange-value, but not value. even though value is what exchange-value gravitates aroundThis is not any sort of contradiction. Things can have use value and exchange value without having a SNLT, see unique artifacts and the like. SNLT exists only if something can be consistently and widely reproduced, and that SNLT only becomes the point around which exchange value revolves in a FREE MARKET with GENERALIZED COMMODITY PRODUCTION where labour is also a cost due to being a commodity, rather than a constant like in feudalism, where you just >had< 200 serfs like just you >had< a river in which fish swam, and in the same way you can just harvest from it every year from the perspective of the lord.
>>1977077Try making arguments any time.
>>1977092>also I fucking wonder how labour disputes over pay could arise in the ancient world, including strikes, if labour power didn't command some average price (value). I guess every employment contract was a one-off>A tiny sector of the economy being proto proletarians means all of the economy is determined by SNLT somehow even though 99% of it is not done for exchange and so is produced with use in mind rather than with exchange in mind, and thus is never exchanged, and thus is never a commodity, and thus production is never is subject to the forces that CAUSE exchange values to converge to SNLT due to competitive productionalso
>labour costs is equal to its ValueUnless you think we still live in victorian england and you deny the existance of labour unions, no. Wages are not equal to reproduction levels, the fact that wages can be driven up by unions and be driven down by capitalists and have impact on the composition of capital and so the rate of profit shows that.
Value is a property of capitalistic market economies. It is not transhistorical. Faraohs did not run the economy to minimize labour time and optimize yields. Neither did lords. Neither did Ur. Because if you had read any history book, you would know the farmed yield belonged to the >farmer< for self sufficiency, they produced primarily for their own use, and the nobility class was a pure, static, parasite that came for their statis, predetermined tithe every year. The Faraoh did not own the fruit of the farmers labour. It did not hire the farmer to work on the lords land to make the lords crops. And as such, the fraction of the fraction of the grain and crops the Lord did not directly use to feed his army and family, to which most of it went, that part was sold without any pressure or relationship to the SNLT of those products. Whatever was left, was sold, for whatever the highest price was. Farmers did not do calculations on which crop yielded the most shillings per hour worked at the market that year, because they did not do autistic accounting of every minute worked, because they did not grow crops for the market, they grew crops for themselves, and if they had any left, so they hoped, they would sell it. If the people determining production of the primary basis of the economy do not do the calculation of how much time they spend on their carrots vs their apples vs their turnips, and put it against the price it fetched, then there can be no economic pressure that drives their prices to that SNLT. Value exists in capitalism because capitalists produce for pure profit, and as such do accounting of their production, and do calculations and research into other fields of production, so that they may do that which yields most profit. That accounting, that shifting of labour and production based on profit seeking, is what causes underpriced goods to stop being produced, that causes overpriced goods to be produced more, that thus causes the price to converge to be proportional to the costs the capitalists pays every cycle to produce it, and since all costs in the end are labour, to labour.
>>1977138>neither does Value or cockshots models, because they are modelsThe reason for not doing that in TANS isn't because it's a model. Read a post to its end before you start writing the reply. The post said: "If the means of production are not split up and apportioned between different entities by a market, there is no need to compensate for organic composition."
>>Do you believe that how long it takes to do something had no relevance before some special point in history.>1. For the most part it did notDo you believe the bee dance about resources communicates a time component because bees live in capitalism.
>the value of said grain was completely detached from any measurement of labourLabor contracts where set in grain amounts.
>>1977077>Michael HeinrichI went and looked up Cockshott's reply to him, see pdfrel. Heinrich puts forward a position I've seen other value critics do, that value is created in exchange. as Cockshott correctly points out, this amounts to explaining prices using prices. more sophisticated variants of this argument posits that when Marx says that value is realized in exchange (in the form of exchange-value), that is the same as saying value is created in exchange. one wonders then why even bother with the distinction between value and exchange-value
Heinrich attaches great value (heh) to footnote 10 in the paper, which is just Marx pointing out that producing commodities for which there is no demand produces no value. what Heinrich proposes isn't a value theory. this he has in common with the neoclassicals, which also have no value theory
>>1977152>Labor contracts where set in grain amounts.>Using grain as a form of currency to pay masons means the price of it magically reflects the production labour costs even if at no in the economy is there any force that drives the price to reflect that aspect of its production.
>Bees under capitalismNo clue what you're on about or what kind of shit you think I think. If the production of the grain is not undertaken for exchange, and thus the amount of grain on the cities market has no impact on the amount produced, then there is no force diverting labour from one crop to another to drive its price closer to the SNLT.
>The reason for not doing that in TANS isn't because it's a model.Not even capitalism does it, dummy.
>>1977140Making a meme where you portray yourself as the chad and the other as the soyjack does not make you right. See? You didn't even use the meme correctly.
>>1977850Alright lets destroy your train of thought, eh? Lets use simple logic, and your definitions, under capitalism:
>What is SNLT<The average time a society takes to produce something
>What is Value<The point around which the exchange value hovers, which is equal to the SNLT
>What is exchange value<The rate at which commodities trade against each other. This fluctuates around Value, which is why it is called "its true value".
>What causes the exchange value to direct towards the SNLT, or "value", as you call it?<If the ratio of exchange value vs the SNLT is off in the economy, because of under of overproduction/supply of said commodities, the profit rates will be higher and lower as well due to labour being the source of all value. Competitors and investors will notice this, as this information or its effects are observable, and will scale down production or invest in expanding production to shift their capital away from low ROI production towards high ROI production. This causes the prices to inversely respond, making more profitable commodities cheaper and closer to their Value, and less profitable commodities to be more expensive and thus also closer to their Value. Inside the production of a single category of product, superprofits and the people losing out due to superprofits cancel out.
>So if the exchange value trends towards the SNLT because of capitalists consciously shifting the entire production and all its labour to maximize the exchange value per unit of capital invested, and minimize losses, then how would an economy in which the producers do not produce for sale on a market, do not distribute their labour to maximize exchange value, do not take into account the possible exchange value of the products they make in to production goal to put their means of production to use, function?>Would its prices tend towards their SNLT?<No>Then what is the true "value" based on that old timey economists talked about, if the supply is not at all regulated based on its production costs?<Oh, I guess there would not be a trend towards the SNLT of the exchange value of things. So there is no SNLT-determined Value around which prices fluctuateWow would you look at that. The law of value is not transhistoric, as it does not act upon the production of feudal or hunter gatherer societies, nor does it have to act upon a communist society in which all decisions on what and how to produce have become political rather than left up a blind process of independent capitalists.
>>1977850Yeah it's vacuous. (By the way I think the spooky line by Marx about apes and higher forms is something that can be explained from his Lamarckian view of evolution.)
>>1977873>If the production of the grain is not undertaken for exchange, and thus the amount of grain on the cities market has no impact on the amount producedYou argument implicitly assumes that this is either 100 % the case or not at all. Then you note that it isn't 100 % the case (true of course), and from that you continue as if that logically implied the opposite extreme. If you go back to your first contribution to this thread and the responses you got to that, you will see this has been pointed out to you from the get go.
>>The reason for not doing that in TANS isn't because it's a model.>Not even capitalism does it, dummy.? Literally nobody in this thread is saying that, and the statements coming closest to that are your own (which you stated with the perfect competition caveat, the claim is still false even with that though). You said TANS is not optimizing for an equivalent of profit-equalizing prices because of a model simplification. You have been told twice there is a different reason for that.
>>1977928>What is Value<The point around which the exchange value hovers, which is equal to the SNLTAgain failing to take into account organic composition.
As for the rest of that post, your argument has the form that
X happens through Y and so, if Y does not happen, X does not happen either. The gap in the argument is that you don't establish that Y is the only possible way of making X happen.
>>1977873>>1977928>being so buttblasted you misuse the meme templateat least watch the KotH episode that it's from
what do you think regulates the value of grain and other commodities in precapitalist societies? fucking magic? like even if you establish prices by law, you still have to explain where those prices "come from". or maybe you think Mesopotamian kings could legislate whatever the fuck prices they wanted? or that people buying copper from reputable merchants didn't have some expected price in mind for some given quality of copper? "my slave returned with inferior copper worth half of what I paid for it? no problem, because market forces don't exist in precapitalist societies! prices can be whatever I want!"
>Competitors and investors will notice this, as this information or its effects are observable, and will scale down production or invest in expanding production to shift their capital away from low ROI production towards high ROI productioncapital can't actually move this freely, which is why le transformation problem is bunk
I also like how you still can't concisely explain what value is if it isn't SNLT
>>1978071Holy shit how retarded are you. Do you actually have absolutely zero reading comprehension?
>I also like how you still can't concisely explain what value is if it isn't SNLTI literally explained several times already what value is.
If you say "well, it was a lot of words, so its wrong", maybe go check out mein kampf, they also like short, simple and incorrect explanations.
>capital can't actually move this freely, which is why le transformation problem is bunkThe transformation "problem" has nothing to do with this lmao.
>what do you think regulates the value of grain and other commodities in precapitalist societies? fucking magic? like even if you establish prices by law, you still have to explain where those prices "come from". or maybe you think Mesopotamian kings could legislate whatever the fuck prices they wanted?They basically did.
Modern government do it all the time.
The soviets did it too.
Thats one of the fucking points i've been trying to get through your thick skull.
If you have a system that is not focussed on maximizing exchange value per hour of work
>Like the soviet government, which planned its economy in kind>Like mesopothamian kings, which planned their small economy in kind for the majority of important products>Like schools and healthcare in europe, which do not sell their servives at market ratesThen the LAW OF VALUE DOES NOT SET THE PRICES.
The fact that Things Cost Labour To Make does not automatically cause their societal Value to be equal to their labour costs, it does not cause society to valuate it as such, it does not cause the production to try and produce such and such amount so that its exchange value becomes equal to it.
If the producers do not actively work to make prices reflect their labour content, it wont happen. If the labour content versus their exchange value is not the sole focus of economic action, if it is not a generalised commodity market in which the difference between these two is the only place in which you can outcompete others and thus capital constantly seek out opportunities to jump in that gap, then the exchange value wont be pushed towards its labour content.
The Value, an abstract notion of equalibrium price, of a commodity in capitalism is equal to its labour content precisely because it is the only place where profit can be made. First by not paying labour the full value it made, and last by seeking out those areas of production where you get more exchange value per labour invested. This last part is what causes Value to exist, what causes the abstract notion of equalibrium prices to exist and be a force.
If you do not have an economy in which these two forces dominate, You. Have. No. Law. Of. Value.
>>1978091And before you try to escape hatch by citing examples of small scale, non-dominant markets in the ancient past in which there was a degree of profit maximisation
Hunter gatherers did not have markets or profit seeking
They did not experience a "law of value" which made such and such thing "exchangable" or "of equal value" as such and such other thing. Because in that mode of production, the notion of "exchange" of such things is ridiculous, and the notion of conciously producing to exchange such that you may trade little work for the maximum amount of work of others, is nonsensical. So too for peasants, who did not grow crops for trade, but to eat, and if they had something left, IF, they would sell it for whatever they could.
Lastly, aside from all the examples I already gave such as the soviet governments, modern social democracies, and past modes of production:
Current day monopolies, or monopolies of old times for that matter, do not follow "the law of value". The societal value of a product of a monopoly is NOT equal to its labour content. Because >the law of value is an result of *free market* competition by companies producing for exchange<.
I think I have given more than enough examples to disprove the notion that the law of value is transhistorical. Being able to calculate the difference in costs between seperate things is not the same as the law of value. Because merely calculating costs says nothing about exchange. Value only exists in market exchange, because Value is an abstract idea, a tendency, an economic law, of free markets with generalized commodity production.
Just account for costs of something says nothing about which quantities to produce. Under capitalism, the quantity to produce is determined by the total sum of people weighing individual choices, and consciously adjusting production such that the exchange value is closer to the costs. You can, we loads of economic systems in the past have, choose not to do so.
For example, publicly owned companies are sometimes told to break even under capitalism. This enforces the goal of price == costs. But they can also be instructed to provide a service within a set budget to spend on labour, buildings, etc, where in the individual choices no mind really is paid to the costs. Or it can be instructed to act as a state monopoly, generating large profits, such as state owned resource extraction companies, where they purposefully break their society from the law of value to drive up the price and the profit.
The law of value is not transhistorical. It is not even all encompassing in our current world. Because the law of value is a law of CAPITALISM, not a law of nature.
>>1978091You keep on talking as if value is an on/off thing. You have been asked about this, repeatedly, and posted, repeatedly, giving no argument as to why you think that.
If production has no surplus whatsoever, then the proportions of production are tightly set by the constraints of survival. The rule is follow these, or die.
If production allows for a surplus, there are various possibilities of how much to produce of what (and for what prices, if there are prices). But these possibilities are still constrained by the surplus size. This is true irrespective of whether society is capitalist. There is no switch from one solution to anything goes.
>>1978119 (me)
I think I see now what the problem of that stubborn poster is: a thinking that starts from the frog perspective of a given individual with given endowments and a given psychology instead of from a viewpoint "looking down from the sky" at the economy and the networks of the many dependencies people have to operate in.
>>1978119You basically posted
>There is surplus>???>Prices (if by your own admission, there are any) are proportional to their labour cost, for some reasonIt is exactly because of this:
>If production allows for a surplus, there are various possibilities of how much to produce of whatThat the "law of value" is not transhistorical. The law of value states "equalibrium prices are equal to labour content".
There is no reason that you have to do that. You seem to be fully stuck in thinking that the ancient world was just "capitalism except some people farmed their own food".
There was no real "market". The "market" was just people nearby. You did not sell grain on a free open market. The majority of things being produced in the majority of our history were not produced with the goal of maximizing exchange value vs how much resources you put in on a market in mind. Because Mesopothamia and feudal kingdoms were more often than not, quasi-planned mini economies, where only those tings unable to be made in the domain were sold on a very marginal market. Wages were set through politics, not free competition, because of guilds. Wanted higher wages? Strikes. Lord wanted to pay less? He did. But the blacksmiths employed in the royal armoury did not make fucking swords for the lord to fucking sell. And the lord did not buy swords of armour on the market from individual blacksmiths.
The whole problem with cockshott and you lot is that you bought the capitalist logic that
>Exchange value (ie its price) should be equal to its costs if the economy is in equalibriumline and sinker.
There is, litterally, not a single good reason to do so. A society can just decide, "hey, we are just *not* going to produce something, despite it having demand. They can decide to make it cheap, or free, like condoms in some countries, or like what Venezuela does, just set prices.
The only reason that seems not to work in the soviet union or venezuela so well is because they exist in a world dominated by capital, and still used capitalist logic internally. If you still have people producing according to capitalist principles, which is to say, in which their primary goal is to enact the law of value, then simultaniously forbidding them for doing so causes them to lose money (or make a lot, depending on which end they are on). At the same time, all the cheap food is being smuggled out of venezuela, was being smuggled out of the DDR, towards the "oh so efficient eternal law of value west" were, surprise surprise, it also benefits society to have cheap food.
You can't just say "there is surplus, something something magic, prices in equilibrium are proportional to their labor costs", because making it so that production is distributed to achieve that situation is an active process in which the people at the handles of what, when how much and how to produce must make it so. And that arbitrary goal, the arbitrary goal of making prices proportional to their labour content, is a symptom of markets, because it only happens automagically if the economic actors producing those products seek to do so. So while market salesmen, or peddlers of cloth weaved by farmers, may have enacted the law of value, the majority of production under non-capitalistic systems is not done for market sale, and so does not experience the effect that we call "the law of value", so that means the law of value.
Is.
Not.
Transhistoric.
So yes, value is an on off thing. If the people producing it do not do anything to make its supply match its demand in such a way that its prices level out proportional to its labour costs, then whatever is produced will never have that equalibrium of the law of value.
>>1978137incomprehensible have a horrible day
>>1978098>the law of value>valuethese are not the same thing
of course the law of value only applies in exchange. that's the point. and indeed, monopolies can set quite high prices, effectively extracting ground rent from their position in the market. but, they cannot set whatever the fuck prices they want, because they are still subject to the law of value. if a monopoly sets too high prices for the commodities it sells then competitors will arise. this is a non-convex phenomenon, so prices have to be set way too high for this to happen. this happened in the USSR in the second and third economies
let's take your notion that the law of value does not apply in ancient times. what then regulates prices in the market? for example in ancient international trade. what regulated the price of paid by the Egyptian state for tin mined in Cyprus? by your account one must presume, assuming Cyprus was not under Egyptian control, that the Pharaoh could just decree to the Cypriot miners that they would get one ton of grain per ton of tin, even though the value of one ton of tin is perhaps one hundred tons of grain. this because there is no law of value regulating prices, as you seem to claim, since the law of value is unique to capitalism. and there's no one else to outbid the Egyptians because apparently market forces don't exist in the ancient world. or perhaps there is some other law regulating prices? but any law regulating prices is a value law. so we must presume there is something other than SNLT that functions as value in the ancient world. perhaps the will of Resheph regulated prices?
>>1978098>The law of value is not transhistoricalnot only is value transhistorical, but so is capital. capital is the object of study in Marx' Capital. the clue is in the name
capital doesn't care whether feudal peasants produce mostly for their own survival. capital only cares about surplus value. capitalism is the period in history in which capital dominates. by no means does capital penetrate all aspects of life even in our time. it has however reached a qualitatively different role in our society compared to previous ones
>>1978177>Prices (if by your own admission, there are any) are proportional to their labour costWhat that post was actually saying is different from that made-up quote. In the big picture, the quantities and their ratios are constrained. You are proposing a binary on/off distinction, again.
>equalibrium prices are equal to labour contentYou aren't accounting for differences in organic composition of capital, again.
>>Exchange value (ie its price) should be equal to its costs>There is, litterally, not a single good reason to do so.>like what Venezuela does>all the cheap food is being smuggled out of venezuela…
>the arbitrary goal of making prices proportional to their labour content, is a symptom of markets, because it only happens automagically if the economic actors producing those products seek to do so.Their goal is to minimize money cost, not labor cost.
>So while market salesmen, or peddlers of cloth weaved by farmers, may have enacted the law of value…That's putting too much weight on individual psychology.
>>1978178>of course the law of value only applies in exchange. that's the point. and indeed, monopolies can set quite high prices, effectively extracting ground rent from their position in the market. but, they cannot set whatever the fuck prices they want, because they are still subject to the law of value.Monopolies can quite literally set whatever the fuck price they want. That is the property of a monopoly. You can't just say "oh but they cant do that because uuuuuh law of value". A true monopoly can. The soviet were a true monopoly, and they did, so the law of value did not apply to their economy.
The "law of value applies to monopolies under capitalism" is only marginally true insofar that monopolies under capitalism are never true monopolies, because they could be competed with if they are retarded enough to ask a bazzilion dollars for a cup of coffee.
>let's take your notion that the law of value does not apply in ancient times. what then regulates prices in the market?If all the surplus grain comes from peasants who produce for their own value or for quotas from the lord.
And all that is sold is just whatever is left after they used those, if they are lucky.
Then the price of grain is NOT equal to the labour content encompassed within it.
Because the price of grain only equalized to its labour content if, over several cycles, production of it is shifted such that not too much or too little is on the market.
What determines the price then is simply whatever people feel like is subjectively reasonable to pay, given there are often alternatives, and competing merchants, who at some point will give in and say yes. Is there a lot of surplus on the market? Low prices. Fuckton of barley and little grain? Grains probably going to be a little more expensive than barley, but barley, as it is quasi substitutionable, will drive down grain prices too, even if it took a lot of work to make that grain. Because The Law Of Value causes equalibrium prices after all the shifting of labour and capital has been done.
Can you really not see it? Under market capitalism, the amount of production is changes to make sure that prices become proportional to labour costs. Under systems where production is NOT done for sale, but for other reasons such as quotas, or self sufficiency, the amount going onto the market is arbitrary.
The law of value is unique to open markets, where production is done for exchange. That is capitalism, and forms of proto capitalism. That is what I claim.
You, and by you I mean Cockshott who you parrot because your take is *not* a mainstream marxist position, claims that THE LAW OF VALUE is TRANSHISTORICAL, meaning that this law, that in reality only applies to things produced competitively purely for exchange, somehow determines the quantities of production in ALL of history, in ALL of production, past present and future.
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/a-belated-response-to-rv-or-why-the-law-of-value-must-hold/https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/why-law-of-value-really-applies-in-socialist-economies/Cockshott for no reason a-priori accepts that prices be proportional to labour content even under socialism, or communism.
Its not transhistorical, it will never be, and its absurd to claim that cavement magically did labour time accounting and balanced their production such that, if it were to be exchanges with each other, it somehow would be exchanged proportional to its labour content, something they just did not do. Its equally absurd to think that communist societies somehow will have to follow "the law of value" and "price" their moneyless society, and to give you the benefit of the scenario, run virtual exchange calculations such that its virtual not actually real price equals its labour costs and base the entire distribution of their economy on that equation.
Knowing how much or how long something costs to make, and using that info to make informed decisions based on that, is not the same as the law of value. If I know it will take me 5 euros and 30 minutes of time (ie about 10 euros in labour costs) to cook dinner, and 20 euros to have it delivered, i can choose to have it delivered because the entire point of the proletarian movement, of communism, is to take control of the economy into the hands of the working masses, and make it political. To not be subject to blind forces of capital, to not be rules by Capital as a force, to not live in a world that is determined by "line goes up", but to live in a world where we, the people can choose to do whatever the fuck we want. Free ice cream? WE CAN, just ration it. Make smoking fucking expensive because it sucks dick? Oh oops we already do that! So much for the law of value.
>>1978216Correction, read this post incorrectly:
Irrelevant. Your counterargument is "capital existed in a marginal role in the economy in feudal (and perhaps slave societies) then you only argue that the law of value accompanies markets and commodity production (ie, the other side of the coin of capital). So the law of value is not transhistorical. It only exists in the capitalist subset of those societies that had capitalist subsets. Not in hunter gatherer societies. It did not determined price of products coming out of non-capitalistic production, which is what I have been saying this entire time. The price of non-capitalistically produced things is not determined by the law of value. Grain in feudalism was not grown *to sell* by capitalists using capital, and as such, it is not influenced by the law of value, because see any of the thousands of repetitions ive already written.
>>1978217>In the big picture, the quantities and their ratios are constrained. You are proposing a binary on/off distinction, again.They are not, I have explained plenty of times how they are not constrained.
>You aren't accounting for differences in organic composition of capital, again.Has nothing to do with this discussion.
>Their goal is to minimize money cost, not labor cost.And bada bign badaboom, because everything is made out of labour, all costs, in the end, are labour.
>That's putting too much weight on individual psychology.Sure just ignore the several pages I (or Marx for that matter) wrote explaining how profit seeking through production with capital does exactly that, enacting the law of value.
Thank you for shopping go directly to jail do not pass start do not collect 200 dollars, im going to bed this thread has dropped off man.
>>1978221>>1978234>Monopolies can quite literally set whatever the fuck price they want. That is the property of a monopolyundialectical nonsense
>The soviet were a true monopoly>wereanon I
>What determines the price then is simply whatever people feel like is subjectively reasonable to payand there it is. the anti-Marxian position of the value critic is revealed
>its absurd to claim that cavement magically did labour time accountingis it? did cavemen not have to decide what to spend their time on? did they not have to reason about whether to spend a day knapping arrowheads or a day hunting? a day gathering or a day travelling to a nearby tribe? were they stupid?
>Its equally absurd to think that communist societies somehow will have to follow "the law of value" and "price" their moneyless societynowhere does Marx claim that communism means exchange-value goes away. Gothakritik suggests exchange-value is done away with for needs, but says nothing of wants
>Make smoking fucking expensive because it sucks dick? Oh oops we already do that! So much for the law of valueyou are aware of tobacco smuggling, right? capital finds a way
>you clearly have not read marxI have read vol I-III of Capital
>Grain in feudalism was not grown *to sell* by capitalists using capital, and as such, it is not influenced by the law of value, because see any of the thousands of repetitions ive already written.some of the grain was. there is a dividing line between what capital does to reproduce the labour force, and what it does for valorization purposes
>Thank you for shopping go directly to jail do not pass start do not collect 200 dollars, im going to bed this thread has dropped off man.I accept your surrender
>>1978234ooh also
>capitalists using capitalit's the other way around
>>1978221>Monopolies can quite literally set whatever the fuck price they want. That is the property of a monopoly.I don't know of any economic theory that claims that monopolies set prices arbitrarily. (Neoclassical 101 is that they try to maximize profits, and Austrians would claim as a rule of thumb something below that in order to reduce risk of entry by others.) And monopolists still have running costs.
>A true monopoly can.How about a real-world one?
>The soviet were a true monopolyThey were a player competing with others on international markets.
>If all the surplus grain comes from peasants who produce for their own value or for quotas from the lord (…) What determines the price then is simply whatever people feel like is subjectively reasonable to payAnd to you this subjective feeling is itself not grounded in anything because your analysis starts from an individualist liberal POV. Tell me, how do lords come up with their quotas? Is this also based in spontaneous feelings and not estimates of what's physically possible?
>Under market capitalism, the amount of production is changes to make sure that prices become proportional to labour costs.Breaking news: Anon has forgotten organic composition of capital.
>If I know it will take me 5 euros and 30 minutes of time (ie about 10 euros in labour costs) to cook dinner, and 20 euros to have it delivered, i can choose to have it deliveredYou can make such a decision with your consumption points in the TANS scheme as well, no matter the details of the pricing algorithm.
>because everything is made out of labour, all costs, in the end, are labour<Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm >>1978242>anon IYou seen any soviets around lately?
>undialectical nonsenseLettersoup
>and there it is. the anti-Marxian position of the value critic is revealedPrice under capitalism only has a "true value" because the logic of commodity production itself put incentives and punishments that lead to it converging on labour costs.
A farmer who has at the end of the year, 100 hours worth of grain left, can trade it for 10 hours worth of new equipment, and he is still better off at the end of the year.
See my barley example. IF A MARKET IS NOT IN CAPITALIST EQUALIBRIUM PRICES DONT EQUAL VALUE, AND NON CAPITALIST ECONOMIES ARE NEVER IN EQUALIBRIUM BECAUSE THERE IS NO MECHANISM TO FORCE THEM INTO IT
>nowhere does Marx claim that communism means exchange-value goes away.Communism is the abolishion of the commodity form and as such exchange altogether (and also money since money is just a special universal equivalent commodity). Claiming that communism will have exchange value (and a law of value, which requires production for exchange) and thus commodities is absurd. Also I dont remember that in the Gotha programme critique, gonna need a source on that.
>you are aware of tobacco smuggling, right? capital finds a waySo you agree that the only reason the soviets "felt" the law of value is because of surrounding capitalist countries?
Need I remind you that communism is global?
>I have read vol I-III of CapitalDoesn't sound like it
>some of the grain was.If capitalists grew grain using invested capital and hired labour then its not feudal production, but capitalist production. And the law of value still does not apply to feudal economies. (btw there was not really commercial grain growing under feudal times, its kind of the whole characteristic of the period, you know, serfs and shit)
>there is a dividing line between what capital does to reproduce the labour force, and what it does for valorization purposesWord soup
>>1978246>it's the other way aroundAlready said that also not relevant also individual capitalists do use their own capital for production even though capital in the abstract dictates the actions of capitalists as a class
>>>1978257>I don't know of any economic theory that claims that monopolies set prices arbitrarily.Maybe read some more books then.
>Neoclassical 101 is that they try to maximize profitsThat doesnt disprove it
>Austrians would claim as a rule of thumb something below that in order to reduce risk of entry by others.Already addressed that
>And monopolists still have running costs.Not relevant because they already make a profit, making more profit isnt hindered by unchanging running costs
>How about a real-world one?The soviet economy. Or pick any non-capitalistic economy. Peasants cant buy from "competition" if they dont sell anything, and so "competition" to the lord of UR cannot come into being (and if they do the lord of UR will just kill them).
>Breaking news: Anon has forgotten organic composition of capital.Does not disprove or prove anything said here since this is just an espect already contained in the law of value as well as all models that emulate it. You just say it to try and sow confusion, the organic composition of capital is implicit, and if you really wanted to hammer down on this point, you ought to attack your buddies who champion "Value is equal to snlt and prices hover around it".
>Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.Ah a classic misconception. Wealth and Value arent the same. Value is economic, wealth is not. Notice how marx explicitly says
>Nature is just as much the source of use valuesand not
>nature is a source of *Value*Because nature provides use value, but nature on its own is not a source of value.
Nature provides me with clean drinking water in aquifers. But that water has no value. The value of that water pumped up is just the costs of its labour to pump it up.
The quote is also wholly irrelevant to what you replied to since you talked about costs.
Things that nature provides to us have, by definition, no cost. You don't have to pay a forest for the tree you cut down in it, even though it has use value. You do have to pay a carpenter to make that log into a chair, which is a cost, a worker to paint and pack it, a trucker to transport it.
>>1978288>IF A MARKET IS NOT IN CAPITALIST EQUALIBRIUM PRICES DONT EQUAL VALUESo you are saying in equilibrium organic composition of capital doesn't matter?
>If capitalists grew grain using invested capital and hired labour then its not feudal production, but capitalist production.Assuming here that production is either capitalist or not, on/off.
>>I don't know of any economic theory that claims that monopolies set prices arbitrarily.>>And monopolists still have running costs.>Not relevant.
.
.
If they have running costs they have to set the price at some minimum level or they go out of business. What are you even writing here. This is outsider art.
>you ought to attack your buddies who champion "Value is equal to snlt and prices hover around it".*ctrl-f hover* here is the post found:
>>1977928I agree that post is retarded.
>>Labor is not the source of all wealth.>Ah a classic misconception.You literally wrote: "everything is made out of labour". The Marx quote is a fitting reply.
>>1978313>Assuming here that production is either capitalist or not, on/off.Production is either conducted for exchange or is not conducted for exchange. So yes.
>If they have running costs they have to set the price at some minimum level or they go out of business. What are you even writing here.Monopolies can set their prices are arbitrarily high as they want. Are you dense?
>"everything is made out of labour" gotchaUnless you thought i litterally made "is is made out of the material: labour" which isnt a physical material, this reply is retarded
All costs in production in a capitalist economy, are made using labour. All the costs in them, are labour. Natural wealth, such as pre-existing trees, oxygen in the air, etc, has no cost.
"Everything is made out of labour" is a way of saying "all commodities are made using labour and labour alone is the cost of everything in the end"
>>1978288>NON CAPITALIST ECONOMIES ARE NEVER IN EQUALIBRIUMneither are capitalist economies. in fact this is a central point of Marx', that prices are always in flux
>Also I dont remember that in the Gotha programme critiquewe can start with the classic slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", repeated in the Gothakritik. notice the use of the word "needs'" rather than wants. in Part 1 Marx says:
<Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etcso, school, health services etc are unqualified needs. the funding of these needs is deducted in the form of taxes. this leaves some amount of vouchers for non-needs, for wants. and higher-phase communism is defined by he distribution of needs regardless of the amount of labour performed. but nothing is said of wants. I can
want a ton of gold from society, or a rare antique, but I won't get them because I don't
need them. having to exchange for wants is not at all in conflict with higher-phase communism. only needs are provided for
>>1978323>Production is either conducted for exchange or is not conducted for exchangeagain with this undialectical nonsense. production can happen for multiple reasons. it is only ex-post that it is revealed whether it was done for exchange or not
>Monopolies can set their prices are arbitrarily high as they wantthey literally cannot. you yourself said so. if Starbucks has a monopoly on coffee in an area and then tries to charge 1,000,000,000€ for a cup of coffee their monopoly won't last. monopolies aren't absolute. everything is in flux
>>1978323>Monopolies can set their prices are arbitrarily high as they want.Monopolies have running costs, so there are lower bounds to its pricing decisions; and buyers have limited budgets, so there are upper bounds as well.
>All costs in production in a capitalist economy, are made using labourFirms have to pay for their inputs. Input prices have a rent component. You haven't taken into account organic composition of capital.
>>1978325>neither are capitalist economies. in fact this is a central point of Marx', that prices are always in fluxNon capitalist economies are never going to be driven towards this equalibrium either since there is no way to correct production to that standard.
Ive explained it plenty, we are running in circles.
>>1978325>we can start with the classic slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", repeated in the Gothakritik. notice the use of the word "needs'" rather than wants.lmao. The original german is Bedurfnis which also means "desire". This is even worse than that "ablation" shit. Also even if that were true, doesn't do anything to help your absurd claim that communism will have commodity production, since the abolishion of the commodity form is a core part of communism. Communism is not "when the government gives you healthcare", that is social democracy.
>again with this undialectical nonsense. production can happen for multiple reasons. it is only ex-post that it is revealed whether it was done for exchange or notIt is precisely the intentionality that determines for what goal is being produced and the goal determines what and how much is produced. If the goal is "to eat" then the possible monetary value of it will not influence it, so it wont matter if the market is flooded with grain.
>>>1978327>they literally cannot. you yourself said so. if Starbucks has a monopoly on coffee in an area and then tries to charge 1,000,000,000€ for a cup of coffee their monopoly won't last. monopolies aren't absolute. everything is in fluxI LITTERALLY ALREADY DISPROVED THIS EXACT EXAMPLE YOU FUCKING MORON
You mf litterally can not read.
>>>1978331>Monopolies have running costs, so there are lower bounds to its pricing decisions; and buyers have limited budgets, so there are upper bounds as well.Youre missing the forrest for the trees. Monopolies I used as an example to show how the Law of Value is not some iron clad law, how theres plenty of examples where commodities are not impacted by the law of value.
>You haven't taken into account organic composition of capital.Word salad, not relevant to this discussion, you keep repeating it yet have not once explained how it would even invalidate the idea that the law of value is not transhistorical.
>>1978327>>Production is either conducted for exchange or is not conducted for exchange>again with this undialectical nonsense. production can happen for multiple reasons. Yes of course.
>>1978333>It is precisely the intentionality that determines for what goal is being produced and the goal determines what and how much is produced. If the goal is "to eat" then the possible monetary value of it will not influence it, so it wont matter if the market is flooded with grain.Suppose I produce some quantity of a food item with the goal of selling all of it. I fail to sell all of it and so decide to consume the unsold stuff myself. I guess I failed at doing 100 % a pure capitalism then, so does it mean I must live in 100 % feudalism then?
In everything you say you make too much of individual intent and use definitions as hard walls to bang your head against.
>>1978333>The original german is Bedurfnis which also means "desire"my language has the same word. it means need. a want is not the same thing as a need. German has a word for want: will/wollen
I have seen people claim that communism entails unity between wants and need. I very much doubt it. even a child has wants for things they cannot have. like candy before dinner
>>1978690Yeah IMHO if Marx had wanted to really communicate desire in the sense of something highly subjective and luxurious, he would have used Wunsch (wish) instead of Bedürfnis.
Jedem nach seinen individuellen Wünschen! (To each according to their individual wishes!)
https://www.haerdin.se/blog/2024/10/08/in-kind-accounting/<Traditionally accounting is done using double-sided unsigned accounts, as explained above. I suspect that this method comes about for historical materialist, technical reasons. It is much easier to sum two columns of unsigned numbers separately and then computing balances, than it is to sum single columns of alternating positive and negative numbers.IIRC the very concept of negative numbers came up first in economic accounting.
<The grain stored at point B might not be reported as a single value, but as an interval, tracked by two accounts rather than just a single account.YES. This must be a default option for input fields of any quantity.
<The types of properties we might choose to account for can be quite numerous. For example we might track all of the following:<yards of linen<number of coats<cubic meters of potable water…In these examples a physical thing gets exactly one aspect entry. But a thing could get several entries for several aspects.
Somebody made a proposal for accounting with four entries per thing (in a normal capitalist context), but I don't remember what that was about.
>>1980371interesting paper, but it's also full of Trot whining. it manages 5½ pages before going muh Stalinist counterrevolution
>Resources were allocated by “feel and intuition,” and planners had little idea about the technical coefficients of inputs and outputs (Gregory, 2004: 211):this sounds like bunk. the people in charge of the various ministries were often intimately familiar with their industries. one prime example is Baibakov, who was an oil man first and foremost
>In Stalinist Russia, all the words of the plan played the role of ritual, propaganda, or vision, serving to justify the un-planned exploitative regime.the author fails to explain how exactly Soviet planners under Stalin were supposedly able to exploit Soviet workers. there was as far as I know no way for planners to appropriate surplus value for themselves. perhaps the author means exploitation in that a surplus was extracted and then used to accumulate? that is, to expand the MoPs? but that's a good thing, and if anything we should admonish the Soviets for not doing more of it
next we get some interesting mathematical stuff, which is partly true and partly bunk:
>Above all, it was very difficult to correctly determine the total quantities of the inputs that were required to produce the outputs, that is, total input coefficients, from material balances, for the latter could not take into consideration all the so-called second-round effects.>Algebraically, the second-round effects can be expressed as the sum of ‘I + A + A2 + A3 + …’. However, only the first two terms of the sum, I + A, can be captured in material balances.this is true. but then the author writes this nonsense:
>This means that constructing a balanced plan is beyond the latter's scopethis completely misses the iterative nature of the system, which did eventually converge on a mostly balanced plan. it was just very slow. what the author seems to be demanding is that Gosplan should somehow have formed inv(I-A), a task completely infeasible with the technology at the time, and infeasible even today with millions of products
>Moreover, Stalinist planners usually compiled the plan from the previous year, using the input coefficients of the previous year, without knowing whether they were optimal minimum quantities of inputs required to produce the unit output.with an iterative system this is actually the appropriate thing to do. an approximate starting solution is better than starting from scratch. later on the Gosplan would computerize, enabling actually solving the relevant linear systems. the ministries/sovnarkhozy then became a fetter on the system, since Gosplan didn't have the downstream technical coefficients (afaict). to their credit, the author does touch on this as well, when quoting Becker
>>1985138I also noticed Cockshott has a very weird way of pronouncing the word "proven", with a short oh rather than a longer ooh
Cockshott seems to imply that computers can do anything that humans can. this seems like complete nonsense. computers are machines. they are objects of human society rather than subjects of it. Cockshott also seems to say that what matters in planning is computation. but I'd argue computation, while necessary, is the least important part of planning
>>1993002see this copypasta:ONLY GOD CAN UNDERSTAND DIALECTICS: WHY HEGELIAN MARXISTS ARE PSEUDSTLDR: dialectics aren’t real and even if they were humans would be incapable of understanding them
PEOPLE TOTALLY MISUNDERSTAND COCKSHOTT'S ANTI HEGELIANISM. The whole reason Cockshott is anti hegel is because he is a computer scientist and it is widely accepted in the academic computer science community that a human mind is equivalent to a universal turing machine (if not actually much WEAKER since a TM has unlimited memory and a human brain doesn’t). None of his critiques of Hegel's logic make sense without this basic understanding.
All of theoretical CS is based on the classical categories of computability theory (degrees of unsolvability, computability over functions, real numbers and ordinals). Cockshott even wrote a book, less known here, "Computation and its limits" which goes into detail debunking "hypercomputationalists" i.e. people who reject the academic CS consensus and argue that the human brain can go beyond a turing machine. This isn't just a limited claim about building software, its a universal claim on the actual mathematical limits of logic and even physics.
Absent this understanding, I can see why his statements of "the implicit critique of the Hegelian method provided by the failure of Hilbert and Russell’s formalist project." don't make sense. Philosophyfags here have been too quick to dismiss Cockshott as just an ignoramus, while remaining extremely ignorant of the actual philosophical implications of computability and information theory on the nature of reality, and its this frame Cockshott is coming at it from.
>Here we have the same sort of presentation process that occurs in the Logic, with its deduction of being from nothingness, and becoming from the contradiction between the two. At the beginning in Hegel this has a certain plausibility but as the argument proceeds, as he gets to the derivation of “ought.” I for one felt, reading Hegel as an undergraduate, that this was all a conjuring trick. He was sneaking already formed presuppositions and concepts into the argument rather than deriving them. This essentially is what Althusser says of Marx’s form of presentation. It only works to the extent that he brings in real historical forms which have their own material history, their own information content, into the argument. Althusser contrasts this form of presentation at the start with the chapters on the working day and primitive accumulation which present the real histories of the forms being discussed.
>If we look at the history of mathematics, and if any domain would seem suited to the logical self development of ideas it is maths, we can see how a method analogous to that of Hegel came to grief. The formalist project of Russell and Hilbert came to grief first in set theory and then in Turing’s (1937) paper on the decision problem. The project had aimed to found mathematics on logic and Hilbert had asked for a mechanical procedure by which the truth or falsity of a mathematical theorem could be determined. If a theorem could be proven true, then you demonstrate that it can be derived from axioms using valid rules of inference. So if you could discover such a mechanical method for checking arbitrary theorems, you would have demonstrated that all of maths could be logically deduced from a collection of founding axioms. Turing showed that no such proof decision process can exist. He did it by taking the term “mechanical procedure” and designing a general purpose “universal” computer that could perform any calculation that a human mathematician could do. He then demonstrated that the assumption that such a mechanical proof procedure could exist would lead to a contradiction analogous to Russell’s paradox. It thus follows that even in mathematics, the project of a complete and logical development of the system falls down. The basic reason is that you cannot get more out of an axiomatic system than you put in: Chaitin’s aphorism: “You cannot get two kilos of results from one kilo of axioms.” Advocates of “dialectical logic” may say that this is just a restriction of formal logic, dialectical logic does allow you to derive more than you start out with. Well the reason why formal logic is different is that it is specified precisely enough to allow machine checking. A human dialectician is free to engage in all sorts of rhetorical sleights of hand, importing hidden assumptions without needing to give any justification for them. The great advantage of a mechanizable formalism is that it excludes such verbal conjuring tricks.That's the reason Cockshott rejects Hegelian logic and especially applied to political economy, because it would have to violate Chaitin's incompleteness theorem to be true. Marx is in tension because he's a half Hegelian - he tries to start off the exposition of capital in a Hegelian manner but is required to smuggle in actual historical empirical data about the development of capitalism (ex: primitive accumulation) to actually have a theory. The informational content in Marx is a result of external information being brought in from this source. not some a priori derivation.
It is logically impossible to derive more information from a theory than you put in. Many people will claim the reason Cockshott rejects Hegel is because Hegel's system is not formalized, which is completely missing the point. He's not saying Hegel is wrong because he hasn't been formalized, he's saying Hegel is wrong AND THATS WHY he hasn't been formalized, because to pose it in a formal way would open it up to the same sorts of incompleteness arguments that have been used against other systems in the past. A system of logic must be "mechanisably falsifiable" (in the Turing-ist, not Popperian sense).
All of this coping about Cockshott's materialism being "crude" really just reveals the critics own lack of understanding about science.
It has been mathematically proven any law in physics, if not computable, can be simulated to a finite degree i.e. the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle. A human brain exists as a physical system in physical material reality. Any claim that a human brain performing logic using Hegel's system or any other can transgress the inherent limits of computation therefore must inherently devolve into a form of cartesian dualism.
And that’s giving the maximum benefit of the doubt, since any evidence there is actually points to a human brain being weaker than a UTM not the opposite. And before anyone says well a brain is analog, and that somehow lets it transcend digital logic: there have been information theory proofs that show that you can simulate analogue processes digitally with arbitrary precision (in theory, though probably not in practice tbf). also:
>the effects of noise on limiting information transfer allow us to quantify the information transmission rates of real neurons, and they are finite and finitely describable. The presence of noise in the brain, which is estimated at the level of 10%, simply makes analogue hypercomputation not a credible option after all.Choice:
1. For Hegel’s or any system of logic to be complete it would also have to be hypercomputational
2. There are very strong arguments why both logical systems and physical reality are not hypercomputational
Therefore:
Any claim that a system can transcend these limits is equivalent to a claim that the system can transcend the limits of both logic and physical reality. This is non materialist and also anti scientific.
Conclusion:
Marx got around this limit of Hegel’s system by using actual empirical and historical data in his work. In that sense he is a bad Hegelian but a better theorist. The reality is that Hegel’s system does not enable us to transcend the limits of logic but is likely internally inconsistent or relies on assumptions which are not themselves derived from the system. This could only be demonstrated by a complete formalization of the system, which will never happen for exactly those reasons.
Hegelianism is supposed to be a complete, closed circuit system (Engels):
>Therefore, however much Hegel, especially in his Logic, emphasized that this eternal truth is nothing but the logical, or, the historical, process itself, he nevertheless finds himself compelled to supply this process with an end, just because he has to bring his system to a termination at some point or other. In his Logic, he can make this end a beginning again, since here the point of the conclusion, the absolute idea — which is only absolute insofar as he has absolutely nothing to say about it — “alienates”, that is, transforms, itself into nature and comes to itself again later in the mind, that is, in thought and in history. But at the end of the whole philosophy, a similar return to the beginning is possible only in one way. Namely, by conceiving of the end of history as follows: mankind arrives at the cognition of the self-same absolute idea, and declares that this cognition of the absolute idea is reached in Hegelian philosophy.Even hypothetically, if a hypercomputational system of logic existed it would be incomprehensible to human minds because we can’t compute it. For the same reason humans can’t apprehend actual physical infinities. There is literally no human brain big enough to understand it, let alone write it down. If such a system existed only an infinite being (i.e. God) would have any chance of understanding it.
Laugh it up, but Hegel is actually pretty close to claiming this. Starting with Spinoza for who god was nature, for Hegel god is reason, that comes to understand itself i.e. “Absolute Spirit” an ‘all-inclusive unity’. Spinoza’s system is close to a (nondualist) vedantic or buddhist idea of a cosmic soul. Hegel is a Spinozist, and literally stated as much:
>“The fact is that Spinoza is made a testing-point in modern philosophy, so that it may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”t. Hegel
Hegel inherits this ontological(existence) monism and changes it from static being to a process of self development of consciousness. But what is this consciousness? It is not a human consciousness but a cosmic consciousness which comes to know itself.
The problem is that we know that ontological monism is false, and not scientific. The fact that buddhism and other forms of eastern mysticism are becoming so popular on the left is a consequence of this bullshit.
We know now that material reality is made up of physical particles like atoms, protons, electrons and quarks. A human mind is bound by the laws of physical reality, and as TCS has shown the laws of computability at a MAXIMUM.
Positing the actual
real existence of dialectics is equivalent to positing the existence of a God, whether of the spooky christchinletry type or an impersonal Spinozist/Hegelian or eastern type.
For Marxism to be scientifically grounded it needs to divorce Hegelianism. This necessitates also rejecting the arrogant assumption of logical completeness that Hegel posits which was already rejected by Marxism as explained by Engels in ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’. Although Engels does a lot of cringeworthy Hegel-stanning in that book too he also recognizes its limits esp. in terms of Marxism.
Althusser went a long way in doing this. It always makes me laugh when people try and say that modern Marx scholarship has obviated Althusser’s idea of an epistemic break, they simply do not understand the idea of symptomatic reading, which does not rely on authorial intent. For Althusser, reading is to ‘determine what a particular text is unable to say or represses because of its ideological conviction.’.
>In The Philosophy of the Encounter, texts dating from the late 1970s and early 80s, he somewhat modifies his original position on the epistemological break. He now says that there were relict Hegelian idealist strands in Marx as late as Capital.
>The shift to seeing the epistemological break as being gradual is realistic. Having looked at Althusser’s idea of matérialisme aléatoire it occurred to me that instead of relying on old Lucretius’s second hand account of Epicurus’s now lost works, Althusser would have been better to rely on the modern Atomists. I got out Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy. In the second chapter of this he gives an account of the historical birth of the quantum theory and the long period that elapsed between Planck’s initial work on the black body radiation in 1895 through Einstein’s introduction of the idea of the photon in 1905 to the matrix and wave mechanics of the mid 20s up to the synthesis of these in the late 20s. We are talking here of a 30 year period for the epistemological break between classical and quantum mechanics during which a half dozen or so of the brightest minds in the world worked on the problem collectively. Heisenberg recounts that in the early 20s they had hybrid ideas mixing a bit of quantum with a bit of the classical continuum, which were still a scientific advance but were far from being fully worked out. The Bohr atom with electrons in actual orbits was an advance, but it retained Newtonian forms of thought: electrons as planets, the nucleus as a sun. It could not account for the great stability of atoms under collision. Two solar systems approaching one another would be completely disrupted but atoms bounce off one another unharmed. It is a mistake to expect Marx, working without the active collaboration of other theorists, to have completely worked out a consistent framework in his own life. What you were bound to get is a gradual process in which things became more and more worked out as time went on. You can see the same thing in Darwin. After the explicit break with the Lamarkian concept of evolution of acquired characteristics in the Origin of the Species, one sees the old concept of acquired characteristics resurface from time to time in the Descent of Man or in the Expression of the Emotions. Without a theory of genetics like that developed by Mendel, the old idea of evolution through acquired characteristics retained its appeal… the logical inconsistency of the Lamarkian model is easy to see after DNA but was not originally so evident.What Cockshott is doing is an epicurean/ATOMIST and post-althusserian symptomatic reading of Marx, informed by modern physics and information theory, rebasing Marxism from its deterministic roots inspired of newtonian physics and classic evolutionary biology to a modern one based on notions of randomness and stochastic process, in line with the shift of modern physics.
But I’m sure the pseuds over here will continue to say HURR DURR MUH HEGEL MUH ANGLO POSITIVISM HEHE BASED
addendum:DIALECTICS: Why Hegelian Marxists are STILL pseuds
<Do you think because TCS isn't empirical, it means it can't be applied to understanding the physical world? This seems wrong, the person who pioneered the physical interpretation of the CT thesis was a literal physicist, David Deutsch. Again, claiming TCS being apriori means that the strong/physical interpretation of the CT thesis (Church–Turing–Deutsch) must therefore be wrong is also pseudery, just of a different kind. The Church-Turing thesis is a statement about models of computation. The Church-Turing-Deutsch principle is a statement about theories of physics. Deutsch’s idea was based on an observation that seems self-evident: computation is inherently a physical process, in the sense that any computation must be carried out by an actual physical computing device, and so must obey the laws of physics. This line of thought led Deutsch to propose a revision of the Church-Turing thesis, which we are calling the Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle. Just to restate it in the terms used above, the CTD Principle says that every physical process can be simulated by a universal computing device.
>Every computational process is ultimately a mathematical description of a physical process in terms of (possibly coarse-grained) state transitions. Every physical process has a mathematical description in terms of a sequence of mathematical operations such that it may be simulated by a Turing Machine. Therefore, every physical process may be simulated by a universal computing device. Again, this is a claim on physical reality not just abstract TCS, it was Deutsch who applied the CT thesis to physics. There are two fundamental theories of physics that account for nearly all experiments and observations performed to date: general relativity and the Standard Model. If we could simulate these theories by Turing machines, then the outcomes of any experiment could be deduced by a Turing machine, and then then any physical computational device could be simulated by a Turing machine. General Relativity: There was a breakthrough in numerical relativity in 2005, and we now have computer programs that do an excellent job of simulating general relativity. While we can't rigorously show that relativity satisfies the Church-Turing hypothesis, this is good evidence that it does. The Standard Model: Lattice field theory seems to do a very good job of simulating the Standard Model (albeit with enormous computation times). Again, we can't rigorously show that the Standard Model satisfies the Church-Turing hypothesis, but this is good evidence that it does. If you are talking about computing devices that can be built using any conceivable future technology, these two theories probably cover all of them. The Church–Turing thesis is about physically realizable machines. To the best of our knowledge, hypercomputation models cannot be realized in the physical world. They are a figment of our imagination. If someone would find a new law of physics which enables solving the halting problem, that would make a big fuss in the world of science. But I am not holding my breath. Bottom line, there is very strong and good evidence for the physical interpretation of the CT thesis aka CTD. >>1993002>>1993006Cockshott misses the
dialectical part of dialectical materialism
>>1993025>this is a fairly standard assumption of computer scientistsit's unfortunately common, yes. CS is full of STEMtards
>the human brain is an organic computerthis is circular reasoning. you're begging your own conclusion. a 1600's clockmaker would reason that the human body is akin to a clock mechanism. this view of the brain as a computer is no different. historical materialism do be like that
what I find especially funny about Cockshott's seeming denial that subjective experiences exist, is his seeming willingness to extend personhood to computers, but not to trans people. it is as if he entertains the notion that an assemblage of copper and fancy sand could ever be a human, but the queers are not
>INDEP Panel Conversation on Information Systems for Democratic Economic Planning
This is a recording of the panel "Realizing Visions of Postcapitalism: A Conversation about Information Systems for Democratic Economic Planning" with Alejandro Ruiz, Jessamyn West, David Zachariah, and Tomas Härdin, on 22nd October 2024.
Event description:
In this panel, we will explore some of the technical considerations of democratic economic planning (DEP). Alejandro Ruiz, Jessamyn West, David Zachariah, and Tomas Härdin will explore their work and converse about how existing organizations might be able to integrate that work to build DEP systems and postcapitalist outcomes in the real world. This panel will explore some of the infrastructure, interface, and institutional dimensions of postcapitalism, including the burning question of, “What is to be done to realize a better world?”
The beginning part of the event will be directed towards a general audience interested in DEP. The last part of the event will be directed more towards an audience of specialists who may want to engage in more technical dialogue. All questions and contributions are welcome, no matter how general or technical. We’ll do our best to make space for and translate between these two domains of conversation.
INDEP - The International Network for Democratic Economic Planning
indep.network
We are an international network of workers, students, researchers, and activists, who share the common goal of advancing a post-capitalist economic system based on democratic economic planning.
You can join INDEP as a member (as individual or as organization), subscribe to our newsletter, share news and events from the world of democratic economic planning. If you are interested in organizing an event with INDEP yourself or want to get involved otherwise feel free to reach out to us (email address is on our website indep.network).
>>1993801>the difference in complexity is quantitative rather than qualitativeno. we don't construct computers to do human stuff. we construct them to do computer stuff. we have a separate labour process for creating humans called sex. you should have it some time
>the problems the human brain can solve are in the same category as those the computer can solveno they are not. a computer cannot participate in human society. a computer cannot love. a computer does not have the lived experience of a human, and it never will
we don't know whether reality is computable. but even if it is, that doesn't mean your computation is "real"
the notion that a computer can be a human falls apart as soon as a computer manages to get a drunk guy home, at which point he will turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of the ear-piercing shriek of its cooling fans
>this is cockshotts go authorhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katerina_Kolozova<Katerina "Katarina"[1] Kolozova (/koʊˈlɒzoʊvə/; Macedonian: Катерина (Катарина) Колозова; born on October 20,1969 is a Macedonian academic, author and philosopher.>speculative realist philosopher<While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers have a shared resistance to what they interpret as philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of Immanuel Kant. What unites the … core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both "correlationism" and "philosophies of access". All four of the core thinkers within speculative realism work to overturn these forms of philosophy which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms of realism against the dominant forms of idealism in much of contemporary Continental philosophy. In After Finitude, Meillassoux defines correlationism as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which privilege the human being over other entities. For speculative realists, both ideas represent forms of anthropocentrism. Many critiquing correlationism and philosophies of access typically are critiquing the excessive association of ontology with human-centric phenomenology. New Realism, ultimately is critiquing thinking and being's association, and as such is within the same conversation. However, Ferraris approaches this problem slightly differently than Meillassoux. Ferraris structures his critique of the "thinking and being" association in relation to the areas of epistemology and ontology respectively instead of phenomenology and ontology.wait, so is cockshott a confirmed anti kantian now?
I don't see what any of this has to do with socialist economic planning, so I will keep it brief + sage for off-topic
>>1993071>a 1600's clockmaker would reason that the human body is akin to a clock mechanism. this view of the brain as a computer is no different.These statements have similar smell, but modern computing and robotics are of course more sophisticated. You may believe that where machines are at
right now is far from having human-like behavior, but holding firmly the position that this must be so forever would be committing the heap fallacy. Who would deny that at least small improvements in mimicry are happening each year. And who can see any fundamental hard limit to these improvements.
There is some fundamental stuff taught in math, physics, engineering, computing that establishes limits on what can be. It is about what can be in machines. It is also about what can be in humans. Now you think that this is that people who make such a statement see humans as very machine-like (and they often do talk like that), and that these people
for that reason come to the conclusion that the fundamental stuff applies to machines and humans. But this reason is not necessary. The fundamental stuff about what can be applies because it is the fundamental stuff. It applies to the universe.
If you really feel the need to talk more about this, make another thread for that.
>>2002188the point is that humans are subjects of human society. a dog doesn't participate in our society the same way people do. perhaps a better word is
agencybeing a materialist also doesn't mean subjective experiences don't matter. such thinking is physicalist
>>1993871>>1993090In which Cockshott projects philosophical dualism onto Althusser, who, was the prime example of an anti-dualist materialist.
Mind you, I love Cockshott's economic works (of which I'm a main translator) and I also adore Althusser's "aleatory materialism," but the two together produces a mishmash of nonsense.
Yes, I'm familiar with Ck's "How the World Works" and how in it he "utilizes" Althusser to "correct" Marx's supposed teleological view of the development of the modes of production.
That's all fair, but that doesn't negate the fact that Cockshott is a DUALIST (ideology/idealism vs. physicism/materiality) and tries to abolish said dualism by asserting that QUALIA doesn't exist, lol.
That's the biggest cope-out that can be, mind you.
>>2002225>>2002321>>2002436"denying qualia" isn't the own you think it is.
If i had to guess Cockshott subscribes to Daniel Dennett's views. Dennett is after all on his official 'materialist philosophy' reading list.
Dennett started as a compatibilist but eventually moved to denying qualia outright. For Dennett, mental states, including consciousness, are entirely the result of physical processes in the brain and the concept of qualia is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism.
Dennett suggests that our experiences aren’t as private and undeniably accurate as the concept of qualia assumes. He uses examples like color perception, where different people may experience colors differently, to argue that our perception can change over time or due to context. Thus, there's no perfectly private "redness" of red because experiences vary between individuals and situations. Qualia can't be defined in any objective or testable way. He proposes thought experiments, such as the famous "inverted spectrum" scenario, to show that it’s impossible to verify if two people experience the same “redness” when looking at a red object. If qualia can’t be communicated or verified, he argues, then they aren’t useful for understanding consciousness scientifically or philosophically.
Phenomenology, in the philosophy of mind, is therefore superseded by "heterophenomenology" i.e. phenomenology of another, not oneself. It is an explicitly third-person, anthropological/scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. This method involves analyzing people's descriptions and behaviors regarding their conscious experiences rather than attempting to access private, untestable experiences. This approach treats subjective reports as data to be analyzed rather than as direct access to a unique, subjective reality.
Dennett ultimately suggests that the feeling of “qualia” is an illusion created by the brain. He proposes that consciousness can be explained entirely through physical processes and functional states without invoking mysterious, non-physical qualities. In this view, consciousness is a complex, physical process, and the subjective qualities we think we “feel” are simply an illusion or a trick of our introspection. Understanding is merely a property that emerges from lots of distributed quasi-understanding in a large system, ex: the human brain.
This is indeed, a philosophical stance deeply grounded in anglo-analytic philosophy and logical/analytical behaviorism, itself derived from the thought of Vienna circle positivists and Dennett's own doctoral advisor, the
British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who argued that:
>"mind" is "a philosophical illusion hailing chiefly from René Descartes and sustained by logical errors and 'category mistakes' which have become habitual.Again, you can disagree with these views but to call them dualist or philosophically illiterate is just misinformed. >>2002455yes and thats the issue
the invisible hand must be made visible
this to me is the symbol of post-capiitalism; a true look at the mechanics of power rather than their ideological obscuration
>>2002462>market is visibleit isnt though. it is hidden behind uncritical institutions that never give a total account of the world system
>we need a better regulatoryes, but more intrinsically - we must feel ourselves as part of a system which we collectively reproduce
We can also ask why Cockshott tries to combine Althusser and Dennett style anglo analytic philosophy. The through-line is their rejection of subjectivity. As Althusser said in “Essays in self criticism”, “History is a process, and a process without a subject’. Both Althusser and Dennett argue that the notion of a stable, essential self is misleading: for Althusser, it’s because subjectivity is formed through ideological interpellation (early) or chance encounters (post ‘Philosophy of the encounter’); for Dennett, it’s because the self is a “center of narrative gravity” rather than an entity with intrinsic essence. Althusser’s aleatory materialism suggests that structures (like social systems) have no underlying essence and are sustained only as long as certain contingent conditions allow them to persist. Dennett would likely agree with this framing when applied to consciousness: he argues that the mind is a “user-illusion,” a stable but ultimately non-substantial structure. Just as Althusser sees social structures as fleeting and contingent, Dennett sees the self and consciousness as stable illusions—“useful fictions” generated by physical processes rather than by any substantial, intrinsic essence.
The difference is that Cockshott takes this further than thinkers like Althusser, Badiou, or others in denying the existence of the philosophical subject althogether, collapsing them into a Dennett-ist style emergentism. Of course he also references the soviet jurist Pashukanis to explain the juridical origin of the notion of a philosophical subject, which to him is merely a reflection of the feudal superstructure which has persisted in philosophical traditions.
>Monarchy was the overwhelming prevailing order in Europe until the French Republic was stably established as an exception in 1870. The language of European philosophy was formed in monarchy where all but the sovereign were legally subjects, so the term subject enters legal use and then philosophical dialogue as a synonym for persons.
<But being a subject is not a position of freedom, but, as the name implies, one of feudal subordination. To attribute it as a linguistic category … is an illusion, an a-historic and specifically bourgeois republican misinterpretation of the term. The entire legal and coercive structure of the European monarchies, real laws, currencies, armies, navies, prisons and courts were a practical demonstration of this.
>The … linguistic constitution of the subject actually comes down to no more than this insignificant pun on grammatical terminology. It pretends to give a material support to the idealist philosophical category `subject’, but on examination turns out to be just empty.
<the subject … is just the Cartesian mind or Christian soul.
>>2002473there is no fixed subject, but there is subjectivity nonetheless. what is missed here is the concept of mediation which also serves a first-principles (or metaphysical) approach to society. marx himself was metaphysical where it concerned grounding the social substance between commodities as abstract labour. you cant quantitatively measure abstract labour in-itself, but still qualify its universal (or necessary) precondition in modes of production.
the same thing can be asserted about subjectivity. there can be different subjects, but all still conform to the universal condition of selfhood.
the extreme historicism of abandoning subjectivity otherwise makes knowledge in-itself an impossibility by particularising knowledge as something inherently contemporary to each age.
also, to speak of the "objective" is to already be entered into a particular subjectivity by its mediation in language, culture, etc. nonetheless, there is the synonymity of subjectivity across cultures which is not lost in translation.
KANTIAN MARXISTS ARE PSEUDS: WHY THE CONCEPT OF “QUALIA” AND SUBJECTIVITY IS BASED ON CRYPTO-CARTESIAN AND CRYPTO-CHRISTIAN ONTIC ASSUMPTIONS
Daniel Dennett has a much better idea of cognition that german idealist pseuds!
According to Kant (a Christian non materialist), the mind has a priori structures – categories like space, time, and causality – that mediate and organize all sensory input, making coherent experience possible. Instead of assuming that knowledge conforms to the external world (as empiricists suggested), he claims that the external world as we know it must conform to the structures of our mind. In other words, our experience is shaped by how our mind actively organizes sensory input using concepts that are inherent to the mind itself. Thus, we don't derive these basic organizing principles (like space, time, and causality) from experience, they are what enable us to have coherent experiences in the first place.
Now, if the ‘mind’ is just an information-processing system like a computer, we might ask: Could a machine "learn" these categories (or others) from raw data without explicit human instruction? This would challenge Kant’s claim that these categories must be innate rather than learned through experience. Well, that already does happen.
In machine learning, neural networks “learn” without human-defined categories like "causality" or "space" explicitly programmed into them. Instead, they learn patterns from data and store their results as weights and biases, often in binary blob form which is neither readable or comprehensible by a human being. And before you say this is merely academic, automated theorem provers are decades old. As are examples of computer programs which can deduce the laws of physics by watching a pendulum swing without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry. When/if general AI is developed I’m willing to bet it won’t be because some AI scientists and programmers decided to program Kantian transcendental categories into the AI, it will be based on some other model entirely or more likely a combination of different models.
I’m sure someone will argue, well what about human minds?
Well, Daniel Dennett’s concept of the “user-illusion” resembles Kant’s idea of mediation in that both suggest we do not have direct access to the world “as it is” (the noumenon, in Kant’s terms). However, where Kant argues that we cannot know the thing-in-itself because of the mind’s mediating categories, Dennett contends that what we perceive as “reality” is a kind of user-friendly simulation produced by the brain. This illusion does not represent any essential or intrinsic structure imposed by the mind but rather serves as an adaptive approximation designed to simplify complex sensory input and make it actionable.
Our cognitive faculties are shaped by evolutionary pressures to “filter” information in a way that promotes survival and reproduction. For instance, our tendency to see objects as stable, continuous entities (a phenomenon Kant would attribute to the category of substance) is a result of evolutionary adaptation that helps us identify and interact with entities in our environment efficiently. Cognitive mediation is therefore not fixed or universal in the Kantian sense. The mind doesn’t impose logically necessary a priori structures on perception. It’s just that certain interpretive frameworks (like seeing an object as “having a purpose”) are evolutionarily advantageous and help us predict behavior in complex environments.
For Kant, the mediation of experience implies a form of inner synthesis where disparate sensory data is unified by the categories. However consciousness is not a single, unified experience but an emergent property of multiple distributed processes. This decentralized view of consciousness suggests that there is no central “place” where experience is synthesized and presented (the so-called ‘cartesian theater’ – an error which began as noted earlier, with Descartes). Rather, the brain uses parallel processing to create an impression of continuity and coherence.
Kant’s model relies on the concept of the noumenon, or “thing-in-itself,” which exists independently of our perception but is ultimately unknowable. Dennett rejects this idea. From his perspective, the concept of the noumenon is unnecessary because our experience is entirely explainable through physical processes and adaptive mechanisms. He would argue that there is no need for an unknowable “real” world behind our perception, as our evolved cognitive structures provide us with all the tools we need to operate successfully within the world we experience.
To conclude, we don’t need a metaphysical basis for knowledge any more than we need a metaphysical subject. Insomuch as mediating cognitive structures in the human mind exist at all they are the result of evolutionary processes and pragmatic adaptions. There is no need for such things as ‘Mind’ in the Cartesian sense, Kantian transcendental categories or noumenon. All aspects of human experience, including its mediated qualities, can be understood through the lens of naturalistic, scientific processes without appealing to transcendental structure. Furthermore, there is also no evidence that even this naturalistic/physicalist mediation is universal since as with the previous example of machine learning and AI, cognition with different (or possibly no) mediating structures is also possible.
Althusser was wise to question Hegel, but to really get to the bottom of things we must problematize not only Hegel, but Kant as well.
>>2003398Not quite, I don't think dialectical logic is based not accepting the law of non-contradiction as such
Rather, if you look at Aristotle's conditions on the law of non-contradiction (from memory, its that A&~A is false when the terms have a stable meaning, A ~A take place at the same time, etc.)
So for example, dialectical logic deals can deal with the case where A & ~A are taking place at different times.
Eg. A: I am eating soup.
If we include time A&~A is not necessarily false, given the case where I am eating soup at time t & I am not eating soup at time t+x, x=\=0.
In fact, it may happen that it is the very fact that I am eating soup at time t that leads me go not eating soup at time t+x (because I am full of soup for example).
I think this kind of thinking makes a lot sense of things like the negation of the negation not being equivalent to the original statement, because what is being negated is actually something like a composite or very concrete predicate (eg. I am eating a sandwich at time t; I am not walking at time t+1 as I am taking a breath; I am not taking a breath at time t+2 nor eating a sandwich because I am drinking a soda)
>>1993002What's cockshott's problem with free will? It's not even something relevant to economics.
Like Im willing to give you commies everything, but the whole "no free will" is the most NPC bullshit I ever came across.
>>2010753lol really, THAT's your problem? out of everything? Free will is easily bullshit if you're a physicalist/materialist. Its literally a leftover from christianity. The whole idea of free will was to explain why evil exists if there's an all powerful all good God. Its because you have a 'choice' to commit evil. If you think that a human being has an eternal soul it makes sense but otherwise no.
>>2010840 edits a fedora on cockshott, but he is basically right. If the only thing that exists is matter or 'matter in motion' then human thought comes from a human brain. Physics determines what happens by causality or quantum randomness. In order to believe in free will you'd have to explain why human brain cells, out of all the other collections of matter in the universe, somehow have the ability to override causality and go against it and do what it wasn't suppose to do or something. And thats when you get into the schizo rationalizations like Penrose's idea of quantum microtubules in the brain or whatever.
Basically, there is no way to save free will without resorting to reinventing cartesian dualism, hyper-computational physical forces, or some other really esoteric shit (at least from a scientific point of view).
>>2010840Did he actually say that? If he did kek.
>>2010878>If you think that a human being has an eternal soul it makes sense but otherwise no.I have a materialist outlook on things, which is why I cannot make judgement on "souls" or what not. I only made a statement about free will which I can only prove exists in me. That is, I cannot prove someone else has free will, but I'm telling you from my experience, I have free will. I don't have free will when I'm dreaming (sleeping), but I have a modicum of experience (awareness) that I am assuming is what animals have, but then again, It's just a hypothetical since I have not studied it.
>If the only thing that exists is matter or 'matter in motion' then human thought comes from a human brain.What is "matter" by our colloquial understanding of it, is not the only thing that exists? Again, as a materialist, I only focus on that which can be interacted with, or interacts with what is material. I don't know what exists beyond (if it even does), but I don't make conclusive statements on those.
>Basically, there is no way to save free will without resorting to reinventing cartesian dualism, hyper-computational physical forces, or some other really esoteric shit (at least from a scientific point of view).Does everything have to be reduced to our current scientific understanding which is mostly consensus based anyway? What if Descartes was right? What if a new scientific paradigm (as has happened in the past) changes our perception of material reality? What if Einstein, Bohr and Max Born are discredited in the future along with quantum physics like Aristotle's theory of matter? I don't need a peer-revYOOd paper to tell me I am a being, I am aware that I am a being and that I make/not make choices. I still don't understand why most communists have this hang-up over free will as if they don't have countless examples of their compatriots clearly making choices that show the existence of agency and not a result of blind reaction to external stimuli.
>>2010901Proof requires coherent reference and derivation from already established axioms. Those axioms are what is assumed to be true a priori. You can have relative proof via some system, but you cannot have absolute universal proof. Such is the blessing/curse of reality.
>>1985242Humans are machines - "natural machines", but there is nothing existentially special about humans or subjectivity. That is something different from saying "the mathematical work of Godel is irrelevant because humans are computers and computers are human". Any restriction of computation in computers applies just as much to human faculties, thought, and operations.
The problem with lazy comparisons is that humans were not built to be computers or reduced easily to such. If you did operationalize everything a human body did, you are dealing with a very different construct with billions of cells, that adapted to its environment throughout its lifetime and had parents doing likewise, stretching back countless generations. Computers are specifically engineered to do one thing - rote calculations - and their history is extraneous to the task. Humans, whether they like it or not, are stuck with their faculties, and certainly they engage in market activity and planning as if their actions were a going concern and morally valued by them. You could make a computer which is functionally like a human with remarkable accuracy, which asks the same questions we do about economics and acts as an economic, rational agent.
Biggest problem with planning is that usually, the economic plans suck donkey balls, and everyone who has this plan pushed on them knows it. If these plans were scrutinized by any public inquiry, we'd see that the managerial, computational strata is largely unnecessary and can be trivialized in any era. That was never the problem. The problem is that a few assholes insisted we have to respect their scams because they hold a position of authority over us and society, and society was claimed by them as their monopoly. You're always going to have this fear with any large institution, for reasons which cannot be solved with any planning - if you believe human avarice and moral foulness is natural and eternal and necessary for economic life to continue. If you don't, then you're asking a very different question. Managing resource inflows and outflows is trivial in any era - humans would not have managed any civilization is computation was the intractable problem. There are limits to computation - rulers do not have immediate access to all information in their domain, and this has been a persistent weakness of states up to today. Generally, though, the rulers have sufficient knowledge of what humans do in those domains, and has every right to collect that information. Nothing about the universe requires the state or its officers to pretend they're blind and retarded, which has always been the Germanic conceit. It's not as if we're too stupid to see what is being done in front of our faces.
>>2011668>why would someone voluntarily choose>chooseYou answered it anon. Your choice of language betrays you.
>>2011327>thats not really materialism?Materialism is dependent on our existing knowledge, technical capabilities and interaction with the material world (and also conceptual framework of understanding ie. caloric vs atomic). At the present, we can confirm we do not fully know the material world because we always find out something new that forces readjustment in conceptualization. If you lock in materialism to your current understanding of the world then you will not progress. You need to make space for the unknown with an objective to figure it out in the future (if possible). Once it becomes known (quantified/categorized), then it is factored into any future materialist analysis.
>>2035942I'd rather read the actual papers (if they exist) for these panels:
https://www.indep.network/indep-organising-panels-at-21st-historical-materialism-conference/Anybody got any of those?
These podcasters sound like they are high. Not great, but if you want to listen,
skip to 28:00. Everything before that is about the burgerstan prez election.
44:35 They talk about how pure ex post VS pure ex ante position is bogus, it's obviously going to be a mix. I have no idea who is supposed to hold on to a pure extreme here. They seem to believe that Parecon is pure ex ante and that everybody in Parecon world MUST provide a consumption list in advance and stick to that 100 %, but as far as I know this is not so.
At
57:00 they briefly and dismissively talk about using multiple metrics and multiple vouchers instead of using labor time. We have gone through the problems of multi-voucher systems in an older cybernetics thread:
https://archive.is/xBFYY (relevant thread section starts at "The more voucher types we use…").
>>2044076the talks will be released. it's probably taking some time because there were a lot of them
>>2053037looking forward to it
>>2044076> they briefly and dismissively talk about using multiple metrics and multiple vouchers instead of using labor time. We have gone through the problems of multi-voucher systems in an older cybernetics thread:Transitionally can't multiple vouchers run concurrently until advanced enough?
People are not going to give up the concept of money so soon, that's my worry.
>>2054455Long term poster here, honest question, are labour vouchers even neccecary anymore?
Aside from the benefit of making it clear things are made with labour and how expensive something is to produce vs actual cost and clear view of your wage and taxes. We don't actually need the restriction on transference or things like expiration with modern monetary systems. If your entire currency is already digital, and all transactions flow through your central banking system, you can just check for fraud and law breaking at the end instead of restricting at the front. That way parents and grandparents can still give money to their kids, or people can still buy their friends rounds and pay them back later.
>>2054455Tom O'Brien is extremely against anything that isn't concrete labour time, as opposed to social labour time. but history has many examples of non-labour means of payment, for example WW2 era ration cards. locking oneself into any one particular solution is undialectical tbh
>>2054501>Long term poster here, honest question, are labour vouchers even neccecary anymore?they're one tool in the toolbox. tbh they create their own set of problems, as pointed out by Marx in Gothakritik, as as pointed out in these threads many times. one example is that they make it impossible to gift vouchers, as you say yourself:
>That way parents and grandparents can still give money to their kids, or people can still buy their friends rounds and pay them back later.the main purpose of labour vouchers is to make the private hiring of labour power impossible. but there are other methods to achieve this, for example legislation. in the long term we'd hope to make a system where such hiring isn't attractive in the first place. but that may take decades or even centuries
>>2055058There's certainly an underlying need of maintaining flexible principles. The core can remain firm but the parts on the circumference must know how to move around and adapt to the external conditions, which are many. That's why just pulling the old DK and hoping to make it work out of the box on any society regardless of the ongoing troubles, acquired changes, social upheavals, current values, or even geographical, political or demographic limits is definitely futile. And on the other hand, being way too supple and lenient to some radical forces has created a quagmire that is almost impossible to get out of. Example, immigration. It is very obvious that in some countries or regions the cultural modifications have allowed a very ancient form of society to take root, it erases the weaknesses of the modern industrial world and replaces them with a whole code of morals that nothing coming from the far left or the far right can challenge. So we're facing a real problem here because while a fight against racism is laudable, being totally blind to races and external cultures massively implanted by capitalists, so that they could protect themselves at first, has now created such a situation where dialectics are hopelessly outranked. I don't really appreciate the left's drift towards cultural battles that took us away from the original opposition to capital because it made us defend a group that first posited itself as oppressed while it was nothing of the sort but merely growing in power from a little seed, a force that has even less intentions to move once in place, which is Islam, and which definitely doesn't care about any kind of international revolution. The reason is so simple: you cannot argue with Islam. The union of forces of labor should have been maintained on the basis of being cautious of third or fourth gregarious external forces defending their own shrewd interests. A cultural assimilation within the existing liberal democratic system was necessary but was progressively abandoned for the sake of easiness in the name of a fight against racism and fascism. Yet we now found ourselves with this very element that is almost racist, definitely very closed on its culture, use by wealthy oligarchic families and certainly just as oppressive. What an accomplishment! In other words, letting the Levant's issues being imported into First World countries has now totally backfired.
>>2054501>… are labour vouchers even neccecary anymore?imo yes, if only in the same way as cash is still "neccecary" i.e. Physical backup for when tech shits the bed. I've actually trialed a crude CiK version with some local orgs using defunct cheques and a hole punch with initial method.
>>2054521I've often proposed that in my country, just as we have Expiry Dates and Best Before labels on commodities, we should also include the Total Kilograms of Carbon and Gross Human Hours (both averaged out per unit) involved in production.
That way consumers would see three or four things:
<Does this thing actually expire, and when is it unsafe to consume/use.<When does the producer and by extent the distributor no longer take responsibility for the qualitative, but still safe, changes.<How much environmental impact did this thing have (including it's label, shipping, storage, etc.)<How many natural person hours went into this thing to create it (including the human hours that went into the machine, the extraction of the raw materials to create it, etc.).I'd compromise by settling for these "From Pont of Production" which would egregiously cut out a lot of the energy and human labor involved (e.g. R&D, marketing designs drafts, etc.).
How would I determine what is Socially Neccercary Labor I have no idea, because it is absolutely true in my mind that purely "hours of work" removed from the effort/output is unpalatable to the public because "Then we all just get the same?!?".
I always try to think:
>"If I was a corporate shill whose income depended on finding loopholes and pushing for them, e.g. Include carbon and human labour in the food but not the wrapper and transport, how would I do it so I get a bonus?"Then I think:
>"If I was a government that couldn't get the corporate dick out of my ass and mouth, what's the 80:20 impact I can practicably enforce, and it must be enforced otherwise there's no point, on corporates to get this over the line and in effect asap?"/blog
>>2055148Because he releases them for free a few months later.
Either wait for it, or consider getting your local library to get one.
Dickblast is apparently starting to get the early signs of Alzeimers so helping a 75 year old financially a bit (ideally directly and not through middlemen) isn't a bad thing imo
I'm all for FLOS and Piracy, but I'm a cuck and still buy things from people I support (usually after getting the free version to see if it's worth it).
/ramble
>>2055154i'd pay if i had the money for it, but i don't.
>Dickblast is apparently starting to get the early signs of Alzeimersis it true? that's damn sad
>>2055151>Physical backup for when tech shits the bedwe're not short for computational devices. what might happen is that the Internet goes down, or becomes sufficiently crippled. there already are store-and-forward networks that are tolerant to intermittent connections. worst case you can resort to sneakernet
if there are literally zero computational devices around, not even 30+ year old ones, then I find it hard to imagine what kind of scenario we'd be in. even in an atomic war you'd still have 'puters around. we have landfills full of them
>I've often proposed that in my country, just as we have Expiry Dates and Best Before labels on commodities, we should also include the Total Kilograms of Carbon and Gross Human Hours (both averaged out per unit) involved in production.yes that could fill a useful didactic purpose. in fact many companies do print the (supposed) amount of embodied carbon on their commodities as a greenwashing tactic. the EU is working on something much more sophisticated than what you describe with its product passport system
>How would I determine what is Socially Neccercary Labor I have no idea, because it is absolutely true in my mind that purely "hours of work" removed from the effort/output is unpalatable to the public because "Then we all just get the same?!?".in Marx SNLT is just average labour (in an exchange economy blah blah blah), roughly equivalent to piece wages. that doesn't mean we'd pay people piece wages. but we also can't pay them according to the amount of concrete labour, in cases where areas with radically different levels of development are part of the same system. in such a situation there simply isn't enough value to go around, without drastically lowering quality of life in other parts of the system. the latter is likely to be a hard sell politically. you also need a surplus to invest in MoPs
that said, in a geographical area with a somewhat uniform value of labour power power paying everyone the same is not a bad idea. whenever you pay people differently this will bias some industries away from investments. we could pay people for getting educated. with differential wages you by definition are underpaying some people. what is to be the criteria for such underpayment? whatever industry it is, it is likely to receive less investment as a result
>>2055154>Dickblast is apparently starting to get the early signs of AlzeimersDickblast-san, no!
>>2055465>worst case you can resort to sneakernetAnd radio frequencies too.
>>2055465>product passport systemIntreguing, have a source for that please? If it's better than what I'd otherwise propose, I'd prefer to implement that.
>>2055465>we could pay people for getting educated.1000%, I've often advocated that (again locally in my country) that learning is work, ergo education should unquestioningly be paid national full-time minimum wage (but I'd settle for 80% of).
Then again, I also believe a Negative Income Tax (funded in part by a progressive Unimproved Land Value Tax) method is superior welfare system until such a time it is uneeded.
>>2055502>>2055465paying students for education is gonna be dismissed as fuekking studemt entitlement.
Its nit a bad idea though I would expand on that.
Spring semesters should deficated to community service.
Meaning, the school days will be doing wrk around the community from March to mid-June, six hours a day, four days a week.
Fridays off.
As for the Internet in case of a nuclear war, do we have backup servers?
Im sure that the feds do record things on paper still as backup.
>>2057280>paying students for education is gonna be dismissed as fuekking studemt entitlement.we do it all the time. it's called a stipend. we can qualify payment on passing grades
>As for the Internet in case of a nuclear war, do we have backup servers?we can design backup systems that survive nuclear war yes
>>2061587Kosygin-sama
blyat
>>2080902yeah he made a video a while back talking about value. this one:
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=8Z2LCNAVfMwhe tries to make the case that even though there is plenty of empirical evidence for the LTV, that doesn't mean it's true. he's fond of citing Bichler and Nitzan who point out that the correlation presented by Cockshott and others could be spurious. but neither BN nor UE propose any causal theory of their own, only pedantry
the blog post Cockshott is replying to is here:
https://unlearnecon.medium.com/astonishingly-poor-empirics-cockshott-edition-98223ccfcdf2in it UE rejects the notion that he should explain what this third supposed factor is that constitutes BN's "industry size". the point about covariance is good though. just things in isolation amounts to only evaluating the diagonal elements of the covariance matrix
>>2082711I've read his book and it makes perfect sense to me.
That's enough for me to support him.
>>2088354based anon
you're doing to lords work
>>2088354more seriously this just sounds like labour money. the
arbeitzeitrechnung people are on about roughly the same thing, and it shares the same issues. still, it can serve a didactic purpose, namely teaching people that money ≃ labour time
>>2080929UE got BTFO by guys much younger than cockshott like Victor Magarino and some other guy whose name I forgot.
The stupidest part of the UE video on value was his retarded speaker analogy.
>>2088622Money can deflate, money can inflate. The geometric intuition of people tells them that money that neither inflates nor deflates is in the middle, in proper balance, or to use another word: neutral. But physical stuff rusts. Physical stuff needs to be taken care of. So how could eternal money that has no storage cost be a neutral representative of real wealth?
Over a hundred years ago, Silvio Gesell argued something like that and proposed a "more natural" currency with something like a holding fee. For a bill of that currency to remain valid past a set date, you need to get a stamp to put on that bill (and another stamp for a later date).
It's kinda like inflation, kinda not. You don't see prices
in general going up like with inflation. Also, it makes lending money among friends go more smoothly, because it's a taboo to ask for interest between friends, and in this rusting-money system you as the creditor already benefit just by getting the same amount back without any interest paid on top, because the other guy paid the fee to keep the bill valid for you.
Nowadays Gesell's alternative money is also associated with a hyper-localist outlook because these currency experiments are restricted to small regions, but as far as I know that's just how things have turned out and it's not something he advocated for.
>>2088734>le depreciating moneyDavid Harvey is pushing the same meme. it can be circumvented with commodity money like gold. Porky always finds a way
the issue isn't the medium of exchange, but that we have a market economy in the first place
>>2089067 I think that for that part the best proposal I have read is from Stafford Beer in Platform for Change because in there he proposes how to measure eudemony directly ( the well-being of people) and this could be used for the reward sub-system homeostasis for incentive. Innovation would depend on the freedom to use resources there would have to be a degree of allocation to make sure it is or will be there .In my opinion you need the whole package from him ( VSM and cybersyn,etc) given the law of requisite variety which Cockshott never mentions.
I'm working on a simulator of Cybersyn at the moment by the way:
https://vrclist.com/world/624926 >>2089063>it can be circumvented with commodity money like gold.Anything that depreciates much can be "circumvented" by something that depreciates less (I would rather hoard wealth in land than in bottles of milk), but there are limits to that. Several currencies are in existence and it's simply not the case that the least inflationary currency somehow wins the competition and the loser currencies disappear. Why don't the other currencies disappear. Is it because people are somehow not informed about inflation and exchange rates, is it because they have delusions about this or that currency becoming more stable in the future. No. State governments have the regional monopoly on violence. States can expropriate you and put you in prison. States can give you the choice between being expropriated and paying a tax instead. This makes the state's currency useful, even if it is highly inflationary.
Also consider: To obtain something somebody else owns, it is not enough that you want it, it's also necessary that they are willing to part with it. So between more and less inflationary payment methods available, it is not necessarily the one that is depreciating the least that is circulating the most.
>>2089067Paraphrasing an idea from an older /cyber/ thread: Three rules plus one for rewarding improvements.
Rule 1: There must be an estimate of what the size of an improvement is, not just that there is an improvement. Otherwise people have an incentive to delay and split up a big improvement into a series of smaller improvements.
Rule 2: The reward size itself must be proportional to improvement size and there cannot be a progressive tax on income from such rewards. Otherwise people have an incentive to delay and split up a big improvement into a series of smaller improvements.
Rule 3: Consumption points
may have expiration dates, but such expiration dates cannot exist for income from improvement rewards. Otherwise people have an incentive to delay and split up a big improvement into a series of smaller improvements.
Rule 0: A mediocre reward system can be worse than having none at all, because it is not a given whether people are in a cooperative or egotistical mindset, the environment is pulling on them.
Yes, I repeated myself a bit. The point is: We should do exactly this. Otherwise people have an incentive to delay and split up a big improvement into a series of smaller improvements.
This needs a pompous name. I propose
Innovation Blast Processing(TM). Whenever somebody talks shit about socialism, just roll your eyes and tell them that, ahem, we have
Innovation Blast Processing now, without explaining what it means.
What's up with the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) things
https://situational-awareness.ai/ ? Anyone know about it and what's the pros and cons for us?
>>2088399>arbeitzeitrechnung <IDAinteresting… I'll check out their stuff too. Thanks. If it's like what I'm trying I'll be chuffed as it means much smarter people are already doing it, so I'm on
the a right track!
>>2092845>https://arbeitszeit.noblogs.org/en-GB/post/2023/09/10/towards-an-old-socialism/hmmmm>>2092854>What's the point of this?See
>>2089723 >>2088399If it works, then two things will happen:
A local non-governmental currency will provide poorer people with a means of accessing higher quality goods than was possible before (an immediate QoL improvement thus "proving" "Socialism" can get real outcomes). This builds credibility and legitimacy.
Then, with time and effort, it educates a whole community that $ =/= labour (it "decouples") which opens their concienouness to moving even further away from $ and with coaxing towards a preliminary labour-voucher/certificate like system in a tangible way (notably that 'The Government' is actively removed from the equation and thus certain constraints are dissolved).
It's not perfect, but based on the work myself and others have put in we're hoping to get results from it even if it fails as an experiment. Can't read books all day, have to talk to people and
do stuff.
>>2092878>https://arbeitszeit.noblogs.org/en-GB/post/2023/09/10/towards-an-old-socialism/leftcom infantilism strikes again, why are they so obsessed with descentralization even when there's no gain at all?
>Why not let the workers in the plants record their labour-time themselves? Pen and paper would have sufficed. But Cockshott and Cottrell do not even consider such an idea.honestly laughable.
all things considered though, I hope they find some success, but I just know they'll hit a wall if they continue down this path
>>2092878>https://arbeitszeit.noblogs.org/en-GB/post/2023/09/10/towards-an-old-socialism/Here's a 2023 post about it in German:
Es gibt ein deutschsprachiges Blog pro Arbeitszeitrechnung. Natürlich nur echt intellektuell und deutsch mit einer Hallenbadfüllung an sektiererischem Rumgewichse. Hier werden die Ideen von Cockshott, Cottrell, Dunkhase, Dapprich "analysiert":
https://arbeitszeit.noblogs.org/post/2023/08/28/arbeitszeitrechnung-von-oben/<Dabei ist eine Wirtschaft, die mit Geld kalkuliert, gar nicht imstande, Arbeitswerte – hier im Sinne von Arbeitszeiten – exakt zu erfassen.Könnte schwören zu jedem Schichtstart und zu jedem Schichtende stehe ich vor einer Stechuhr, aber was weiß ich, vielleicht habe ich das ja nur geträumt. Während der Schicht werden Arbeitsabläufe erfasst. Manager machen manchmal auch die stupidesten Tätigkeiten mit um zu checken, wie lange dies oder das dauert und wo es viel Leerlauf gibt. Sie wuseln rum und gucken mal hier, mal da rein und ohne Vorankündigung. Wenn sie doch nur richtig marxistisch-intellektuell geschult worden wären wie diese Blogger hier und wüssten, dass sie die Arbeitszeiten nicht erfassen können!
<Wie die GIK in ihren Grundprinzipien kommunistischer Produktion und Verteilung klar erkannte, muss, wenn alle Arbeitsprodukte einen Wert besitzen, auch die Arbeitskraft einen Wert haben und allein dieser bestimmt den Anteil der Produzenten am Konsum.Zeitmessung im Produktionsprozess ist eine Sache. Was Leute erhalten, kommt aus dem gemeinsam produzierten Haufen an Dingen und kann durchaus abweichen (zum Beispiel ein Zuschlag für Leute, die gesundheitsbedingt nur wenige Stunden die Woche arbeiten können). Solche Zuschläge müssen nicht in Produktpreise eines einzelnen Betriebes reingeprügelt werden, denn der einzelne Betrieb ist dafür nicht verantwortlich, solche Zuschläge werden von der Allgemeinheit getragen.
C & C machen den Vorschlag in TANS, unterschiedlich intensive Arbeit (nix zu tun mit Qualifikation) unterschiedlich zu belohnen. Dazu wird viel gemotzt hier und natürlich immer das Schlimmste vermutet von wegen Konkurrenzdruck und Fremdherrschaft und so, dabei war das gerade mal eine Seite und nicht weiter entwickelt. Ob sowas gut oder schlecht funzt, hängt von den Details ab: Wie groß ist der Unterschied, gibt es vielleicht ein Unterschiedsmaximum was durch lokalen Entscheid nochmal gestutzt werden kann? Vor allem: WER macht die Bewertung der Arbeiter? Das kann doch auch über ausgeloste Komittees entschieden werden und wie viel elitäre Fremdherrschaft wäre das dann.
<Einfacher wäre es gewesen, man hätte die Arbeiter*innen in den Betrieben ihre Arbeitszeit selbst erfassen lassen. Dafür hätten Stift und Zettel ausgereicht.… Dann können die aber auch bescheißen ohne Ende. Es ist wichtig, dass die Idee von der Autonomie des einzelnen Betriebes gebrochen wird, die ja immer nur eine Scheinautonomie sein kann wegen notwendigen Inputs von anderen Betrieben. Die Produktionsmittel werden als ganzes der Gesellschaft gehören, nicht das einzelne Schiff den Matrosen darauf.
<Um nämlich Angebots- und Nachfrageüberhängen entgegenzusteuern, soll der Staat Gleichgewichtspreise festlegen, die von den „Arbeitswerten“ abweichen.Sind keine Gleichgewichtspreise. Gleichgewichtspreis wäre der Arbeitswertpreis. Ziel ist die Bereitstellung der Menge, die Leute beim Arbeitswertpreis haben wollen. Es wäre Zauberei diese immer genau zu wissen UND ohne Verzögerung bereitstellen zu können, darum diese Ausnahme.
<Was ist das, wenn nicht staatlich gelenkte Marktwirtschaft, computergestützte Marktsimulation?Die Alternative: Manche Dinge verschimmeln lassen und bei anderen Dingen manchen Leuten verbieten, die zu nehmen, obwohl sie den fixen Preis zahlen könnten. Warum das besser sein soll bleibt geheim.
<Ins Staunen wird man auch versetzt, wenn Cockshott und Cottrell auf der Notwendigkeit von Pachtzahlungen bestehen (…) Die Arbeitszeitrechnung wird hier durch unzählige staatliche Regularien derart ausgehöhlt, dass man sich fragt, was davon noch übrig bleibt (…) In Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis kommt es Cockshott und Cottrell folgerichtig kaum noch darauf an, ob nun die Geld- oder die Arbeitszeitrechnung das Wahre ist. Hier sprechen sie von der Arbeitszeitrechnung nur noch als möglichem Verfahren. Makroökonomische Steuerung scheint ihnen wichtiger zu sein als die Belange der Produzent*innen.Ja mir als dummer Prolet ist natürlich scheißegal, ob Wohnraum verschwendet wird oder ob ich im Sommer totgekocht werde. Perfekt austarierte Zeitautismuspreise und jedes Jahr nach Malle, mehr brauch ich nicht zum Glück und weiter kann ich auch gar nicht denken.
<Das Rätesystem – bei der GIK für die Arbeitszeitrechnung unerlässlich – verwerfen Cockshott und Cottrell mit dem Argument, es müsse notwendig zur Einparteiendiktatur oder zum Parlamentarismus führen. Woher sie diese Gewissheit nehmen, bleibt unklar.Der gleiche Effekt wie bei Gerrymandering, und das wiederholt auf jeder Delegationsebene.
<Letztlich schwebt Cockschott und Cottrell bloß ein mit Kybernetik und Partizipation aufgemotzter Sowjetstaat vor.Ist doch gut :P
>>2092878>A local non-governmental currency will provide poorer people with a means of accessing higher quality goods than was possible beforehow? the law of value still applies
>notably that 'The Government' is actively removed from the equation and thus certain constraints are dissolved<goes into the cybernetics thread<doesn't realize "cybernetics" and "government" are synonymouslol
>>2092918>>Why not let the workers in the plants record their labour-time themselves? Pen and paper would have sufficed. But Cockshott and Cottrell do not even consider such an idea.>honestly laughable.tbf you can account for
concrete labour using pen&paper.
social labour less so
>>2093384Not to be pedantic, but I'd say cybernetics is
governance rather than
a 'government'. The administration of things vs the administration as institution.
>>2092883Working on it, but I'm not smart enough to give a satisfactory answer. It'll either be correlating the face value with hours of human input, or getting the mutual bank to open a "time bank" part.
The main thing is we're learning as we go, basically taking feedback from the community while trying to also get them even just questioning pre-held beliefs.
We're, in that sense, at step zero… The fact it's been taken up
at all I think bodes well.
>>2092918Some success is what I'm hoping for. Even if it's a deadend, there'll be learning.
I'm just tired of bookclubs. Had to at least
try to put stuff into action, and so far at least some of the community and farmers market stalls are behind it.
Selling the ideas and framing them in a non-scary way I think is what's really helped. No jargon, just open enquiry.
>>2092883>Since it's not a labor voucher and it's essentially just money, how will this be acomplished exactly?Oh you meant as in how do they make it more affordable?
The tl;dr is the produced is priced differently from $ and is on the whole lower. So more bang for buck by using this rather than normal $.
>>2093384>tbf you can account for concrete labour using pen&paper.People don't even do that reliably when it's their own concrete work, like people whose job is to inspect building safety simply lying about where they are:
https://swindledpodcast.com/podcast/99-the-skywalks/(Relevant bit is 52 minutes in, at least in the version I got. Mind you this podcast comes with ads which might be different in your region, so I can't give you a perfect timestamp.) At least very crude and obvious forms of faking work like that can be reigned in with ID badges, cameras, and surprise checks.
We have been through that in older threads but it bears repeating that we need to differentiate between different uses of time reports, which create stronger and weaker incentives to bullshit. It's far less dangerous to take self-reported times with little checking for the purpose of determining output price averaged from these reports than for determining the individual remuneration.
>>2094592>The GIC people are opposedWere opposed, that group was almost a century ago. If you mean the German IDA guys and the Alpha2Omega podcasters as GIC's offspring of sorts, yeah it looks like that for the former, unsure about the latter.
(I don't know why some Marxists of all people have such a hard time following a description of various systems running simultaneously that evaluate components differently and yet sum to the same aggregates.) A2O promised a book to improve over TANS for this year, but it looks like they haven't published it yet.
>>2095578>replying to a bad-faith post with a buzzwordWe will pay people for improvements as described in
>>2092828 you idiots. And algedonics is just quick and rudimentary feedback about being happy or sad.
>>2095604>If you mean the German IDA guys and the Alpha2Omega podcasters as GIC's offspring of sorts, yeah it looks like that for the former, unsure about the latter.the latter also appear to say the same thing. I think it is much too premature to say that we should always have fixed hourly wages and never piece wages. or no wages at all for that matter. or universal income. it'll be interesting to see how they justify it in the book
paying people the same for shoddy work also seems like it would squander resources. Cockshott has pointed out that Indian steelworkers are far less productive than Yankee steelworkers. the same applies across all industries. it seems that neither group has given the issue of unequal development much thought, or to any other of the premises now in existence tbqh
>We will pay people for improvements>We willyou can't make statements like this about a system that hasn't been put into place yet. I could just as well say
we won't, and supply a bunch of reasons why. academia does not work on any kind of incentive system to take just one example. there's no reason at all to assume people wouldn't innovate in other contexts. I'm highly skeptical of giving people treats for them to do their jobs
>>2097287you apply for grants, and your reward for a successful project is recognition. and maybe more grants. people don't go into academia to make money
t. research engineer
the oompa loompas of science >>2098737>do a book review and post some excerptsthanks m8
Starting 2025 of with some new Cock would be great.
>>2098737less talking more scanning
>>2098779>>2098798thanks breh
>>2098798>>2098918Why are these in different file sizes?
5.99 MB vs 5.69 MB
>>2098918>>2098798>>2098843>To maintain the core focus on the development of materialism in philosophy and natural philosophy, we have made a number of intentional omissions. In particular, we do not address the ‘big’ philosophical questions: where do we come from; why are we here; why are we like this; where are we going?>We do not consider other world views, other than where they directly contributed to or hindered materialism. In particular, overall we say little about belief or religion. Finally, we do not consider the moral, ethical, social or immediate political consequences of the materialism we elaborate. Perhaps the most significant omission is that of the nature of consciousness. Our rejection of idealism necessarily leads us to situate consciousness as a property of material systems, whether or not human.Megabased. I can read this without challenging my faith.
DEUS VULT
>>2111824not an argument man…
<In fact – and as Cockshott knows full well – the only way to ‘know’ labour values is the neoclassical way: by revelation. Whereas neoclassicists assume that prices reveal utils, Marxists assume that prices reveal socially necessary abstract labour time. And that is it.<As they stand, the quantities of utils and labour values exist not as empirical observations, but as religious-like visions. They emerge not from open-ended research and scientific exploration, but from circular rituals that make them true by definition.tbh it's true, it's as unfalsifiable as the subjective theory of value
After skimming that web page which includes a passage quoted from pages 92-97 from Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power (2009), let me respond.
Nitzan and Bichler's critique is moronic and vulgar, and here's why.
Empirics aside, if you actually boil it down, their critique is that (certain) abstractions aren't real because they aren't directly observable. What N&B are missing is that they literally don't believe in abstract labor. They're sort of anti-value theorists in that they think value theory is impossible (either Marxian or Neoclassical). This is really just a philosophical argument posing as an empirical one. The critique hinges on the ontological and epistemological status of abstractions, specifically the concept of abstract labor in Marxist theory.
They're right to note that without abstract labor as a real abstraction, Marxian value theory collapses, because there is no measurable or material basis for value production and the link between labor time and prices becomes untenable. But this isn't the dunk they think it is.
If you reject abstract labor, by extension, you reject value theory. Marx’s point that such abstractions are real precisely because they operate as socially embedded realities in capitalist systems. Abstract labor is a real abstraction. Real abstractions are abstractions that arise not merely as mental constructs but as material and social realities within specific historical contexts, especially in capitalist societies. They are "real" because they are embedded in the actual practices, institutions, and relations of production, not just in thought.
Abstract labor is a dialectical category because it arises from the concrete diversity of human labor but negates that diversity by reducing it to a single, measurable abstraction. At the same time, this abstraction organizes and dominates the concrete activities of production and exchange in capitalism.
If you deny the ontic validity of real abstractions of course you will reject value theory, but thats not an "own".
>>2111817>Capital as Powerreactionary drivel
>>2111829falsifiability is not science. pooper belongs in the trash
>>2113402no! noooooo!
>>2113397>eco-authoritarian regimeBASED
I wanna post this schizo pic of a terminator park ranger robot pointing a gun at the viewer defending the 'rewilding zone - no humans 500 miles' but cant find it, it went hard as fuck
>>2113411you WILL be taken care of by loving machines and you WILL like it
reminds me of this existential comic:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/139cute win3.1 poner
>>2112126So basically because they don't think it's real (physical) they think it's bunk?
But yet we know that it
is real (circularly socially emergent) because, well,
it's literally observable?
>>2113397>>2113389INDEP is garbage, they are a bunch of anti marxist anarcho-liberals who uncritically reproduce Steedman's critique of the LTV and hayeks arguments against central planning.
We need an explicitly marxist version of INDEP that rejects parecon nonsense.
>>2115795>INDEP is garbageThere are no other orgs with
any reach that genuinely try to do cybernetics and planning.
If any do exist, they're irrelevent.
Also INDEP has young people in it, that's
'fucking essential.
I propose young blood transfusions be given to dickblast to stave of his encroaching alzeimers.
>>2115795who are you talking about specifically? INDEP is more than once person
I've noticed the "democracy" part of democratic planning brings in shitlibs. we should probably drop it. the word "planning" likewise seems to confuse people. perhaps we should just say "economic cybernetics"?
>>2127659Just don't let the radlibs take over. The "planning" part probably keeps enough away, while the "democracy" part keeps the dogmatic weirdos out imo.
It's goinf to be cybernetic/VSM-esk anyway, the PARECON folks will perhaps get some marginal things at most.
>>2128342yeah I know. it's just annoying is all. an endless parade of liberals going "uhm do u really want computers to decide for people?" who then go on to propose the same old petty bourgeois nonsense they always do. it's fascinating how many self-described socialists are afraid of actually socializing production. even MLs still cling to national boundaries rather than amalgamating all production into one single thing, like a katamari
na naaa na na na na na na na>>2128186tbh the VSM is just vibes, as has been elaborated on ITT. you're better off reading actual control theory and building a few control systems so you know what the hell cybernetics is about
>>2128440The Ashby's law of requisite variety applied to a recursive organizational model with set theoretically homomorphic mapping to interlocked homeostats on a nervous system analogue is not just vibes it is the result of beer 30 years OR work synthesis ( he was in contact with all the early cyberneticians lol: Wiener, Mcculloch, Ashby) what you people need is to expend a few years studying Beer or ask Deepseek to make you a summary.
99% of "cyber" communists are reductionists applying deterministic models to exceedingly complex systems which don't have RV. You can do better than this, and yes, the capitalists want to stick to the classic organization chart after ww2 over a model where the hierarchy is not authoritarian but only logical. Communists when organizing a socialist society for example can fall in the very same trap of mapping their organization to these authoritarian paradigm with no RV.
>>2128440> it's fascinating how many self-described socialists are afraid of actually socializing say no more fam
>…productionyes yes that too
>>2128476I'm not talking about organization. you can organize things however you like. I'm talking about the actual control of the economy, a task that cannot be left to mere humans. no human can oversee the entire world economy with its billions of products and work out, in excruciating detail, the necessary amounts to produce of each one to meet some given vector of final demand, all within environmental bounds. there is not a single proposal out there so far from the people proposing "decentralized" planning that can actually bring about stable global control, even less so within environmental bounds. none.
inevitably, when one starts to scratch the surface of these proposals, it turns out they all rely either on value to coordinate things, or inferior modes of planning, such as aggregate planning. worst of the bunch by far is Parecon. all this to avoid the simple truth, that the working out of allocations must be done under one roof, in the one singular and global planning system. it is easy to see why if one considers the world economy as a (locally) linear plant, and planning as the process of modelling said plant. all attempts to break the model up will result in an amalgamation of models that can
never be as good as the singular monolithic model. I suspect the motivation is fear, since man fears that which she does not understand. fear of
vollsozialisierungit's interesting that you mention Ashby, because what I've said above is fully in line with the good regulator theorem, of which Ashby is a co-author. personally I find it still to be full of vibes, compared to analyses more firmly grounded in linear algebra
>>2129585Look at past threads m8
>>2129567My take is that the obsession with optimization
without even getting something working in reality first is secondary.
That is, imo, optimisation emerges iteratively through action.
That's why, despite being rightly shat on for my efforts with a local freigeld, I'm more concerned with getting something going then learning
from people who do it, so I guess a sort of Free Energey Principle.
A confederated subsidarity system, where the "whole"
is the central planning organ.
But if what he's saying is that we can't optimise and plan at all, then that's just bullcrap.
>>2131716Haier is already doing it with Blockchain within their micro enterprises.
To each according to their contribution, to each according to their need.
>>2128634Kimi.moonshot.cn is still open.
It's an actual AI startup, whereas Deepseek was a bunch of quantitative analysts goofing off.
>>2133819From the Tricontinental study they're quoting:
>By 2009, secret US cables to Washington revealed by Wikileaks stated:
>Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialisation of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution… When Xi takes the helm of the party, he might aggressively attempt to address those evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.140Holy fucking shit based Xi
>>2138060I remember watching a criminal justice video of a cop pulling over an innocent Hispanic man and confiscating his money.
And the cop decided to test it for drug residue.
The narrator said that testing money for drugs isn't probable cause for arrest/conviction because seventy percent of paper money in circulation has alot of drug residue
>>2138232your cockroach opinion will never "cease" while we, the rest of the world, untangle ourselves from anglo-american 5eyes domination
rest assured we will go after your mother and your father after we have succeeded
please remain seated
>>2138060civilized economies are already cashless
>>2138130superprofits are created in the North doe, and increasingly in China thanks to development apologize to comrade Deng and comrade Xi
>imperialism is.. le badbourgeois imperialism for sure. communist imperialism is
ultraimperialism which is
good Someone should check this interactive website. Its about OGAS and MIR development.
Can someone find out the first computer with a monitor display?
https://www.innovation-in-isolation.com/>>2139265interesting
site is completely black with scripts disabled. disabling CSS yields the text and pictures. but I see some things I haven't heard of before
>Dnepr>Promin>MIRbut also
>Kyiv🙄
>>2154711control theory (cybernetics) is essential to being able to run an economy without relying on exchange. production anarchy can be understood through the lens of control theory to name one example
>Whatever you are doing is still simply just logisticsyeah? logistics is a branch of cybernetics
>>2155136what passes for economic cybernetics in capitalism are things like "nudging" and indicative planning
>Also, can cybercommunism be useful in nation-building?nations can't be "built". nations exist. read Stalin's
Marxism and the National Question:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm>le independencethis is only of interest insofar as it hurts bourgeois states. we want to foster dependence within the socialist bloc
>>2155410Lee's older video on the "Unlearning Economics" guy was better because it was more focused. The new one get really bad and superficial near the end, just running on vibes then and really no better than "Unlearning Economics".
Utilitarianism, Subjectivism, Marginalism are three concepts that often appear mingled together, but they are not the same concept: Authors who speak of something like a "general will", are talking a type of utilitarianism that does not take subjective differences to be big and important. Marginalist analysis is about small changes and can be applied to technology without use of any psychological considerations.
MMT or Chartalism is not a new addition to Keynes, but was already espoused by Abba Lerner in the 1940s and he wasn't the first Chartalist either. MMT does NOT claim that putting more currency in circulation is never inflationary. That's just a lazy right-wing strawman. MMT says a government with its own currency reduces inflation by pulling currency out of circulation through taxation. A point made by MMT is that the currency-issuing state's spending logically precedes taxation and 1:1 correspondence between taxing and spending does not guarantee stabilizing currency so 1:1 should not be a legally enshrined principle; and that furthermore the state might have other goals besides a stable currency.
Neither marginalist thinking nor MMT are in any way incompatible with being a communist. And what conflict is there between these concepts and labor values? You can use marginalist analysis for short-term planning when running against tight constraints and look at average costs for the broader context. MMT is about macro and says nothing about price ratios between goods.
>>2153915>>2155410 (me)
watched it now, Lee talks about planning in it, so it is relevant to the thread
>>2155429the bit about MMT was weak, yes. it largely repeats the Austrian explanation of inflation, that inflation is caused by printing money rather than by capitalists raising prices
>>2155471what is logistics if not the appropriate regulation of production and distribution?
>>2160514thanks anon
>>2161238maybe tell Cockshott to make a response to this
>>2161821>>2161405>>2161238havent watched this but based on his interviewwith hardin Tom seems honestly like someone who buys into neoliberal critiques of fordism too much. All/most of the indep people do actually. Alot of them seem like anti marxist anarchists and pareconers shilling sraffian economics. Some of them even uncritically reproduce hayekan information arguments.
Hearing Tom, a guy who works as a freakin math teacher, go on and on about pull production and toyota manufacturing like hes 1985 alvin toffler or something is infuriating to those who have actually seen that system in practice (ex: agile in IT/SDE) and know how much of it is hype.
Cybernetics is also outdated anyway the idea of a transdisciplinary theory of feedback is dead and most of the useful parts got incorporated into engineering and CS.
>>2161238<slide: Marx/Engels Concept of Socialism/Communism<3. Workers have right of the disposal of the productSo the guys running the water supply have the monopoly over water?
<4. No unearned incomesDisabled people?
What he says for point 7…
<7. Communal reproduction of the economy…contradicts what he said in point 3.
He has another point 7 somehow:
<7. Lower stage communism retains bourgeois right - one's ability to consume is a function of one's contribution to social labourHe immediately contradicts himself:
<8. The labour of each worker is treated equallyPerhaps qualify these two statements with
early and
later on? Like a liberal he claims that this would lead to classes emerging, as if class in the Marxist sense were just about income, and as if the richest under capitalism were all particularly intelligent and hard-working.
<9. Prices of goods in terms of the labour they embodyHer justifies that by fighting commodity fetishism. But we NEED FLEXIBILITY here. Volcano eruptions and earthquakes and a lot of other problems are not unique to capitalism. In the TANS proposal, the data about labour time is still available and might as well be printed on consumer items along with the flexible price, so I don't see how that would be more fetishistic or whatever. In an older thread, we had a model that added variable prices paid in "Q-points" to fixed consumption-point prices for dealing with shortages. Probably more tedious to use than TANS-style, but that would work too.
<12. Deduction from individual consumption…Makes sense. Contradicts points 3 & 4. (It's OK to make contrary statements if you say what's the usual way of doing things and what's the exception, but he doesn't do that.)
He claims that Marx and Engels never supported central planning. Well there is Engels in
On Authority making statements like this:
>Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.Engels then goes on about rails and ships as examples for needing authority.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htmHe goes on to say that M & E mentioning terms like "general plan" and "social plan" and that these have nothing(!) to do with central planning, which just sounds absurd on the face of it. I think his mistake is that he mixes up centralized data processing with a tiny group of powerful people administrating things.
He creates an artificial massive gap between trial and error via market processes and labour-time planning. You can just use the former for the very short-term stuff and the latter for the rest.
He says the importance of
tacit knowledge makes central planning impossible, because that stuff isn't in the computer. But you start from a running system and apply changes to it and get feedback from the effects. It is not logically necessary for the computer to know everything.
It ends with the VERY INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT question of how to deal with non-labour inputs and I'm thinking maybe watching this wasn't a waste of time and then Tom says:
The answer is in my book. Buy my book you cucks, bye. >>2162820in the talk Tom explicitly rejects calculation in kind, and cuck to the Austrians by saying you can effect good regulation via a general equivalent. but as Neurath points out, you win wars with bombs and bullets, not money. at the end Tom is quite explicit about having islands of planning connected by exchange. but Tom being Tom, he would probably deny that this is exchange. this is why he and Donal stick to their value criticism, because if what's flowing around in the GIC model is value then they'd have to confront the fact that they're just advocating market socialism rather than planning
>>2162914>So the guys running the water supply have the monopoly over water?it hinges on what Tom means by "workers". does he mean individual workers at each workplace? or the working class as a whole? only the latter is socialist. you cannot have workers defecting from the collective will of the class-for-itself
>Like a liberal he claims that this would lead to classes emerging, as if class in the Marxist sense were just about incomethis is a recurring problem with Tom. I'm fairly sure he's read Capital, yet somehow he missed Marx pointing out again and again that it is someone's relationship to the MoPs that determines their class, not specific income levels. Cockshott makes the same error btw, when he tries to imply the gays are bourgeois
>I think his mistake is that he mixes up centralized data processing with a tiny group of powerful people administrating things.yeah it's a bit like thinking when we say "computers" we mean rooms full of women calculating things. but Tom also rejects the possibility of collecting and processing the data, despite evidence to the contrary
>He says the importance of tacit knowledge makes central planning impossible, because that stuff isn't in the computer. But you start from a running system and apply changes to it and get feedback from the effects. It is not logically necessary for the computer to know everything.Tom has missed the entire point of cybernetics.
of course you don't have a perfect view of reality. no regulator does. that's the entire reason why regulation is necessary in the first place(!). every regulator must deal with noise, with uncertainty in the signals. this is extremely basic control theory. yet Tom calls himself a cyberneticist? he hasn't advanced past 1956 when Ashby formulated his theories on requisite variety. but Ashby himself didn't stop there. in 1970 he and Conant formulated the good regulator theorem. more recently the same ideas has been put in actually useful terms, in terms of linear algebra rather then entropy. I doubt anyone implementing lean production counts the number of possible states their production line can be in to see if they've attenuated variety or not
all in all what Tom is arguing against is straw planning. it was very clear to the Soviet cyberneticians that the planners had to go. the only person in the field today that even talks of "planners" is Cockshott
>6. Money is abolishedhere Tom claims that money is a function of private property. but money comes on the historical scene way before private property does
>11. Open and transparent system of accounting allows for rational planning of economyyet at the same time Tom claims that central planning is not a Marxist concept. an open and transparent system of accounting
must be centralized. all the constraints around production (what may be produced when and where) must also be centralized
>13. Value and the anarchy of prouction and development abolishTom doesn't at all explain how this is to be accomplished, especially when he rejects calculation in kind. you can't end production anarchy by just changing the names of things
btw I found picrel amusing, since it implies we should
increase alienation to attenuate variety
>INDEP online Workshop on Democratizing Investment
This is a recording of the INDEP online Workshop on Democratizing Investment on the 21st February 2025. Our panelists were Christoph Sorg, J W Mason, Sushovan Dhar, Melanie Brusseler, Mike McCarthy and Lavinia Steinfort.
Struggles over investment have long been struggles for control of our economies. Investment shapes the trajectory of social development: it determines which sectors grow or shrink, influences regional development patterns, and drives overall economic expansion or degrowth. In capitalist systems, investment decisions are largely made in isolation by private company and bank management, often in competition with and ignorance of each other. These decisions, driven by profit expectations, have far-reaching impacts on competitors, suppliers, and distributors, yet remain privately controlled. This profit-centric approach leads to chronic underfunding in less profitable but socially crucial sectors such as care work, sustainable technologies, and public goods. It also entrenches social and regional inequalities.
Our workshop explores how investment decisions could be democratized and redirected towards meeting all human needs within planetary boundaries. We’ve invited leading experts on the democratization and socialization of finance and investment to share their insights. Our goal is to examine theories of democratic investment and finance, while also learning from real-world experiences and ongoing struggles for democratic, social, and sustainable investment practices.
>>2162914> In an older thread, we had a model that added variable prices paid in "Q-points"all the old threads aren't archived though ;_;
>>2166429>I'm tired of liberals and now they're invading the economic planning space ffsOf course, they're dying and clawing at anyone or thing that would allow them to continue on.
>>2166507>we need a separate marxist planning network.A network of four people isn't a network
>>2166574>in a transitionary periodPretty much where I'm at (at least locally). Create an accelerated transition period, a phase, preliminary, whatever one wants to call it.
Call me whatever, but after enough touching grass and listening to normal people, I'm fine with using some of the pre-existing infrastructure and "things/stuff" to move in that direction.
There is
not going to be a jump (until there is), and we know most jumps don't work without shitloads of foundational building that can operate whether jumps are made or not.
>>2166407Disagree with the haters here. Earlier I watched the INDEP vid with the General Intellect guy about
da history of muh podcast and it was so dull (at 3x speed), this by contrast gets really good right when Mr Sorg gives the floor to the first guest me thinks. (I am super-tired + have a cold + headache right now so I have to watch it again at something closer to normal speed.) It's good to know that Graete has serious theory books like uh Otomo's Akira.
I have to say I thought at least one would go at it from a more abstract mathy angle (an algorithm an investment jury can use to divide a given budget between topics—
or an algorithm for a jury to allocate a given budget between various proposed fixed-cost projects, each either fully funded or not).
>>2171531>>2171657Separate video.
>Setting physical limits for some stuff, rationing it by price systematically above the labor-time price.TANS guys have proposed the same.
>PUSH production is capitalistic and central planning>PULL production is gommunism xDDWhere to start with that? I hope we can all agree that Toyota is a capitalist firm. Planning with a huge input-output table is not the logical opposite of doing pull production. We can organize the economy around daily demand updates while using a huge input-table, no contradiction.
I like how he answered the question about
muh small business owners.
>differential wages = the driving factor of capitalismwut
>no algorithms exist for chip designwut
I think he has some unexamined mental blockages around assumptions, blockages that have their basis in repetition and vibes, not really thinking mistakes because these are brainless habits. One of these habits is the assumption that an
algorithm cannot deliver
variety, because the terms to him are repelling each other, a vibe incompatibility. He thinks putting variety into an assembly line must be something only a human can possibly come up with.
>>2171662Tom is arguing against straw planning - he has no idea how Soviet planning actually worked. he seems to think that modern proponents of planning want to reincarnate Gosplan, rather than automating the entire planning process
>>differential wages = the driving factor of capitalism>wutCockshott has said similar things. both seem to have missed that it's the relation to the MoPs that determines a person's class, not specific income levels (distribution)
>>no algorithms exist for chip design>wutnot only is this not true (see arachne-pnr for example), Tom is confusing development for production. when it comes to actually producing chips, the amount of silicon, solvents etc necessary to do so is not up for debate. it's a material consequence of the production process. it also doesn't happen in a vacuum. the Czochralski process for making silicon ingots is highly energy intensive. the amount of electricity we can produce is the result of physical constraints. but Tom explicitly denies the possibility of calculation in kind, thinking you can instead deal with it by instituting rents/taxes. but surprise surprise, this is already done (cap & trade), and it doesn't work
>I think he has some unexamined mental blockages around assumptions, blockages that have their basis in repetition and vibes, not really thinking mistakes because these are brainless habits. One of these habits is the assumption that an algorithm cannot deliver variety, because the terms to him are repelling each other, a vibe incompatibility. He thinks putting variety into an assembly line must be something only a human can possibly come up with.he seems to think we wouldn't do R&D to come up with better production processes
>>2171944I mean he's outright saying the Austrians are right. you can't get more idealist than that. also "variety" is a useless concept when it comes to designing actual control systems
I heard in the Q&A that Donal has apparently developed some kind of algorithm to adjust what they call rents (on emissions etc). but based on the two's lackluster grasp on control theory I expect it to be ad-hoc garbage
>>2186655>>2186526>>2186141the poor have always outbred the rich
so there is typically an inverse relation between wealth and birth rates
the idea that making society richer makes it more fertile is fallacious. iirc some countries like japan and sweden have even had programs where they paid couples to have kids in marriage. so its just one of those things.
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