/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2557169
>>2557332
in the end, the maths amounts to: v¹,v² = {0,1} by the bounded value of the joint-process. but this is still unsatisfactory, since we cant actually give v¹ so as to determine v². ian's point appears to be rather, that there is only the joint-value, and not individual labour values; its just a tautology of infinite sets: [v¹ + v² + v³… = 1]. he doesnt actually "solve" the issue (i.e. wicksell, 1901).

>>2557904
>That neccecarily precludes non linear realities of production
true, but even building a linear model of any production process is tricky enough. plus most production is likely to be smooth enough that a locally linear model is good enough
investment on the other hand..
>that isn't in marx' labour theory of value either
said theory includes ground rent, which is in vol III. it is in tension with the notion in vol I that values are average labour. this tension is brough up by Novozhilov, and was a point of contention among Soviet economists
>the value of a commodity is just the total labour expended divided by the amount of commodities
in vol I yes. in vol III not so much. on top of this you have cost-prices vs prices of production
>Subdividing the land in tiers to accurately model the wheat production capacity would mean the problem takes care of itself
Marx does this in vol III. in vol III the value of agricultural commodities is not determined by the average amount of labour embodied in them, but the marginal labour added on the worst field in use. as soon as an even worse field is brough into use, the value of all hitherto farmed wheat is brought up to the marginal value of wheat produced on that field. this rise in value of the rest of the wheat is ground rent. it might be tempting to think this value is created ex nihilo, but it's actually taken from workers and porkies in other industries
one could argue that ground rent isn't "real", but I don't think that's useful. I think it's better to just accept that in socialism we have to directly confront these different types of value
>prohibits models like Cockshott has which requires a priori known values of commodities
it's only an issue in distribution, and only for goods which we decide are to be distributed via exchange. it is not for example a problem for healthcare if we decide to provide healthcare free of charge

>>2558122
oh and to add to all this, it's also possible that Marx is simply wrong about value

>>2558200
>nooo my hecking prophet can't be wrong about things!
even Muslims admit their prophet can be wrong sometimes not Allah though

>>2556050
That's just a remake of an older presentation with better audio. Tomas Härdin points in the comments out how simplistic the model is, but it's a starting point.
>>2557842
Joint production makes things more complicated, but that's also true for the MUH-SUPPLY-N-DEMAND guys. If you make something that is not a joint product, it is much easier to do trial and error with quantities and prices. Basically all animals and plants are joint products. If you have a dozen different things coming out of a joint-production process, you have that many prices to set (or more because of quality grading).

The summed prices of all the stuff coming out of the same joint process can be used and we can treat the process as if the process would only produce one thing with that price.

>>2557844
>are workplaces to be allowed free pricing?
I repeat: They set the prices for their products by fiat, but not the salaries. Since there is no goal of maximizing profits or pseudo-profits, I guess Benanav believes what the product prices actually are is not so important.

>>2557847
>absurd range
As Wright says, the value of the products of the joint process taken together is set. And the range that an individual product in the joint process can get is only so wide for Wright because he wants to be as empirical as possible, and that means avoiding counterfactuals. If a product can be made in a single process as well as in a joint process, the cost for the single process can be used to anchor how high the product can be priced if it is produced in the joint process. Since the model in TANS does have consumer markets and fiddling with prices, I see no reason to believe it would have bigger problems with joint production than capitalism has.

>>2557891
>I get the feeling that he doesn't understand the difference between production costs and differential (marginal) costs.
Anybody who took as much as an econ intro course at some point during the past 70 years knows about these concepts and Cockshott has made some explicit comments about what he thinks of the realism of rising marginal costs as a rule of thumb (similar to what Steve Keen has said). A time traveler from before the "marginal revolution" would also easily understand marginalist economics because it is just applying Ricardian rent theory everywhere, whether it fits or not. Marx also talks about differential land rent. So Cockshott has learned about differential costs twice, like I assume most currently living Marxist academics (not counting some "cultural critics").

>if I understand Novozhilov >>2523747 correctly, then ground rent is a differential cost. it is the last bushel of wheat produced, on the wort land, that determines the value of wheat.
If you want to emulate capitalism, yeah.
>it is not the total amount of labour added to all wheat produced.
But it should be that in socialism! See pdf.

>>2558684
>They set the prices for their products by fiat
how do we ensure said prices are in line with political goals? let's take greenhouse gas emissions as an example. they are a product of joint production. how are GHGs to be priced? with marginal values the answer is straightforward, and the reasoning behind them is simple: we should value them according to the worst emitter, so that we can make investments that take such MoPs out of use
>If you want to emulate capitalism, yeah.
the planned sector will and should behave as the most ruthless capitalist, yes. especially towards producers in the market sector, which is everyone not in the planned sector
>Imagine we live in glorious socialism with marginal pricing for consumer items
we could actually choose to use one kind of values for one kind of buyer (producers) and another set for another kind (consumers). production and distribution are different things
one complication here is that we should measure not the worst production method in the planned sector, but in the entire world economy. this way we can outcompete the shittiest competitor one by one until all has been rolled up into the planned sector, of which there can be only one
we could do a similar thing for consumer goods. we could condition the lower non-marginal prices on participation in the planned sector. we could permit for a time various forms of market "socialism", but those who choose to do so enter a separate tax bracket and lose access to planned goods at lower prices. they are defectors after all. the scum of the earth. especially the guy running the hot dog stand. at present it's the other way around: small proprietors gain immense advantage over wagies, because the former can buy MoPs using untaxed money (see picrel), whereas the wagie has to pay full price for the tools he uses for his hobbies
>But it should be that in socialism!
should is a strong word, especially since we still have peasantoids and petty porkies around. the good thing about land rent in particular is that it dispossesses the peasantry

there is still a theoretical problem here: while we can arrive at marginal values in joint production, we cannot arrive at "average" values in joint production. or maybe we can? what if consumers working in the planned sector want to buy scrap metal for an art project. what is the value of said scrap? with marginal values the question is easy to answer. with "average" values not so much. perhaps the best we can do is prices..

>>2558909
>how do we ensure said prices are in line with political goals? let's take greenhouse gas emissions as an example. they are a product of joint production. how are GHGs to be priced? with marginal values the answer is straightforward, and the reasoning behind them is simple: we should value them according to the worst emitter, so that we can make investments that take such MoPs out of use
Why are you trying to fit greenhouse gas emissions into a market system? Just set a political limit on how much can be emitted.
>What about the private sector
Kill them! I mean, just sell emissions permission slips by bidding.
>Price them by worst emitted
One ton of CO2 is one ton of CO2, whether emitted by 10 factories or one.

>the planned sector will and should behave as the most ruthless capitalist, yes.
You're missing the point. Marginalism as a concept only makes sense when you run an economy from the bottom up. Saying "the value of something is its marginal cost" is a statement which only makes sense if you start out as an individual firm with already existing production. There, you won't expand more if the marginal cost is higher than the price. When you plan top down, there is no use for marginalism, as when you take the whole economy together, marginal prices are an absurd statement. The value is not set by how much it costs to produce more, because cost is not a true limiting factor, since you dont have to sell or make profits. The value of something is determined by the average labour time in the product for any actually existing configuration of production. Since commodities have no price, and do not have to be sold, the marginal cost of a product does not correspond necessarily to the value in a faux-market, because there is never a marginal cost - price correction incentive in place that makes them be in line.

Nevermind the fact that marginalism fails to take into account profit margins altogether. The whole point if if there is a 5% profit margin overall in the industry, it happens all the time that half of them make 7% profit while others make 3% profit. This doesnt make the value of that commodity, or its "true price" equal to whatever it costs the least efficient producer to produce one more of them.

The whole point is that capitalist market mechanics are inefficient in economic terms. They do not yield optimal results, they do not yield the results that is desired by the population, due to many reasons from unequal purchasing power, incredibly slow response time by individual actors, inability to anticipate or plan ahead, etc. Thats why so much of the essential things in society aren't left to the market, from healthcare to education to industrial research. Just because capitalism has ground rent and follows a certain logic necessitated by the limited scope of information and limited scope of action allowed to its individual actors, this doesn't make it the most efficient. Thats why China is beating the USA by burning masses amounts of money on pre-building heavy industry and building up cutting edge sectors. This is not a market solution informed by ground rent, profit rates and marginalism, this isnt the reactive approach of a market, it is the pro-active approach of a (quasi) planned system.

>while we can arrive at marginal values in joint production, we cannot arrive at "average" values in joint production. or maybe we can? what if consumers working in the planned sector want to buy scrap metal for an art project. what is the value of said scrap? with marginal values the question is easy to answer. with "average" values not so much. perhaps the best we can do is prices.
The entire problem in so far as it exists only exists for proposals such as Cockshotts system which a-priory uses absolute value as part of its planning strategy. There is no real reason why we need to do so. We can just as easily do as Wright demonstrates in his video, calculate the possible set-ranges of values, and then use the actually existing consumption patterns together with some common sense to adjust production. Just looking out the expected production of some plan, seeing where production far outpaces current consumption, should let you fix a lot ahead of time. Just run a few models with an added constraint that limit the production of said commodities to something more reasonable, and see if the model ends up with an overall better outcome (comparable inputs, more equally distributed outcomes).

>>2559093
>Just set a political limit on how much can be emitted
you still have to make sure the entire ensemble is viable. in particular that enough means of subsistence are produced. this can be done if enough of the relevant sectors are planned. if not then we have a big problem
>Kill them! I mean, just sell emissions permission slips by bidding.
this is cap and trade. it doesn't work very well, as you can see by looking out the window. it's better than nothing I guess. if the energy sector is planned than we could provide exclusive access to fuel to key sectors. in such a case selling the leftover fuel via auction is probably OK
>When you plan top down, there is no use for marginalism
that's kind of my point. but we will still have to contend with the market for quite some time
>you dont have to sell or make profits
you do so long as there are still vestiges of the market in place
>The whole point is that capitalist market mechanics are inefficient in economic terms. They do not yield optimal results
on this I agree. the market is an incredibly shitty regulator
>This is not a market solution informed by ground rent, profit rates and marginalism, this isnt the reactive approach of a market
I mean it kind of is. the PRC has gotten itself a comparative advantage in strategic industries like rare earths and PVs. it is able to undercut competitors thanks to its investments. when you make investments to sell things on the market, you are very much concerned with the marginal value of the thing you intend to produce. or more correctly, you have to start with the marginal, then "integrate" the amount you intend to produce up to the appropriate Pareto-ish point. this gives you a quasi-marginal value. the reason you'd do this is because you want to sell at the highest possible price. such an investment strategy undercuts the competition by the lowest possible amount. one might object and say that the PRC seeks to lower prices even more so as to put the West into even more of a dependent role, but that just means "integrating" more product to cause the quasi-marginal value to go lower, so as to corner even more of the market. China doubling down on this is also a classical thing in investment theory - you're better off leaning into one sector, then another, then another rather than doing piecemeal investments
if the profit rates are quite similar among producers in some industry than there is less need to think in these terms. this also means that an investment can undercut all of the competition in one go. come to think of it, this is superprofit. superprofit is to industrial capitalists what ground rent is to landlords
>The entire problem in so far as it exists only exists for proposals such as Cockshotts system which a-priory uses absolute value as part of its planning strategy
I'm relatively sure Cockshott proposes calculation in kind. values only become relevant when selling things to final consumers. there he and Cottrell propose quite a bit of leeway for distribution centers to set prices so as to get rid of excess stock. I don't really like this because it introduces degrees of freedom into the system. he also doesn't explain how the base values are to be arrived at. he assumes we can use input-output, but the way IO tables are arrived at is completely arbitrary. Stalin criticized IO for this reason
>We can just as easily do as Wright demonstrates in his video
possibly. it should be able to tell us what prices allow us to exploit the market to the fullest

>>2559199
>you still have to make sure the entire ensemble is viable. in particular that enough means of subsistence are produced. this can be done if enough of the relevant sectors are planned. if not then we have a big problem
So aside from the pact that this thread is, for all intends and purposes, about planned economies, lets come back down from our theoretical imagination back to earth. Suppose you are now suddenly in control of the EU regulations. You implement a limit on greenhouse gas emission, but its too strict. Do you think that as soon as you pen your name, factories and farms immediately literally explode? Not only do these sorts of political changes take some time to be enacted, and have transitional timeframes, during the process of transitioning it will become glaringly obvious if major problems are being caused. You will see clear signals of any overzealous implementation of such measures, and have time to course correct. You frame it as if of over-clamping down on emissions by a hard limit will lead to total societal collapse so you shouldn't try anything, when in reality such overreaches or impossible plans, especially in times of modern information networks, is easy to course correct. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of a good attempt.

>but we will still have to contend with the market for quite some time
I do not see a reason why.

>you do so long as there are still vestiges of the market in place
Does the fire department make profit? Do public schools? You can in fact operate not for profit sectors in an economy that has market aspects in it.

>the PRC has gotten itself a comparative advantage in strategic industries like rare earths and PVs. it is able to undercut competitors thanks to its investments. when you make investments to sell things on the market, you are very much concerned with the marginal value of the thing you intend to produce. or more correctly, you have to start with the marginal, then "integrate" the amount you intend to produce up to the appropriate Pareto-ish point. this gives you a quasi-marginal value. the reason you'd do this is because you want to sell at the highest possible price. such an investment strategy undercuts the competition by the lowest possible amount. one might object and say that the PRC seeks to lower prices even more so as to put the West into even more of a dependent role, but that just means "integrating" more product to cause the quasi-marginal value to go lower, so as to corner even more of the market.
<Actually everything is marginalism, and if you completely wipe your ass with marginalism, its even more marginist!
Framing China's grand geopolitical developmentalism as investor capitalism just makes you look like a fool. China's primary directive is *not* profit as a goal in itself, which would be what marginalism is about. They are playing a much longer term gambit on the scale of a continent and 20% of the worlds population, with the ability to directly confiscate domestic resources, devalue their currency and print as much as they wish, etc etc. You are doing an absurd amount of mental gymnastics if you think the Chinese government is looking at their domestic economy as if they are an investment banker. They plan their key strategic resources, and overproduce the shit out of them at a loss for decades, from resources to infrastructure to cities to research programs, all in a play to build the material basis for power parity, with the market playing a reactive role, mostly in the consumer sector.

>I'm relatively sure Cockshott proposes calculation in kind. values only become relevant when selling things to final consumers. there he and Cottrell propose quite a bit of leeway for distribution centers to set prices so as to get rid of excess stock.
He proposes to use linear formulas that describe production to calculate the value of products, then to instruct the planning agency to adjust production to try to get the prices in the consumer market in line with their value through adjusting the volume of goods produced. This is indeed planning in kind, but he relies on definite knowable value of commodities for planning the consumer aspect of society.

>possibly. it should be able to tell us what prices allow us to exploit the market to the fullest
Unlike you, my highest aim is not to be an investment cuck subject to the uncoordinated inhuman logic of profit maximization of the market. The whole point of marxism is to say, "hey, we can just, not do that, and just produce what we need and want, you know, decide amongs outselves if dumping toxic sludge in rivers is truly worth it for 0.1% savings on fast fashion tshirts."

What would be the classification of Harmony as far as linear programming algorithms go? As I understand it, the idea came to him from reading an older planning book, it works by climbing a nonlinear reward function over the LP. Is the catch that it doesn't really 'solve' the program so much as crank out something halfway decent?

In his paper where he compares the performance of Harmony to LP, the LP side is represented by calling the lpsolve CLI straight and he dismisses it as being infeasible. However I'm fairly sure that usage of lpsolve doesn't even take advantage of sparsity (a property he ensures when generating his technique table). I've been doing some reading on GPU sparse linear programming which at least seems like a way to take advantage of discarded AI hardware after capitalism falls over. Is it even worth looking into? I do get a 'vibe' that economic planning is not really the same kind of hard LP problem as say motion control, but I'm not sure how to mathematically justify that intuition.

>>2559232
>What would be the classification of Harmony as far as linear programming algorithms go? As I understand it, the idea came to him from reading an older planning book, it works by climbing a nonlinear reward function over the LP. Is the catch that it doesn't really 'solve' the program so much as crank out something halfway decent?
There is no need to try to make your own approximation algorithm for linear optimization problems because incredibly good and quick heuristic solves already exist these days. He wrote about the harmony function several decades ago before large scale fast computation and subsequent development of fast approximation algorithms were developed.

True solving is also feasible for substantial datasets but there is really no reason to use that as the quality of your data and the exactness of the implementation is going to be less precise than the numerical gain of a true optimum.

>>2559232
it's inferior to predictor-corrector methods already in the literature

>>2559226
>during the process of transitioning it will become glaringly obvious if major problems are being caused
how about we don't cause said problems in the first place? you know, by planning
>China's primary directive is *not* profit as a goal in itself
yeah, so? I am well aware that China seeks to control the salt and the iron. it has a long plan horizon. we should too. that still doesn't take away from the fact that, assuming optimal planning, investments will offset the worst MoPs first. the effectiveness of the investment, assuming demand remains unchanged, is indeed marginal. better yet, it is likely to be marginal in in-kind terms. we'll want to make the best investments, because they free up precious labour power and inputs for other uses. a good investment made too late carries a social cost that stems precisely from marginal effects. you have to have the lobes for these things
beyond this, there are investments that are to be made for purely political reasons

>>2558684 (me)
>They set the prices for their products by fiat
I really should have split up my post, because I just answer there for Aaron Benanav and I actually don't think pseudo-firms should have a monopoly over price setting. (Though admittedly this monopoly is not a big problem in Super Aaron World, because in SAW you can't squeeze a salary increase for yourself out of raising your prices.) The rest of the post is written from a more Cockshott-like POV and assumes that there are standardized cost-tracking practices and so pricing could mostly just follow that.

>>2558909
>how do we ensure said prices are in line with political goals?
Well, what is really the goal and what is only a means. First of all, the emissions should be set in physical terms. I'm sure that Benanav and Cockshott agree on that.
>with marginal values the answer is straightforward
Absolutely not. You get totally different marginal evaluations depending on the details of how you classify things and what your time horizon for planning is (which changes what is considered a given fixed cost and what is variable).

>>2559711
>First of all, the emissions should be set in physical terms
sure. but that still doesn't answer how commodities produced by the planned sector for producers in the market and for final consumption ought to be priced. pricing is incredibly important for steering the market in some desired direction. for consumers we don't even have to price things - we could decide what consumers need, and issue digital ration cards for said goods. what remains are wants, not needs. we can price wants, such as alcohol, however we want
>You get totally different marginal evaluations depending on the details of how you classify things and what your time horizon for planning is
I am well aware. what do you propose we do instead? in particular with respect to joint production, which is highly relevant for rare earths. we can't use market prices, because market prices change. futures could be useful, but you still need to arrive at a price for said futures. if I'm China and I promise to sell neodymium ingots in the future at some price, then the market is useless for determining what said price should be. by contrast, the marginal value of neodymium over that time horizon can be determined, and the difference between that and whatever the price turns out to be becomes superprofit. and because China is a communist regime, these are communist superprofits

>>2559711
oh and Wright's idea doesn't really help us either, because it only gives us a range of values. in his example corn (or maybe it was seed I forget) eventually gets a value of zero. the planned sector exporting corn for free is obviously silly, assuming said export doesn't happen for other reasons such as humanitarian aid or putting kulaks out of business. perhaps it could be turned into a financial instrument?
a comprehensive planning system would allow us to ask questions like "what is the effect of putting a 10,000 ton neodymium future on the market at 100 worker-hours/ton to be realized in 2030?". this can then be turned into a constraint, which will shift a whole bunch of other stuff around in the planned sector to accommodate that future. this might enable us to pour more labor into defense, or healthcare or whatever

>>2559945
>the planned sector exporting corn for free is obviously silly,
It isn't silly. It just turns out production of those other commodities in the most efficient manner results and a lot of by product. Real life has a lot of waste products in production too. It's just so normalised to think of them as worthless when it's not. Slag can be used in road building, yet it is a waste product with no monetary value, just like corn in his example

>>2560083
oh yeah I shouldn't focus so much on the label. yeah if it were slag it'd make sense. slag can have a value of zero because we can put it in big piles without much issue. there's no inherent need to do anything with it
I wonder if he's worked out the math what the steady state values will be. running a simulation like he does is not particularly elegant
there are plenty of other industrial processes that end up with multiple useful products. copper refiners will extract precious metals out of their anode slimes. the slime itself is often toxic because it contains Pt(IV) ions, so it can't just be kept around

>>2557169
I thought about this a while back. Funny how a guy in 1973 Hungary also thought about this. Socially necessary labor time is not average but weighted average and what I call "echeloned" (where time alters the weighted average). Still I feel like the indefinite coefficients are an information problem not a conceptual problem. The example of the parent and child can be resolved by investigating how much easier it is for each to reach the book. The one for whom it is easier is the one who governs the work of taking that book from the shelf and hence the "value" of the book.

>>2560677
I believe Wright meant to convey in that metaphor that neither child nor adult can reach the book alone at all. So any accounting rule for splitting the result into two individual contributions appears as an absurdity to him.

>>2560718
And yet some production processes are more important than others and require different labor inputs than others. I am even willing to question the matrix values of the corn/seed example. What if there is a rule prohibiting the formation of incoherent output values? Meaning the output values cannot be exogenous, but are in fact endogenous and are best represented as equations from the inputs, then there is no contradiction of negative prices etc.

>>2560718
Also, if both are absolutely necessary then we can simply split it as 1/2 via a leontief graph for right/left shoe as example. You need both a right shoe and left shoe and more left shoes do not compensate for lack of right shoes and vice versa.

>>2560727
this is precisely the kinds of problems linear programming is good at
>>2560734
some people have only one foot you insensitive clod

i dont understand this thread
why is "value" being discussed at all, when "value" is a capitalist concept, not a communist concept?

>>2561257
value remains relevant when interacting with the market

>>2561327
why? its made up.

>>2561257
Is time a specifically capitalist concept?
Is waste a specifically capitalist concept?
Is wasting time a specifically capitalist concept?
No.

Is socially necessary labor time a specifically capitalist concept?
No, only some specifics of the role it plays in capitalism.

Is value in the Marxist sense a specifically capitalist concept?
Quantitatively speaking, capitalism's value of something is equal to its socially necessary labor time. So some people use these terms interchangeably no matter the context, so they make statements like this: Value will play another role in socialism. Others use value as the name of the role socially necessary labor time plays in capitalism, so they say: Value will disappear.

For over a century, Marxists have unintentionally trolled themselves on this issue due to the vagueness of their language.

Marxists are hostile to defining terms because they believe doing conceptual version freeze makes them unable to think about how things develop and change. But just like one can make an animation from still frames, one can make a description of a changing and evolving system using snapshots; all you have to do is come up with more names, and this can be as simple as adding another word to a name to show how one frame is related to another, like "early" & "middle" & "final", or just number them. In theory, people having a dialogue can get by without a battery of definitions and meticulous name-tagging by paying attention to context. In practice, they don't have an attention window of necessary size for even a long monologue.

What's the solution to this? Beatings.

>>2561452
so, will value exist post-capitalism?
if you are consistent, no.

>>2561461
It's like a rule for driving on which side of the road. Either way works, the point is you have to choose a way and stick to it and be explicit about your choice to be consistent and easy to follow in your monologue. Even if your monologue is consistent, if you don't make explicit your choice, it will appear inconsistent to those who have made another choice.

We can follow the choices Engels made in Anti-Dühring, so we then say: Labor-time accounting will be very important in socialism, but it will not act in the role of value, and so, value will disappear.

They are some self-described Marxists who also say that value will disappear, but who seem to mean that in the sense of labor time as an important fact to reckon with. I think they should be cyber-bullied.

>>2561452
based beyond belief

Hard Budget Constraints and Bidding for Resources
(I'm not actually advocating that pseudo-firms with hard budget constraints should bid with play-money for resources in auctions, I'm just investigating that idea.)

We assume here that getting an injection of extra play-money out of schedule is either something that literally never happens or is such an extra-ordinary event that the people in the pseudo-firms don't expect to ever receive that. That's what we mean by hard budget constraints. In the following, I will stick to a very simple model that has a given pile of resources and pseudo-firms that take from the pile to transform resources into consumer items. Each transformation happens entirely inside of one such pseudo-firm. So if we get something to work within that model world, the result is not directly applicable to the real world with its many multi-step production processes that are not vertically integrated.

When a pseudo-firm runs out of play-money, does it lose its ability to access the bidding platform at all? That sounds bad. We can prevent that with the option of zero-price bid, or if we want to be a bit more poetic, empty-hand bid or karate bid ("kara te" literally means "empty hand" in Japanese👈🤓). We do a strict ranking of all pseudo-firms, those with higher initial budget ranked higher, and whenever there are tied bids, we resolve this by referring to the ranks. So when only one pseudo-firm bids for a resource with a karate bid, it gets the resource for free. A pseudo-firm without any budget left can still submit karate bids.

Among those pseudo-firms without budgets, everything is resolved by rank. But does the bidding system need to degenerate in such an extreme way? We can do something to make that highly unlikely, since the bidding system is digital. Suppose every pseudo-firm receives with their budget a POMF (Penny Of Million Fragments), then the broke pseudo-firms can still properly play the bidding game with each other as long as they still have just some fractional pennies left in their accounts.

All in all, this still sounds pretty lousy. Pseudo-firms tasked with very important tasks should not lose access to resources even if they run out of budget. But if they have high hopes for play-money injections when they screw up, this will make them reckless. If we distinguish between the pseudo-firms and their top decision-makers and punish their top decision-makers in these cases harshly enough, we can let go of hard budget constraints without money-printing chaos. But then the pseudo-firms cannot have participatory management, since here that means many responsible people who deserve harsh punishment, and removing too many people at once makes a pseudo-firm inoperable.

Or we can try to keep the hard budget constraints, but then we need to modify the system in some other way. There can be tiers of importance for the pseudo-firms that are independent of their assigned budgets and only within the same tier are pseudo-firms ranked in line with their assigned budgets. The tier distinction is lexicographic, so a karate bid from a higher-tier pseudo-firm beats a bid of any play-money amount from a lower-tier pseudo-firm.

That tier idea sounds like an improvement, but I'm still not happy with this. I have faith we can get to have broad agreement in society about tiers of importance for use-values, but why would the entire output of a pseudo-firm fit neatly into one of those tiers? We could add some procedure for lower-tier pseudo-firms to temporarily elevate their tier just for specific bids that are related to important production processes. A very important institution investigates such claims and judges (that's a lot of power, so sortition should be used here in the final instance).

Hmm… Why even have pseudo-firms, why not always investigate and prioritize the production processes themselves?

>>2561452
I've run into this problem as well. some Marxists are very attached to their definition of the word "value", for example "SNLT under capitalism". thus speaking about value in other modes of production upsets them, even though the concept of value predates capitalism. we see this shit in the planning debate too where some people will try to use semantics to claim that their pet mode of exchange is actually planning. that planning is when people plan things, rather than an entirely different mode of production
>>2561631
there are Marxists who seem to think labour will essentially just become hobbies. how they imagine people will willingly empty the septic tanks is never explained. you just get the anarchist "oh well people will just do it/it won't be a problem because I say so" but they're Marxists so it's totally different

TL;DR: kill sophists. behead sophists. etc etc

>>2562210
this just affirms the need for planning. with planning firms get assigned the resources they need. we could have a small budget of slush money for unforeseen needs, but the big stuff needs planning. for example a steel mill needs electricity, ore and coal (or hydrogen if it's direct reduction), which we can plan. but maybe we can't plan the office supplies they need
if a workplace runs out of resources then the solution is to re-plan with this in mind. this is just another way of saying that the plan period should be delimited not just by time but also by state variables. see pdfrel by Intriligator and Sheshinski

digging into Cottrell's writing on joint production which criticizes Sneedman

God I can't wait for the old man to croak so I don't have to read his retarded second wave feminist opinions in between actual substance.

>>2562392
I have a (loosely) communist/planning story in minecraft.

This was a really long time ago before notch sold mojang to microsoft. Our school had a minecraft server and a decision was made that anytime someone found diamonds, they had to notify an admin who would teleport to the location of the player and would mine out all the diamond ore and give back like 1 diamond or nothing if it was just 1 diamond found. Of course this didn't really work out because people said nothing about finding diamonds so the admins started checking the chests of known player bases for diamonds it was truly a hilarious attempt at dekulakization. Failure to comply with this arrangement led to being banned from server. Everyone wanted to play so they all tolerated this. But eventually people started figuring out sneaky ways to hide diamonds. For example, what I did was get a pick axe with silk touch which allowed to mine an ore preserving a block so it could be placed again. I would surround my diamond chest at a location away from my base by coal ore making it invisible for x-ray vision. I wrote down the x y z coordinates on a piece of paper and would go there whenever I needed to dump diamonds etc. Also, I would bring a few stone blocks to patch up a diamond vein, so let's say I find 5 diamonds, I will mine 2, plug it with stone and then tell the admin I found diamonds, he would teleport, mine the 3 diamonds, give me 1 or nothing kek. It felt good scamming the admins. So guess what, someone found our server outside the school and griefed the hell out of our bases, it was an inglorious destruction and naturally they stole all the diamonds from the central safes. The admins were utterly embarrassed when a bunch of players came clad in diamond gear ready to battle the monsters that escaped the mob farms. They were like: where did you get all these diamonds? why didn't you give them to us? Everyone on the skype call was like: exactly so we would be ready for a situation like this. Everyone was hoarding diamonds and giving back a small amount while the admins thought that was mostly everything. The admins were pissed and shut down the server. Anyways, this story always taught me about the dangers of overcentralization and how it's important to have parallel economies.

>>2564559
except anon in real life mining diamonds or anything else isnt a one person job. Its a collaborative effort which takes high tech equipment produced by someone else and teams of guys going underground. Minecraft is like that because one person can punch a tree and end up building railroads and an 8 bit redstone computer by themselves.

>>2564260
neat, will you post it here? either the original or your commentary or both?

>>2564559
most advanced anarchist theory

>>2564559
>>2564705
people playing minecraft are crypto underage, not doing good for the anarkiddie stereotype

>>2564590
>>2564705
>>2564760
Why are you such bootlickers? Why put your eggs in one basket? The point was forced requisition was immoral and we turned out to be right. Yes we hoarded the diamonds and we turned out to be right. I think there is nothing more immature than being a bootlicker sucking up to power instead of being your own man.

>>2564681
Of course, but I am against harassment of the self-employed.

>>2564767
>Why are you such bootlickers?
I gotta have a strong state
>>2564682
see pdfsrel

>>2564682
>>2564854
as for my commentary, they all dance around the issue that joint production can lead to negative values. interestingly you can have negative surplus value and positive profit
joint production is "dealt" with in national accounts by aggregation. this forces everything into a square Leontief matrix where you only get positive values

>>2562210
Introducing Fixed Prices

What if instead of a bidding for resources with variable-price bids, the bids must be done at fixed prices? I very strongly feel that a resource-allocation system needs to have some flexibility. Imagine only one pseudo-firm wants some resource, but doesn't have the play-money. Isn't that a very silly situation? If the prices are fixed, it should be possible and indeed trivial for that pseudo-firm's spending to exceed its budget to get the resource.

What is the purpose of the budgets? To give the pseudo-firms power to access resources. If society decides to give pseudo-firm A twice the budget society gives to pseudo-firm B for the next period, our working assumption is that society evaluates what A will do as more important than what B will do (even though the two decisions might be made by two different committees without a single person being a member of both). If we have to state any sort of ratio of importance here, we assume that what pseudo-firm A will do is deemed as twice as important by society compared to B. (I'm assuming here A and B are in the same tier. Like in the system with flexible prices, we can have lexicographic tiers of importance for the pseudo-firms, so that a lower tier only gets the leftovers from the higher tiers.)

Suppose the spending period isn't over yet so no new budgets are yet available, but both pseudo-firms are already out of play-money for accessing resources. They are going into minus. I'm using this phrasing for a reason. I'm NOT saying they are "going into debt", because they won't have to pay back anything. Any pseudo-firm's play-money account, whether positive or negative, gets reset to zero at regular intervals and it gets a new budget.

Suppose there is a resource that nobody is bidding for except A and B, each asking for all of it. (Despite using fixed prices here, I'm still using the term "bids", because like with variable-price bidding the requests are not instantly approved, instead we wait for a while till bids are closed; and if the demand exceeds what's in stock, we allocate the stuff in a way that follows a simple rule that has nothing to do with the order in which the bids arrived.) Suppose both A and B are in minus. Again, it is clear that the resource should be assigned despite the lack of play-money in the accounts. It's time to get even more into minus. But how should the assignment be done exactly?

We want the initial budgets of different sizes to have meaning. So, we cannot ignore how far the pseudo-firms go into minus. A pseudo-firm going into minus should have its RAP (Resource-Access Power) reduced. But what is the soundest rule here? We could either do this:
1. For each requesting pseudo-firm look how far into minus they go if they get one more unit of the resource and get lowered their already negative play-money account by the unit's price, then give to the pseudo-firm with the then resulting smallest minus, rinse and repeat for the next unit of the resource.
Or this:
2. Look at negative play-money accounts potentially getting more negative like above, but measure the size in proportion to the initially assigned budget.

Suppose A and B arrive at a negative balance of the same size at the same time. If we only look at their negative balance in our formula for determining their respective RAP, we have to say their RAP is equal and give each of them half of what's available of the resource. But society's decision was to give A more RAP than B and society hasn't made a new decision on that. So we do the second thing and look at the proportions. For each pseudo-firm, whether they are in minus or not, we ask: What fraction of your initial budget will you be at if you get one more unit of this resource? This number can run from close to one to zero to minus… basically no limit here, and we give the unit to the pseudo-firm with the highest value (using pseudo-firm rank as tiebreaker), rinse and repeat for the next unit of the resource.


I haven't talked about different procedures for short-term operational stuff and the longer-term stuff with their distinct budgets. I haven't talked about transport costs. Worst of all, I haven't talked about how pseudo-firms need combinations of things to use in production recipes, a fact which requires INTERVENTION BY A STRONG CENTRAL AUTHORITY to reshuffle some resource assignments to make the more important ingredient combinations complete. Over time, the market-like structures will hopefully become less important and shrink and in-kind planning will increase. What is shown here is all very abstract and simplistic, but despite that, we have three important findings:

1. Assigning resources via variable-price bids goes together with hard budget constraints.
2. Assigning resources with fixed-price bids does NOT go together with hard budget constraints.
3. We can use both systems.

I haven't explained the third point yet, but it's simple: Some resources get a fixed price, some are up to auction as described in the earlier post. We can even split up the same resource and make available some amount of it in each system. Any pseudo-firm gets an account with a nano budget for penny fractions that can be used in the variable-price bidding (see the POMF argument in the earlier post), but aside from that it gets a big account for accessing both systems. It's just that it cannot go into minus to make a higher variable-price bid. These variable-price bids are strictly constrained by the budget limit, while the fixed-price bids are not.

>>2564859
>We can even split up the same resource and make available some amount of it in each system
I've been thinking along these lines. the plan amounts to a set of entitlements to resources. beyond the plan we could have spending money, but firms choosing to use their money instead of plan allocation get lower priority. for this to work we also need firms to produce enough of a surplus that such spontaneous orders can be accommodated. in other words we should plan for a bit of an excess

new dickbros

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpX8mtfH5DI

>>2562210 (me) & >>2564859 (me)
Reminder I made this not as a proposal, but so that we have something to prod.

In the example where A gets twice the budget of B, that also means that if we give B one POMF, we should give A two POMFs. Seems ridiculous to obsess over such a detail that doesn't matter… but when they both go broke except for their POMF accounts they haven't touched yet, it suddenly matters a lot and this is exactly what we want in that situation.

I think the second system with the fixed prices is worse than the first. The fixed prices were introduced to deal with worries about raising prices. But to deal with that, it is enough to have a price ceiling. I have to think a bit more about how I replace the second system (already with an eye on how to combine two systems into one); but I can already tell that by yeeting fixed prices, we also get rid of the necessity of letting accounts go into minus.

Anyway, thread is full. Btw. OP's links to Veduta & Zachariah are dead. I predict the next OP will still include them.

new thread:

>>2566144