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/0sAS2https://archive.is/jXivPDid anyone do calculations on how much labour hours go into total consumption of an average person? Like for example a working class European household, 2 bedroom flat occupied by a nuclear family, utilities, food, clothing, whatever other spending they can afford, how many hours is that?
>>2249957rate of exploitation tends to hover around 100% in most countries, meaning a wage rate of 50%. with a 40 hour work week that's 20 hours per week value added to the labour power itself. the UK work year this year is 253 work days:
https://uk-bankholidays.co.uk/working-days.htmlif we assume an average worker works between ages 20-65 then this works out to (65-20)*253*20/5 = 45,540 hours per worker
>>2249957oh and there is also unpaid labour to consider, such as housework and workers raising the value of their own labour power through attending school and so on
>>2249996Could you walk me though how does the rate of exploitation (or workhours minus rate of exploitation) relate to labour time consumption? Like does 20 hours worth of wage have to buy me 20 hours worth of labour time in products?
>>2249996I wonder if there is something automatically pulling towards that split. Finding such a thing would be a big innovation over Marx, who held the split to be the movable outcome of class struggle. (The 50-50 split was also often assumed by Marx, though he only did that for ease of presentation.)
has anyone talked about how captchas are micro-exploitation because the constitute unpaid labor performed by people who aren't even employees which does in fact contribute value to a commodity which is also a means of production by training AI?
>>2250148you'll have to rebuild the internet outside the big social media companies. starting by people learning to self host/diy websites
>>2250192the key is to do practice problems and only after you develop a "muscle memory" do you go back and ask "ok why does this work"
my problem for way too long is I always wanted to know "Why why why" before even getting the practice in.
>>2250229USA gross domestic income EOY 2023 = 28.1 trillion
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDINet National income EOY 2023 = 27.6 trillion
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MKTGNIUSA646NWDBUSA Workforce EOY 2023 = 157 million
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMSNet product per employee in EOY 2023 = $175,796.18
(Net national income/ USA workforce)
Average annual hours actually worked per worker EOY 2023 = 1713
FRED DISCONTINUED 2011 FUCK FUCK FUCKhttps://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAAHWEPI downloaded the CSV and projected the trend to arrive at 1713
Value per hour = $102.62
(Net product per employee/Average annual hours actually worked per worker)
Average hourly earnings EOY 2023 = $34.31
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003The average burger worker created a value of $102.62 per hour in 2023, while the US average hourly earnings in 2023 were at $34.31
>>2250290>Is there there seriously that much rent extraction?Yes, people think burgers are home-owning suburbanites but the truth is the vast majority of suburban households are rented out by a landlord. Like I live in the suburbs for 15 years now but I have never owned "my" house. I pay rent to a guy who himself also rents a townhouse. Sometimes even your landlord has a landlord.
Also a lot of commodities are rent based now. think software. you used to get an install disc. Now you rent software as a service for a subscription. Same with Netflix etc.
>>2250296its the "x as a service" disease
>>2250305X as a service is just porky coping with TRPF
>>2250281>>2250290Probably the biggest thing missing from this is non-payment compensation which is 31.1% of total compensation. This comes out to $14.13 or $45.52 total compensation (though this average excludes some groups namely federal workers).
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ecec_03132024.htm#ect_table1Another thing missing is (the employer part of) payroll (7.56% of wages or $2.34 on average) and corporate taxes (comparatively insignificant).
https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751>>2250296Even these sorts of rent-extraction comes out of the paycheck.
It sort of blows my mind that all of this could be profit or rent paid by companies.
>>2250335Actually it just doesn't make sense.
Corporate profits are only about 3 trillion dollars.
>>2249875Shit, everyone shooting these numbers at each other like nothing i feel like the biggest ignorant ever
>>2250363Was just using search and LLM to try to find out where the money goes until realized had no idea…
What happened to the rest of the thread?
Where is all the purged content?
>>2250229im not sure how that follows or if thats even what third worldists claim? the workers dont exploit anything anyway, it would be the borg doing it, but appropriating super-profit in exchange isn't exploitation, its a result of competition and uneven development and differences in productivity.
>>2250383old thread full
>>1942906 >>2250391Im retarded sorry
I'm depressed.
>Trump turned out to be a faggot
>Elon turned out to be an even bigger faggot
>Canadians turned out to be the biggest faggots
Alright, I'm tired of all the commie talk. I want action. How do you leftychuds bring communism to america and how would it look like. I'm all ears.
1. How do you take power?
2. How do you keep power?
3. How do you deal with laws not allowing you to nationalize shit?
Biggest hurdles. Will you cancel the supreme court?
Also, why do judges tend to vote against the government doing anything good? Like these fuckers voted for citizens united. Why are judges such simps for big gov and big business?
>>2250407>1. How do you take power?mass spontaneous action by committees across the USA and potentially canada
>2. How do you keep power?revolutionary terror and the immediate
(though not instant) establishment of new systems
>3. How do you deal with laws not allowing you to nationalize shit? answered in number 2, we reject the old order in its totality
>>2250407>Alright, I'm tired of all the commie talk. I want action. How do you leftychuds bring communism to america and how would it look like. I'm all ears.Nobody really knows. There's competing theories. A guy named Iron Felix comes on here sometimes and says Americans can't base their revolution off 1917 but should instead emulate uMkhonto WeSizWe in South Africa. Others just want to wait for China to nuke us and then take power afterwards.
>>2250166>Like does 20 hours worth of wage have to buy me 20 hours worth of labour time in products?yes. and also public services and so on, which are funded from taxes the workers ultimately pay
the above only applies to countries with a "normal" level of development. in countries with lower levels of development workers might work 40 hours but only produce 4 hours' worth of value, out of which they get paid say 2 hours. hence also the lower value of labour power in those countries. contrary to what yellow Parenti says, the cause of the third world's poverty
is its underdevelopment
>>2250170Farjoun, Machover and Zachariah observes that the wage share tends to fall within a rather narrow band. see chapter 6 in pdfrel
oh and I accidentally said wage rate above when I meant wage share
>>2250385first world workers don't appropriate super-profits - they create them. super-profits are about which capitalist use the
most productive MoPs, not the least productive
>>2250408How will you deal with the military?
Revolutionary terror does not sound like something people want to hear. And remember, any successful revolution either needs the normies on their side or totally pacified so there is no resistance. Besides the axiom of having the military on your side.
>Nobody really knows.I guess that is the only true answer I am seeing
>uMkhonto WeSizWeNo idea who that is
>wait for China to nuke us and then take power afterwards.That's not how that works. Assuming anything survives nuclear war, I think building Fallout Communism would be the least of your problems.
I voted for the Libertarian Party because I care about principles. But trumpfags are starting to regret dumb shit the orange tard is doing. I am ashamed I supported him because I thought he was based and redpilled and I trusted the fucking plan. Turns out the plan was drafted by zoomer faggots after their circlejerk sessions. We are so fucking unprepared for tariffs it's just fucking embarassing. Even though I'm a libertarian, I am starting to realize we need fucking statehood. This country is a shitshow with all these feudal billionaires running around. So I am willing to support nationalization of companies because somebody has to coordinate these richfags at least somehow before the whole country ends up like a post-soviet russian feudal oligarchate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuZBd9Bd6Fk >>2250432See
>>2250715Also, If it be my will, I would get rid of the richfags, particularly the "Shareholders" since these assholes do nothing but think they own the country. And we are not allowed to challenge their rule. Investocracy has to go, I never elected shareholders to rule my life. Fuck them. Luigi? You should have aimed higher.
When you commies take over (if you do)
Make me your stalinist dictator of the proletariat since I have like 0.1% knowledge of communism and as such I will be an impartial judge for the inevitable leftist infighting that would occur 100% after seizing power.
Trust me there is nothing more ridiculous than leftist infighting. Even Libertarian infighting is not as extreme as your petty fights over meaningless bullshit.
>>2250720we have to move past stalin bucko.
A stalin woukd only be justified if there was a grand project like going to space.
>>2250723>ike going to space.Ayyy Lmao. You mean what Elon and Trump have both been shilling
>Beautiful rockets>Only you can do that?>Elon does wonders with those rocketsNot to mention that milf space ship with bezos silicone doll.
In other words, yes, let's do a space project to mine asteroids and give every american who wants platinum bullion.
(it won't do shit but hey the people would support it)
>>2250725im just saying the politburo tolerated stalin because of the conditions of rural russia and trying to fend off the us etc…
Worst case scenario the us would get a castro ir whoever was in charge of east germany.
>>2250730>charge of east germanyWE WILL BUILD THE BERLIN WALL AND WEST GERMANY WILL PAY FOR IT
>Trump c. 1961 >>2250739Well look on the flip side the best case scenario is cybernetic democracy.
Cockshott goes on technical detail about determining how much democracy which is i think is overkill.
how about just voting on the budget.
>>2250552>yes. and also public services and so on, which are funded from taxes the workers ultimately payBut why? What is the relation? Also since pretty much every developed country imports significant portion of goods from less developed ones, then in practice the equivalence does not hold, right?
Just for the record, I am not arguing for this or that stance. I just want to understand the mechanism behind it.
>>2250852>But why?Marx goes into this in vol 3
>Also since pretty much every developed country imports significant portion of goods from less developed ones, then in practice the equivalence does not hold, right?import is exchange, which is value preserving. Marx explicitly rejects the notion that value can be created in exchange
>>2250856if a country trades crops for phones theyre getting a raw deal.
>>2250862>if a country trades crops for phones theyre getting a raw deal.they are? what is the value of said crops vs the value of the phones? how much social labour does it give out vs the amount absorbed?
>>2250874well thats a problem how do you quantify labor such as research and development.
ironically communism is more conductive towards research and development than capitalism.
There is former bioweapons scidntists selling toys on the street in russia last time i checked rt news.
>>2250982>well thats a problem how do you quantify labor such as research and development.by counting it? research teams typically require such-and-such number of people
>>2250552>first world workers don't appropriate super-profitsright that is what i said.
>super-profits are about which capitalist use the most productive MoPs, not the least productiveits both. relative surplus value comes from the difference, and in cases in monopoly it is appropriated from the lower productive. its value transfer not value creation, and most of it is not used to pay wages but inflate ownership bonuses, since they are doing the appropriation and distributing the surplus.
>>2251012that's just land rent. anyway for all this stuff you have to get into the details of it. but so far few people putting forward theories of supposed unequal exchange do that. and when they do it turns out they confuse concrete labour with social labour, such as Hickel
>>2251086based pdf anon
>>2251092>that's just land rent.idk if tech patents are land but okay. its still a source of value transfer from the third to the first.
>but so far few people putting forward theories of supposed unequal exchange do that. they do though. unequal exchange is just the name they give to systemic uneven development exacerbated and reproduced by imperialism. the disagreement isn't even about it happening even cockshott admits it he just doesn't want them to call it unequal exchange because Marx says exchange is equal. but unequal exchange isn't about individual transactions being for unequal value.
>>2251104>its still a source of value transfer from the third to the firstnot if there's no value to transfer in the first place. compelling evidence that the RoE is very different in these countries must be presented. so far there is none
Capital tends to not invest in MoPs when labour power is cheap. the result of that is a high RoP in underdeveloped countries, even if the RoE is the same (say 100%). the mass of exploitation is lower
>unequal exchange is just the name they give to systemic uneven development exacerbated and reproduced by imperialismpick a better name. the notion that the underdeveloped parts of the world are somehow "cheated" is highly counterproductive. people like Hakim endlessly quoting Parenti is part of the problem. Hickel also
>>2249875What about labour intensity? can this be measured in an economic model? bc different machinery and worker's skill and speed level can make a substantial difference when it comes to producing the same product at different labour times. Or am i not clicking with the theory at all?
>>2251118you can measure what can be measured, which entirely depends on the industry in question. in some cases measurement is counterproductive, which is why a lot of annoyance with new public management comes from. in other cases it's very important to measure things, for example to find issues in a production line
>>2251112>the notion that the underdeveloped parts of the world are somehow "cheated"but they are, not in exchange, but in international policy. systemic differences in productivity are perpetuated by imperialism.
>>2251123myes. but the issue isn't that the Europe-North America axis is imperialist. it's that it's not imperialist
enough. it only invests so much in say African MoPs. just enough to extract what it deems sufficient without hurting the RoP
>>2251143Utterly wrong. You are imperialist. Mass of profit is incentivised by capitalist over maintaining rate of profit. More constant capital means monopolies exploit neocolonized more because the mass of profit rises, nevermind the general rate. Imperialist workers produce far less value than neocolonized ones.
In their drive for higher profits the capitalists invest their capital in backward countries, where working hands are cheaper and the organic composition of capital is lower than in countries with highly-developed industry and they begin to exploit the peoples of these countries intensively. This leads to a sharpening of the contradictions between the developed capitalist countries and the backward ones, between metropolitan countries and colonies.
Prime source of maximum profits for the monopolies is the enslavement and plundering of economically backward and dependent countries by the bourgeoisie of the imperialist States. The systematic robbery of the colonies and other backward countries and the transformation of a number of independent countries into dependent countries, constitute an integral feature of monopoly capitalism. Imperialism cannot live and develop without an uninterrupted flow of tribute from the foreign lands which it plunders.
The fall in the rate of profit is held up because of the non-equivalent exchange which exists in the sphere of foreign trade, when the entrepreneurs of advanced capitalist countries, through selling their commodities in neocolonial countries, obtain super-profit.
The monopolies draw vast revenues above all from their capital investments in the colonial and dependent countries. These revenues are the fruit of the most ruthless, and inhuman exploitation of the working masses of the colonial world. The monopolies gain through non-equivalent exchange, i.e., selling their commodities in colonial and dependent countries at prices considerably in excess of their value, and buying the commodities produced in these countries at extremely low prices which do not cover their value. In addition, the monopolies draw from the colonies high profits on the transport, insurance and banking operations which they carry out.
>>2251118sure thats just the rate of explotation
>>2251209>Mass of profit is incentivised by capitalist over maintaining rate of profitthis entirely depends on material conditions. capitalists will deploy throngs of low-value labour power when possible, rather than investing
>More constant capital means monopolies exploit neocolonized more because the mass of profit rises, nevermind the general ratebut we know Porky prefers to invest where labour is more expensive, because investment means saving on labour
>Imperialist workers produce far less value than neocolonized onessource? this is certainly not the case in the steel industry, as Cockshott has demonstrated
>The fall in the rate of profit is held up because of the non-equivalent exchange which exists in the sphere of foreign trade, when the entrepreneurs of advanced capitalist countries, through selling their commodities in neocolonial countries, obtain super-profit.which commodities exactly? this can happen whenever rent is in effect, such as with patents. in these cases porkies with said patents steal from other porkies
>ruthless, and inhuman exploitationthis doesn't mean said exploitation is particularly exploitative. that is, that a large surplus is produced. in fact exploitation and improved working conditions tend to go hand in hand
>buying the commodities produced in these countries at extremely low pricesagain, which commodities? because this is very difficult to do with "mature" commodities like wheat, steel and so on
>>2251063>SandlebenNot a very bright guy. There are no new insights over what's in TANS and it's actually a regression (despite him having read it). And he is against price changes away from labor time to deal with shortages, without having any alternative. He just hopes buffers are enough.
>>2251067>Benjamin PetersMakes Sandleben look like Einstein. Have you actually read that crap? Reviewed in this thread:
https://archive.is/HBHxH The relevant comments are
No.1478734
No.1478821
No.1486926
Also, this thread is for future socialism, so imperialism is off-topic. You can make another thread for that.
>>2251228>capitalists will deploy throngs of low-value labour power when possible, rather than investing>Porky prefers to invest where labour is more expensiveUtterly wrong. Why constant capital move to third-world? Because more constant capital in neocolony raises the mass of profits exploited from the third-world.
>as Cockshott has demonstratedCockshott is imperialism apologist who demonstrates nothing but lies. Cockshott is not a marxist.
>which commodities exactly?All commodities the monopolists import from neocolonies.
>exploitation and improved working conditions tend to go hand in handUtter nonsense. The lowering of the average rate of profit caused by introduction of increased constant capital is counteracted by economy in constant capital effected by the capitalist at the expense of the health and lives of his workers. In order to enlarge their profits employers compel their workers to do their work in workshops which are too small and without adequate ventilation, and they economise on the devices which are needed for safety. In consequence of this uyghardliness on the part of the capitalists, the workers’ health is undermined, an enormous number of accidents happen, and the death rate rises among the working population.
>>2251252>this thread is for future socialism, so imperialism is off-topic.the people's republic of walmart??? If you fail to grasp the material laws of imperialism how can you pretend to grasp the material laws of
future socialism?
Has anyone discussed Just In Time logistics as it pertains to economic planning? It's a tool that just wasn't available in the past due to limitations caused by information transfer latency and speed of production. Ironically enough I'm pretty sure this method is used by lots of modern companies to minimize costs. It would take a lot of pressure off any predictive planning system.
>>2251252>Makes Sandleben look like Einstein. Have you actually read that crap? Reviewed in this threadyes, that was the earliest thing I read on OGAS and soviet cybernetics. hey, you gotta start somewhere.
>>2251253>Why constant capital move to third-world? Because more constant capital in neocolony raises the mass of profits exploited from the third-worldit would help immensely if you named just a single example
>Cockshott is imperialism apologist who demonstrates nothing but liesare you suggesting Indian steelworkers are equally as productive as US ones? if so do you have any numbers to back that up?
>All commodities the monopolists import from neocolonies.which ones? we could take just one: wheat. are wheat farmers in say the Sahel region just as productive as those in the EU? if so, then why is Burkina Faso investing in MoPs for wheat production? surely they shouldn't need to, were their wheat MoPs up to snuff. see
https://sahellibertynews.com/2025/03/07/burkina-faso-prioritizes-wheat-production-in-push-for-food-self-sufficiency/ and
https://sahellibertynews.com/2025/02/10/burkina-fasos-wheat-revolution-a-vision-becoming-reality/. the latter is quite interesting as it talks of BF bringing marginal land into use
>The lowering of the average rate of profit caused by introduction of increased constant capital is counteracted by economy in constant capital effected by the capitalist at the expense of the health and lives of his workersthis is not the case in mining, nor in agriculture, nor in manufacture. the more expensive the MoPs the less the cost of improvements in working conditions surrounding said MoPs. dumper trucks and tractors have AC just to name one example. the more valuable the labour power the more sense is makes to invest in safety equipment
>>2251283>Has anyone discussed Just In Time logistics as it pertains to economic planning?The guys from the Alpha-2-Omega podcast are working on a book about that:
https://theclasslesssocietyinmotion.com/>It's a tool that just wasn't available in the past due to limitations caused by information transfer latency and speed of production.Eh I think it is more of a cultural thing. JIT took inspiration from what supermarkets had already been doing for some time. it is technically feasible once you have some quick communication lines. Computer networks are best, but phone or telegraph would be enough for the basics. (I recently read somewhere that a hundred years ago it was common in Berlin to have post delivered like ten or eleven times a day, so people in big cities could shoot postcards at each other almost like Twitter messages.)
>>2251301idk what that anon is on about but what im talking about is just a result of competition. exchange can actually be unequal, and marx talks about this all the time when he talks about individual prices diverging from value, since value is a social average. so some capitalists might sell their goods 1-5% more than what they are worth and some might sell them 1-5% less then they are worth. marx's point about equal exchange is that this "selling dear" as he calls it is not the
source of surplus value, not that he says it never happens. if the current social average for a thing is X and a capitalist introduces tech that lowers the social average, they can continue to sell at or just below that X because all their competitors have not implemented the tech. so what is the source of additional surplus value that they appropriate? it comes from workers in the firms that are still working at the old average, because the competitive advantage and economies of scale involved in more tech allow them to outproduce and capture more market share, even while reducing value per unit, their individual profit rises with the volume produced, despite no more or even less value overall being created.
this is the exact same dynamic as international unequal exchange, except the commodity in question here is labor power. on top of the productivity and monopoly differences there is also a systemic de-pricing of the labor-power of third world workers below the global SNLT for their level of productivity. but it is not first world workers that are appropriating this value, it is first world bourgeoisie, and they are certainly not redistributing it to benefit first world proles, at least for the most part, maybe highly compensated silicon valley would be an exception, but even then and even back in the 60s and 70s when there was more welfare it was funded off crumbs while the big borgs took rest of the pie for themselves. again the point is that you cannot "make" or create more profit in the total economy by unequal exchange, because total labor = total value and profit is surplus value, but you absolutely can appropriate more value as an individual from your competitors by increasing productivity or by lobbying your government to bomb power plants or oil wells in a competing country to lower their productivity.
>>2251521What does any of this have to do with
algorithms for socialism. You care enough to write this much but you somehow can't be arsed to just start another thread.
>>2251591its a response to
>>2250229if you dont want it then tell cockshott to stop pissing and moaning about semantics, or police the people posting his ramblings
okay so i dont know linear algebra but im going off by what chatgpt said.
So theres the division of labor that breaks things into steps.
Say farming wheat. Theres planting, irrigating, reaping and sowing
So wed do sonething like [3,3,6,6] thats the amount of labor time for each step.
For forecasting demand thered be a history of previous demand combined with big data that is gathered by sites such as social media or google. Theres also something called sentiment analysis which coukd tell you the moid, posituve, neutral or negative.
That is my half baked understanding of how this works kind of.
>>2251720Also here's a sample code chatgpt gave me:
https://pastebin.com/KUFnNnnM >>2251301>are you suggesting Indian steelworkers are equally as productive as US ones? if so do you have any numbers to back that up?Indian steelworkers are far more productive than American ones. Picrel 1 demonstrates this in vulgar bourgeois metrics cockshit would use. Jindal Steel's Odisha complex alone produces more tonnage than the 4 total rusted steel mills in ameriKKKa.
>it would help immensely if you named just a single exampleAll operations monopoly capital has set up in third-world. Read modern marxist theory of imperialism.
>are wheat farmers in say the Sahel region just as productive as those in the EU?African agricultural proletarian is far more productive than the EU kulak who rake in subsidy and burn their product.
>if so, then why is Burkina Faso investing in MoPs for wheat production?To break neocolonial dependency on massive subsidized French grain dumping.
>this is not the case in mining, nor in agriculture, nor in manufacture.Utterly wrong. Capitalist everywhere sacrifice safety for maximizing surplus-value. You lie like capitalist workplace propaganda brochure. Proletarian subject to capitalist mining, agriculture, and manufacturing is forced to endure deadly conditions, grueling hours, and toxic exposures. I see proletarians bring own fans to factory. I worked at factory and had to dump toxic powders. They were too cheap to give us cheap masks. Every factory I've been, I sweating to death 12 hours long with no air conditioning. You are wrong. This is ameriKKKa btw.
The children and young people who are employed in transporting coal and iron-stone all complain of being overtired. Even in the most recklessly conducted industrial establishments there is no such universal and exaggerated overwork. The whole report proves this, with a number of examples on every page. It is constantly happening that children throw themselves down on the stone hearth or the floor as soon as they reach home, fall asleep at once without being able to take a bite of food, and have to be washed and put to bed while asleep; it even happens that they lie down on the way home, and are found by their parents late at night asleep on the road. It seems to be a universal practice among these children to spend Sunday in bed to recover in some degree from the overexertion of the week. Church and school are visited by but few, and even of these the teachers complain of their great sleepiness and the want of all eagerness to learn. The same thing is true of the elder girls and women. They are overworked in the most brutal manner. This weariness, which is almost always carried to a most painful pitch, cannot fail to affect the constitution. The first result of such overexertion is the diversion of vitality to the one-sided development of the muscles, so that those especially of the arms, legs, and back, of the shoulders and chest, which are chiefly called into activity in pushing and pulling, attain an uncommonly vigorous development, while all the rest of the body suffers and is atrophied from want of nourishment. More than all else the stature suffers, being stunted and retarded; nearly all miners are short, except those of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, who work under exceptionally favourable conditions. Further, among boys as well as girls, puberty is retarded, among the former often until the eighteenth year; indeed, a nineteen years old boy appeared before Commissioner Symons, showing no evidence beyond that of the teeth, that he was more than eleven or twelve years old. This prolongation of the period of childhood is at bottom nothing more than a sign of checked development, which does not fail to bear fruit in later years. Distortions of the legs, knees bent inwards and feet bent outwards, deformities of the spinal column and other malformations, appear the more readily in constitutions thus weakened, in consequence of the almost universally constrained position during work; and they are so frequent that in Yorkshire and Lancashire, as in Northumberland and Durham, the assertion is made by many witnesses, not only by physicians, that a miner may be recognised by his shape among a hundred other persons. The women seem to suffer especially from this work, and are seldom, if ever, as straight as other women. There is testimony here, too, to the fact that deformities of the pelvis and consequent difficult, even fatal, child-bearing arise from the work of women in the mines. But apart from these local deformities, the coal-miners suffer from a number of special affections easily explained by the nature of the work. Diseases of the digestive organs are first in order; want of appetite, pains in the stomach, nausea, and vomiting, are most frequent, with violent thirst, which can be quenched only with the dirty, lukewarm water of the mine; the digestion is checked and all the other affections are thus invited. Diseases of the heart, especially hypertrophy, inflammation of the heart and pericardium, contraction of the auriculo-ventricular communications and the entrance of the aorta are also mentioned repeatedly as diseases of the miners, and are readily explained by overwork; and the same is true of the almost universal rupture which is a direct consequence of protracted overexertion. In part from the same cause and in part from the bad, dust-filled atmosphere mixed with carbonic acid and hydrocarbon gas, which might so readily be avoided, there arise numerous painful and dangerous affections of the lungs, especially asthma, which in some districts appears in the fortieth, in others in the thirtieth year in most of the miners, and makes them unfit for work in a short time. Among those employed in wet workings the oppression in the chest naturally appears much earlier; in some districts of Scotland between the twentieth and thirtieth years, during which time the affected lungs are especially susceptible to inflammations and diseases of a feverish nature. The peculiar disease of workers of this sort is "black spittle", which arises from the saturation of the whole lung with coal particles, and manifests itself in general debility, headache, oppression of the chest, and thick, black mucous expectoration. In some districts this disease appears in a mild form; in others, on the contrary, it is wholly incurable, especially in Scotland. Here, besides the symptoms just mentioned, which appear in an intensified form, short, wheezing breathing, rapid pulse (exceeding 100 per minute), and abrupt coughing, with increasing leanness and debility, speedily make the patient unfit for work. Every case of this disease ends fatally. Dr. Mackellar, in Pencaitland, East Lothian, testified that in all the coal-mines which are properly ventilated this disease is unknown, while it frequently happens that miners who go from well- to ill-ventilated mines are seized by it. The profit-greed of mine owners which prevents the use of ventilators is therefore responsible for the fact, that this working-men's disease exists at all. Rheumatism, too, is, with the exception of the Warwick and Leicestershire workers, a universal disease of the coal-miners, and arises especially from the frequently damp working-places. The consequence of all these diseases is that, in all districts without exception, the coal-miners age early and become unfit for work soon after the fortieth year, though this is different in different places. A coal-miner who can follow his calling after the 45th or 50th year is a very great rarity indeed. It is universally recognised that such workers enter upon old age at forty. This applies to those who loosen the coal from the bed; the loaders, who have constantly to lift heavy blocks of coal into the tubs, age with the twenty-eighth or thirtieth year, so that it is proverbial in the coal-mining districts that the loaders are old before they are young. That this premature old age is followed by the early death of the colliers is a matter of course, and a man who reaches sixty is a great exception among them. Even in South Staffordshire, where the mines are comparatively wholesome, few men reach their fifty-first year. Along with this early superannuation of the workers we naturally find, just as in the case of the mills, frequent lack of employment of the elder men, who are often supported by very young children. If we sum up briefly the results of the work in coal-mines, we find, as Dr. Southwood Smith, one of the commissioners, does, that through prolonged childhood on the one hand and premature age on the other, that period of life in which the human being is in full possession of his powers, the period of manhood, is greatly shortened, while the length of life in general is below the average. This, too, on the debit side of the bourgeoisie's reckoning!
All this deals only with the average of the English coal-mines. But there are many in which the state of things is much worse, those, namely, in which thin seams of coal are worked. The coal would be too expensive if a part of the adjacent sand and clay were removed; so the mine owners permit only the seams to be worked; whereby the passages which elsewhere are four or five feet high and more are here kept so low that to stand upright in them is not to be thought of. The working-man lies on his side and loosens the coal with his pick; resting upon his elbow as a pivot, whence follow inflammations of the joint, and in cases where he is forced to kneel, of the knee also. The women and children who have to transport the coal crawl upon their hands and knees, fastened to the tub by a harness and chain (which frequently passes between the legs), while a man behind pushes with hands and head. The pushing with the head engenders local irritations, painful swellings, and ulcers. In many cases, too, the shafts are wet, so that these workers have to crawl through dirty or salt water several inches deep, being thus exposed to a special irritation of the skin. It can be readily imagined how greatly the diseases already peculiar to the miners are fostered by this especially frightful, slavish toil.
But these are not all the evils which descend upon the head of the coal-miner. In the whole British Empire there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as in this one. The coal-mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. The hydrocarbon gas which develops so freely in these mines, forms, when combined with atmospheric air, an explosive which takes fire upon coming into contact with a flame, and kills every one within its reach. Such explosions take place, in one mine or another, nearly every day; on September 28th, 1844, one killed 96 men in Haswell Colliery, Durham. The carbonic acid gas, which also develops in great quantities, accumulates in the deeper parts of the mine, frequently reaching the height of a man, and suffocates every one who gets into it. The doors which separate the sections of the mines are meant to prevent the propagation of explosions and the movement of the gases; but since they are entrusted to small children, who often fall asleep or neglect them, this means of prevention is illusory. A proper ventilation of the mines by means of fresh air-shafts could almost entirely remove the injurious effects of both these gases. But for this purpose the bourgeoisie has no money to spare, preferring to command the working-men to use the Davy lamp, which is wholly useless because of its dull light, and is, therefore, usually replaced by a candle. If an explosion occurs, the recklessness of the miner is blamed, though the bourgeois might have made the explosion well-nigh impossible by supplying good ventilation. Further, every few days the roof of a working falls in, and buries or mangles the workers employed in it. It is the interest of the bourgeois to have the seams worked out as completely as possible, and hence the accidents of this sort. Then, too, the ropes by which the men descend into the mines are often rotten, and break, so that the unfortunates fall, and are crushed. All these accidents, and I have no room for special cases, carry off yearly, according to the Mining Journal, some fourteen hundred human beings. The Manchester Guardian reports at least two or three accidents every week for Lancashire alone. In nearly all mining districts the people composing the coroner's juries are, in almost all cases, dependent upon the mine owners, and where this is not the case, immemorial custom insures that the verdict shall be: "Accidental Death". Besides, the jury takes very little interest in the state of the mine, because it does not understand anything about the matter. But the Children's Employment Commission does not hesitate to make the mine owners directly responsible for the greater number of these cases.
>the more expensive the MoPs the less the cost of improvements in working conditions surrounding said MoPs.You meant to say that the higher the cost of constant capital (MoPs), the greater the pressure to reduce variable capital (wages/conditions) to maintain profitability.
>dumper trucks and tractors have AC just to name one example.Operating truck or tractor is pennies in comparison to manufacturing plant, but even then ameriKKKan UPS worker only got air conditioning 2 years ago. proletarian never get air conditioners until they force capitalist to install them.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/14/1182147381/ups-workers-facing-extreme-heat-win-a-deal-to-get-air-conditioning-in-new-trucks>the more valuable the labour power the more sense is makes to invest in safety equipmentUtterly wrong. The value of labor power and its productivity are inversely proportional. The more expensive labor power is, the less productive it is and therefore the less sense it makes for the capitalist to further sacrifice profit on air conditioner or even a paper mask to sustain it.
>>2251837>The children and young people who are employed in transporting coal and iron-stone all complain of being overtired. Even in the most recklessly conducted industrial establishments there is no such universal and exaggerated overwork.This is Engels describing 1845 England
>>2251521>this is the exact same dynamic as international unequal exchange, except the commodity in question here is labor powerthe value of labour power isn't the same everywhere. while we can speak of a global value (SNLT) of labour power, particular labour power is only to be found in particular geographical areas. wherever labour power is cheaper, capitalists could potentially extract ground rent. what remains to be shown, which I have not seen anyone do, is that this potential ground rent is actually extracted. capital seems far more interested in skimping on MoPs when labour power is cheap, rather than making full use of that labour power. in other words, the labour power is simply squandered
>>2251837all this shows is that the RoP in the Indian steel industry is higher than in the US, which is entirely the point. Porky doesn't invest in MoPs when labour is cheap. Indian communists, should they come into power, should invest in more productive MoPs rather than thinking they can somehow cheat the market
>Jindal Steel's Odisha complex alone produces more tonnage than the 4 total rusted steel mills in ameriKKKaagain this is not the issue at hand. of course backwards economies can outproduce more advanced ones by throwing more labour power at the problem. what is the value production rate per worker?
>This is ameriKKKa btwthe USA is certainly backwards in many of its industries. more advanced mining operations do not send people into the mines - they send all kinds of drones. such mechanization removes the need for ventilation. also you've quoted Engels without indicating so
>The value of labor power and its productivity are inversely proportionalthis flies in the face of the evidence
>>2250363turn out that TRPF has to with this
>>2251884the material laws which govern capitalism are still the same
How do you guys deal with the following situation?
>Industries are nationalized
>Those industries focus on mass consumption and avoid custom products
>Private producers appear that provide the custom products
>Private producers are more efficient than the nationalized industries and take away more and more customers from the nationalized industries
Before anyone says anything, I have never seen a state-owned enterprise do custom orders. Not even big companies do it. Only small enterprises do custom orders.
>>2252310I would prefer not to
>>2252310just do custom orders then
>>2252310Why not just have smaller firms in a planned economy?
You could even spin them up in bulk like with the Israeli Innovation Authority.
>>2252310its totally the opposite in the world today? Most custom product runs are done by small producers in China. in the USA most companies will only do huge production runs. So small businesses only have the choice of using a chinese producer for their product
>>2252327>smaller firmsdo you think every workplace in a planned economy is like tens of thousands of people? you do understand that the concept is predicated on the entire economy being one giant firm, right?
>>2252355just to be clear: there's no problem at all having smaller workplaces within a planned economy. we can have development "firms" for example, that help bring ideas from academia into production
>>2251086>>2251186>I think it's better than reading that pdf since every 2nd page is a different size.Yeah, what's up with that? Any clean way to fix it? Like setting an upper limit for all page sizes so that they shrink down to the smaller size? Also are there free services that translate entire PDFs yet?
>>2252310>Before anyone says anything, I have never seen a state-owned enterprise do custom ordersYeah, because that is not a role of state enterprises in capitalist economy. There is literally no reason why they could not do them.
>>2252310Isn't that what China does? Just let small private producers make the small stuff and nationalize them when they get big because its an indicator of their social necessity. You can even do a second order planning by providing inputs for them from state owned industry based on quotas that reflect demand to subsidize innovation in emerging industry, then once that industry becomes a part of regular life shift towards democratic control.
>>2252634Nope. China lets private industries grow in the areas not covered by their SoEs (until they start selling them, that is)
>>2252364>>2252460Then why didn't soviets do it?
China still is a capitalist economy where prices dictate production.
After reading cockshott, I see how for it to be "true communism" everything has to be nationalized. I am opposed to this for many reasons but cockshott argues that anything short of this would lead to restoration of capitalist relations. Given how every communist country in existence today is either sliding towards capitalism or is already there (or abandoned communism) I have difficulty contradicting cockshott and thus the bitter conclusion that communism has to be very totalitarian.
And if china is communist right now, what were the 20th century communist countries then or even maoist china?
>>2252673>Then why didn't soviets do it?they did
>>2251777here is a jsfiddle:
https://jsfiddle.net/34f10sew/1/According to chatgpt as primitive as this model(doesn't forecast demand with big data, lacks ai, or sentiment analysis etc…) is the soviet union did not even plan this way.
>>2252861and in this fiddle I scaled it down to a furniture store
https://jsfiddle.net/34f10sew/2/ >>2252795Can you show me examples of custom orders in USSR?
>>2252892if you mean custom products there werent custom products. There was only one brand. The state brand.
>>2252903I'm sure the govt. sometimes commissioned one-of-a-kind objects for specific use cases in research and development
>>2252891You guys keep ignoring what im posting but its not irrelevant. There are instances where the lvt should be used as opposed to regular economics in the absense of price signals. Specially if its a public enterprise. For example healthcare.
As silly as it may sound you're better off breaking down surgical procedures into steps and then doing labor time accounting as opposed to regular economics.
there was someone here who wanted to learn linear algebra? : here's the textbook i used as an undergrad:
https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/theres also a a solutions manual so you can check your work (or at least some of it)
I have another question, how does a planned economy facilitate development and improvement of consumer products? General development of technology and labour saving techniques are baked in so to speak, but the application for consumers seems to be disincentivised by system designed around minimalising labour expenditures.
>>2253179Thanks.
What was the computerisation project in the USSR that Khrushchev was told was cost 5 times more than the space project again?
>>2260259>how does a planned economy facilitate development and improvement of consumer products?Same problem as I had about custom products. Given how a socialist economy is geared towards mass production, you cannot just approach a factory and request a custom order. They will say they are at capacity and have no spare for you. This is the inherent problem of central planning. The planning is done not to maximize profit which implies pandering to consumers, but the fulfillment of a plan from up top. If the central planner office decides on a design of a toaster for example, only the central planner office can change the design. Practically, the manufacturers designed products themselves, but that begs the question: which arrangement is more communisty? Where the central planning office does all the decision-making or where the local manufacturer decides what to produce? And in the latter, what does the planning office do?
As a libertarian I can't help but notice two trajectories within western leftism. The most common one is just to seize power for power's own sake and rule as a social democrat under communist aesthetics. Which is what we have right now but in neoliberal-neocon aesthetics. The other trajectory in the minority is brain-storming how a socialist economy is to be ran and they are getting nowhere because they are trying to square the circle. They look at People's Republic of Walmart and think that central planning works, but in reality, that book just shows how profit-seeking is still in command. The central planning the socialists are espousing is disconnected from consumers and lives in the realm of fantasy where all economic decisions are made on fictional indicators. Even when a correct plan is drawn up, it's because the indicators just happened to be correct, not because of consumers' desires being satisfied. Central planning as a tool can only be implemented if there is a market at play. You cannot plan on indicators or else the economy stops being real. But if you plan based on consumer satisfaction, you inevitably return back to market dominance in economic allocation. So socialist countries either end up poor and broken, or they restore capitalist relations somewhat. It's really scary how capitalism is just unavoidable at this point.
I would be happy if someone actually engages with my argument of consumer choice and how it could be addressed in a socialist economy and not bullshit like this.
>>2252903 >>2260403>Same problem as I had about custom products. Given how a socialist economy is geared towards mass production, you cannot just approach a factory and request a custom orderthats a retarded strawman, you can perfectly plan for some flexibility, custom orders, and small scale individual initiatives for various non mass produced customer goods. I dont see why you feel the need to keep shitting up the thread with your stupidity. Go wank with other libertarians retards
>>2260403Experience of Soviet Block states does tell much about the kind of planning this thread is concerned with. You are imagining a top-down hierarchical structure where planners make decisions and enterprises execute them. The whole point of of "cyber" in cybersocialism is that the economy is supposed to be designed as a self-regulating system, where higher order organs are constantly fed feedback from lower ones, and the "plan" is in constant state of adjustment.
To speak specifically on the question of custom products, I dont see it as the same problem as the issue I asked about. One concerns a feedback from customer to enterprises, the other initiative from enterprises in the absence of customer feedback.
You say customisation requires profit motive, but that isnt really what we actually observe in the economy, is it? Personalised products exist in the margins, vast majority of goods are designed with maximum mass appeal in mind. A capitalist enterprise aims to sell as much as possible as cheaply as possible.
On the other hand imagine if accounting was done in labour. For example you have a t-shirt manufacturer that has 1000 hours of labour available to allocate into producing t-shirts. Importantly, they are not trying to make a profit, there is no decision making between whether you get better return on investment if you produce 500 identical cheap shirts, or 100 expensive ones, because consumer goods are not longer an investment. They are produced purely to fill the demand. The points is to break even, to unload all the t-shirts within reasonable time-frame at the total cost of 1000 labour hours. If you want a custom product, and are willing to pay a higher price to cover higher manufacturing cost, for the manufacturer your 10 labour-money for a shirt that they expended 10 labour-hours to produce is just as good as 10 labour-money put together by 5 people for 5 shirts that together also costed manufacturer 10 labour-hours to produce. You might say this is just like capitalist market, but the only function it retains is allocation of goods based on consumer willingness to pay. But nobody makes any money from it. If you at your job work for 100 hours/month, than your monthly paycheck will entitle you to 100 hours (minus taxes) of other people's labour in form of consumer products. It all evens out.
>>2260403> If the central planner office decides on a design of a toaster for example, only the central planner office can change the design.central planners could declare toasters are needed after a vote/survey indicating such and local producers could then make the design, or even several
>>2260403>They will say they are at capacity and have no spare for you.why do you imagine production operated in such a lean way? even russia has idle factories now in case of war, why should communists not use them to make things people want or need?
Hey lambda nerds, are there any concepts that you think:
1) would actually be worth communicating to a mass audience
2) could be made into an engaging interactive tutorial, like an
explorable explanation:
https://explorabl.es/math/https://explorabl.es/economics/>>2260259Juries voting on proposals, some of which become prototypes, then juries checking the prototypes and voting on what to mass-produce.
>>2260403>If the central planner office decides on a design of a toaster for example, only the central planner office can change the design.There are proportional voting methods, some of which do not rely on party lists. These list-free methods can also be used for voting on designs.
I like SPAV, Sequential Proportional Approval Voting (also called Sequential Thiele): Each voter approves as many candidates as they feel like. The candidate approved on the most ballots is the first winner. Then we reduce the weight of the marks on the ballots approving him, so from now on a mark on a ballot approving the first winner only counts for half as much as a mark on a ballot not approving the first winner. We then select the second winner. After this, we again fiddle with the weight of marks. In general, the count proceeds in rounds with each round electing one more candidate, and during a round the weight of a mark on a ballot is 1 / (1 + number of already elected candidates approved on that ballot).
It's kinda like an auction in that merely approving a candidate that does not win is like raising your hand for a bid without winning, and likewise costs nothing here.
>>2262118Who is making the proposals though? What incentives are there to make them?
>>2262415>>2262416i really hated these two videos
its a needless overcomplication of marx
>>2250194Hypothetically if this happened would be it good or bad if every liberal opportunist anarchist were pre-emptively banned. Hypothetically
I read Cockshott's Did Marx have a Labor Theory of Value and I want to check his claims. I have gathered an input/ouput matrix across some 20 sectors (in millions of dollars), the vector of average hours worked (in millions of hours), the vector of average pay across sectors for my country in the year 2020. How do I check if the labor theory of value is correct? The statistics is flying over my head.
>>2262419It's not merely about Marx, it's about Rubin, Geometry, and formalization of some of Marx's ideas using mathematics.
For calculation of gross outputs Cockshott suggests using Jacobi iterative method. From what I read about it on wikipedia though, it can be used only if the matrix is diagonally dominant. Why would the input-output matrix fit such criteria?
>>2264211in practice, input-output matrices derived from real economies often behave well enough, especially if the spectral radius of A is less than 1. That’s likely why Cockshott uses it: it’s simple, parallelizable, and "good enough" for many economic planning computations.
>>2264217But why? When I imagine the input-output matrix, it is going to be mostly empty, as most things are not inputs for anything, but occasionally there will be column for something like steel, that will be full of numbers.
>>2264211input-output is useless for actual planning. Stalin rightfully dismissed it as "a game of numbers"
>>2264340Where do I start with Cockshott? His videos, I mean.
What is his basic blueprint for establishing socialism in the modern world once the revolution is complete, does he agree with the state capitalism transitionary stage or is his cybernetic views something that can skip past that entirely
>>2264342are you soliciting recipes for the future?
>>2264346I want to understand his recipe for socialism.
>>2264348such a thing is not possible. things always depend on material conditions
>>2264370Yes I know, socialism always moulds around the needs of the nation, but how does Cockshotts theories bring socialism to the 21st century.
>>2264372
try to plan a toy economy using input-output yourself and you'll see. it's particularly useless when it comes to joint production, and when attempting to figure out which among a set of production methods to use to provide some use-value. for example, whether to burn coal or install PVs to provide electricity
>>2264384Is there any further writing on the topic you could recommend?
>>2264403Zachariah and Hagberg talk about it here:
https://github.com/lokehagberg/rhp - see rhp_intro.pdf
you should probably read up on linear programming, so you understand how it can be applied in general
input-output is only useful for statistics. for example, to work out the amount of embodied labour in all products
>>2264442that sounds more like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-commodity_flow_problem which can be solved with LP
>>2264211Could you be more specific:
1. Where does Cockshott say that?
2. Do the cells in the row for a thing show what's an input into the thing or what the thing is an input for?
3. What's the measure for quantities in the cells, is it labor time or what?
4. Why assume the table to have the same number of rows and columns? (Please don't say because we need that for having a diagonal.)
Iron Rice Bowl 2.0: Security and Flexibility for Everybody's Basic Consumption Needs
Imagine you are the God Emperor of an island and you arrange things in a way so that everybody has enough money to buy a certain bundle of goods and the bundle is available in as many units as there are people. Does it follow that everybody who wants that bundle can obtain it? No. Having enough money for something is not enough, it also has to be available. Just because there are as many units as people does not mean it is available, since some people might buy more than one unit. In conclusion, markets suck because, even when there is no technical obstacle to serving everyone, they cannot guarantee anything. In contrast, assignment by administration can guarantee that whenever there are at least as many units of something as people, every person can get one unit.
But consider this: Do bureaucrats know you well? How often have you been disappointed by gifts from your family? Wouldn't you have preferred the equivalent amount of money quite often (or even half of that)? And does a bureaucrat know you better than your own mother knows you? So can assignment of consumer items by administration really work well, even with the best bureaucrats in the world?
Look at what technology we have today. Let's do this online: We assign to everyone a care package of basic things like rice etc. This package may come in variations taking into account some information like sex and age or just the same package for everyone. People can individually choose to reject this or that part of their package and get money for that (or consumption points or whatever). So we don't have to know who is vegetarian and who is not. People can be certain to get their package, or whatever subset of it they care about, even with runaway inflation. And even with very low prices for some things in a tight supply situation, for those things that are also part of the package there is no worry then about arriving at a store with emptied shelves. So people who are skeptical of market mechanisms should like this.
People who are fond of market mechanisms should like to hear the following: The very same items in the packages can also be offered in normal stores, for prices equal to what one receives for rejecting the item. So there is no headache from juggling two distinct price systems or from worrying that the care packages could distort supply-demand information from prices and quantities moving.
>>2262412The content of the interview was interesting, but the interviewer was kind of annoying, not annoying in the usual grifter way, but in a different way
>>2269640that is a very bad take
- Jesus says that you either serve God or money (mammon)
- you render unto caesar that which is caesar's, and that which is God unto God (showing how caesar is contrary to God).
- Jesus whips the money changers
- 666 in revelation refers to "nero kaisar"
- the beast in revelation is rome (7 heads/hills)
the new testament is anti-rome (the new babylon)
>>2262412Summary of a part I found interesting in this interview: He thinks early 19th century Germany had a bias against atomism due to its absolutist political culture, and that people like Marx were forced to use a German idealist mode of expression or mode of presentation, to appear unlike the "crude" British and French materialists, hence all the Hegelian language in Marx, but at the same time, Marx's academic origins were in studying the Greek materialists of antiquity, Lucretius, Democritus, Archimedes, etc. Cockshott contends that Marx was a mechanical materialist and not a dialectical materialist. He contends that this is revealed through his more Newtonian language (Capitalist laws of motion) and how he uses the idea of laws of conservation from physics and applies it to economic exchange in order to prove that profit does not arrive in exchange, but in exploitation, and similarly his separation of labor from labor-power is similar to the separation of work done from horsepower in mechanics. He cites Marx attending physics lectures and living in England for most of his life as proof that Marx's exposition in Capital is thoroughly of a mechanical materialist and not dialectical materialist character, and that the debates in the 1920s Soviet union mistakenly attributed Dietzgen to Marx leading to dialectical materialism becoming a state doctrine in the USSR by mistake.
>>2267873>4. Why assume the table to have the same number of rows and columns?that's necessary for an inverse to exist. it's also why IO sucks, because you must have exactly as many production methods as there are products
>>2269734yes, exactly. statue of liberty is literally lucifer. founding fathers were freemasons.
<novus ordo seclorumnew world order.
I know Cockshott suggest a different approach to democracy and some other stuff, but is he still fundamentally ML in things like advocating for a vanguard party and shit? Would like to know what he thinks is the best approach for revolution, just for curiosity tbh
>>2269895explain to me in your own words how you can use IO to choose the proper mix of solar vs wind vs coal power
>>2269905he's not a member of any ML party, despite CPBG(ML) seeming like a decent fit
including the anti-trans shit >>2269963according to wikipedia hes' part of the CPB
>>2269973I thought he joined some Scottish party? maybe I'm not up to date on my Cockshottism
>>2264442Yes, as I see it the input-output view partially augments and partially replaces supply-and-demand analysis.
>>2269806I have seen squareness called convenient, but never seen anybody ever define input-output tables as always being square. You can certainly draw a non-square one. Besides, if you look at the subset of things that are direct or indirect inputs into themselves, the resulting
pseudo input-output table* is square, so analysis that requires square data tables can be put to work on that.
*I'm saying "pseudo input-output table" because a thing A that is an input into itself can require some other thing B as an input which is not an input into itself, so thing A does appear in the table and thing B does not, and so the table does not show a workable complete recipe for making thing A. (Though of course we always have simplifications in our data, so there can be disagreement about what a proper complete recipe is.)
I'm reading the .pdfs itt right now
>>2270773non-square systems are not solvable. at best you can compute a least-squares solution. or just use LP like a normal person
>>2271608Why are you so hung up on that. There is always a square matrix you can extract from the thing and alternatively you can also keep the whole thing and conjure up additional parts to make it square. A real economist tortures the data until it confesses :P
>>2269644>jésus was le communisteahistorical projection. Christianity teaches personal salvation through faith and works, it teaches fear and trembling of the master by the slave, it teaches the kingdom of heaven (monarchy of the absolute idea), and it teaches the surrender of personal property at the feet of the apostles. This can be construed as a sort of proto-communism but it is so thoroughly anti-materialist in its outlook, that it has no expectations of any future sublation of the material conditions of class society, except through the divine act of world destruction, and the final judgement of all human souls who have ever lived. Jesus's opposition to the moneylenders in the temple was not on the basis of them being money lenders alone, but on the basis of them profaning a holy place with their base profession.
>Jesus says that you either serve God or money (mammon)In Marx's analysis of capital, it is the miser who loves money, but the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad. Capital is self expanding value that is gotten not by hoarding money, but by casting it into circulation. The capitalist's true source of wealth is private ownership over the material conditions of production, which is to say the work place and the means of production therein, not in the hoarding of money for money's sake. Capitalism as a mode of production did not even exist yet in Jesus's time, through the early forms of capital (merchant's capital and usurer's capital) certainly did.
>>2271649there's a difference between computing statistics, for which IO is perfectly fine, and planning, for which IO is useless. see the electricity mix question in
>>2269963there are specific procedures for aggregating data to make a square matrix that economists use. therein also lies the problem: aggregation
>>2271950>specific procedures for aggregating data to make a square matrixPlease elaborate.
>>2272463Thnx I will read that, but just at first glance the guy seems to have the position that input-output tables are amazing?
Thanks to Sigma Rizz God Paul Cockshott for making Marxism palatable to STEM uyghas
>>2272514 (me)
The first half is complaining about how Sraffa and Morishima dealt with joint production (I agree with the author that negative labor value in joint production of things that are all useful isn't a sensible concept), the part with his solution starts with:
<6. Obtaining Positive Values in a Realistic Model of Joint Production<In this section, we will show that labor values can be calculated in a coherent way in the case of joint production, rigorously defined.
<The difficulties that we have encountered so far have shown clearly enough that for economists joint production is a true problem and at the same time a tricky phenomenon, which raises a number of question-marks about the best way to deal with it, in particular from a mathematical point of view. Statisticians are generally considered as more familiar with mathematics than many economists, and it should therefore be no surprise that the light at the end of the tunnel of joint production has come from them. Indeed, as early as 1968, they proposed two different methods for transferring secondary outputs and associated inputs by combining the use and supply matrices mathematically in order to build symmetric (and therefore invertible) input–output matrices. A quick presentation of these methods and of the reason for selecting that which appears to be the most appropriate for the resolution of our problem, will allow us to propose a corresponding representation of a joint production system. This will in turn provide a background for a mathematical determination of labor values in such a system. Guys what should I study in uni?
I'm interested in Engineering, Politics, Computer Science, Climate Change, Economics, Urban Planning, Planned Economy, Cinema, Math, Ending Poverty. Idk how to make a career out of these things.
>>2273324Cockshottist Engineering
Anything else is a waste of time and LGBT-conspiracy anyway
>>2273326What is Cockshottist Engineering
>>2273329the study and application of the scripture as revealed by Dr Paul Cockshott
>>2272514they're useful for statistics, yes. he doesn't talk about planning
>>2273324most kinds of higher education will be useful should there ever be a socialist revolution. we know historically that Porky will brain drain young socialist nations, so having well educated comrades is important
>>2273324Cockshott had a great lecture to PhD students about how they need to understand philosophy. I can't find it now, but you should email him and ask for it. Defending Materialism is the textbook to use.
>>2273324computer science and/or applied math, plus philosophy as a double major would probably be good.
CS + Philosophy = a thinker-builder hybrid. You get the power to build systems and ask the deep questions about what should be built.
close second substitute applied mathematics, or physics, or engineering, though engineering has such a heavy courseload it might be difficult to add a second major.
Cockshott thought will rule the world fr fr
Could someone please give me a moron version of explanation of the section in TNS about harmony and neural net and reshuffling production to minimalise shortages? Like how do you get the function of:
Let u = (output − goal)/goal.
If u < 0 then harmony =−u^2 ,
otherwise harmony = √u.
How do you assign "harmony" score to a specific commodity? If you have two commodities between which resources are shared and there is not enough for either, how do determine the ratio at which they should be produced if the harmony curve is always −u^2 for both?
I get why we try to avoid negative harmony (shortages), but why would you ever want positive? Doesnt that inherently mean we are wasting resources on stuff nobody needs? And how can any industry have positive harmony if all surplus resources are allocated to common pool?
>In computer experimentation, one often finds with the algorithm in this form that there are unused resources left over and that the overall level of output is lower than it
could be. Intuitively we can understand this as being due to the very strong tendency of the algorithm to settle in the region of whatever mean harmony it starts out with.
What does this line mean? Why does it settle in that region?
>As with the conventional input–output analysis discussed above, one important point is not to represent the input–utput table as an array, but to take advantage of the fact that it is a very sparse matrix and represent it using linked lists
Wait, we were using linked lists before? Why? How do they work? Like do we make a list of industries within the same supply chain, do calculations with it, and then what? How do we link them to other lists?
Fucking hell, I hate being stupid. Why didnt I study STEM instead of wasting time on social science despite being autistic and never having a shot of finding a job there.
>>2273896dope
>>2274085the harmony method is just a shitty interior point solver for LP
>I get why we try to avoid negative harmony (shortages), but why would you ever want positive?a surplus is less bad than a shortage. we can plan for a little extra
as a treat>Wait, we were using linked lists before?there are many ways to store sparse matrices. see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_matrix#Storage >>2274101>the harmony method is just a shitty interior point solver for LPI dont know what you mean by this.
>>2274107there are better methods in the literature
>>2274110Remember this book was written in the 90s
>>2273324don't listen to the other guy telling you to major in CS, it's oversaturated and the tech industry is cooked. Minor it w/ something more relevant as your major.
If I was doing uni again I'd either do a math major with a focus on statistics with a MINOR in CS to prep myself to be a statistician/"data scientist" (meme job but good monies); or I'd do electrical engineering because that's always in demand and the coursework filters brainlets which is good for less competition. (also would do the minor in cs here)
>>2274439So what are the better methods?
>>2274543I already said I am not a stemcel, you posting random pdf means nothing to me.
>>2274554All right, I will give the book a try.
Could you do me a favour and ask this question in Cockshott AMA, I dont know how to formulate it without sounding stupid.
>>2274564By question I mean how could the math be updated to modern standards.
>>2272502
>ever read the bible?
yes
>we are saved
spooky
>spiritual israel
ahahahahahahhahaha
>>2272502
>if we read the book of revelation, we see that heaven is actually a pure communion of the church, without an idolatrous shrine to God, since he is the fellowship between its members:
you can interpret the bible to mean anything you want because it is not making rigorous, testable assertions but making sweeping poetic statements
>>2272502
Religion has no place in communism. Get lost
>>2274685NTA but the original christians were basically communist
>>2269905I think he is realistic, critical but generally supportive. His own words:
>although Marxism-Leninism may have serious weaknesses when it comes to how to organise a socialist society, it still stands head and shoulders above any alternative on how to conduct political class struggle for socialismAs for his democratic model, since it deals with abolishing parties and elections I suppose it would be a break with vanguardism. I think he sees it as dated, fitting for tsarist Russia and WW1 but not for the 21st century. He rejects democratic centralism in TANS. I know Cockshott has proposed a single, all-European socialist party but he hasn't written much about the role of the party under said model or if it even would exist.
>>2275057sage is a somewhat downvoots!
>>2274793
if god was real, then we must kill him
>>2275314Imagine if you had the same emotional power to contact Jesus or the divine at will without being tricked?
>>2273605PLEASE SEND ME THE LINK TO THAT LECTURE
>>2273324I did bachelors in teaching and masters in cybernetics.
I'm a data monkey now
tho >>2276437all profit is wage theft
>>2276441Ok, but there is a difference between wage theft which is legal under capitalism (surplus value) and wage theft which is not. It turns out the kind which is not is also rampant, and it is interesting to note, because marx's analysis is focused on surplus value, not on these other, additional forms of wage theft. The point is that the worker is
even more screwed over by capitalism than marx says.
>>2276584>marx's analysis is focused on surplus value, not on these other, additional forms of wage theftthey're also surplus value extraction. but I see what you mean. sometimes Porky thinks certain kinds of exploitation is too much
>The point is that the worker is even more screwed over by capitalism than marx saysI'm relatively sure Marx brings up in Capital similar examples of capitalists trying to pay their workers even less than their nominal wage
Archived the Paul Cockshott AMA
https://archive.is/53xswThe link should be working in a few minutes
>none of the shitposts were answered
Not surprising
I was going to ask him, which touhou character would you hang out with or lead cyber-Communism, if he did.
>>2276517
look what you did mods, he was all confused like a lost black child out in the open.
>>2276586Didn't see this request but here you go:
>>2276598 This was disappointing.
>>2276635And you consider the answer satisfactory? The way I understood your question was emergence of commodity money, not wheather people will buy bags of sugar off each other.
>>2276725Your interpretation is correct, my concern is the emergence of a specific type of product as a substitute for money, that could be a way for black markets of illegal substances, prostitution, bribery to exist.
>>2276733People will barter if there are shortages addressed by limits per head instead of by price increases. Cockshott isn't much concerned about bartering because the TANS model got price increases for when there are shortages. Paying bribes and paying for prostitution will still happen in the following form: People will demand that you use your consumption vouchers to obtain things they want and that you give them these things.
>have too many other discussion threads ongoing on other media.
Where? Did he do Q&As on other forums!?
wait so are we really in the era of neo-socialist uprising?
>>2276782probably behind on his xeetposting
Sickblst fred was a dogshit thread btw. Stoped reading but literally none of the questions are about any of his work, just social media addicts dogging for 'takes'.
Pathetic site. Really has gone down the drain.
>>2277331>but literally none of the questions are about any of his workHalf the questions were directly related to his work.
<economic planning in an age of climate crisis
Apparently there's a free version to share somewhere?
>>2277331
>"what do you think is the best strategy for revolution??"LMAO
What is the cybercommunist solution for allocating workers to specific positions? Should the labour market work pretty much as it does today, with hiring at the level of individual enterprises, workers competing for the more prestigious jobs, and those who cant find anything good forced to work the shit ones? Are pay differentials used to attract people into less desirable positions?
>>2281242Also a flipside question, what about situation where you want to motivate highly in-demand workers to put in more hours? Like for example if there is a shortage of doctors, do you raise their pay to do overtime, so that now 1 hour of their labour != 1 hour of general labour.
>>2277377it's ok anon is just going to slander and make shit up
>>2281242>hiring at the level of individual enterprisesNo.
>workers competing for the more prestigious jobs,Yes.
>and those who cant find anything good forced to work the shit ones?Yes. Though I'd like to have limits on shit work conditions:
a) classified so bad that we plan around this, so this is not needed for the plan and nobody is forced to do these
b) classified bad so only justified for core use-value goals if all other means are exhausted
Giving absolute guarantees is hard to impossible, but giving relative protection is easy. Like this: If you are in a relatively more protected group, you are not drafted for something until drafting opportunities from less protected groups are used up. For example, a guarantee to
never force vegetarians to work anywhere in the chain from slaughtering to serving meat is much harder to plan for than just giving a relative guarantee, meaning we look for meat eaters first to fill these positions. We can also give relatively stronger drafting protection to people who have spent more time in draft mode.
>>2281417>Like for example if there is a shortage of doctors, do you raise their pay to do overtimeYes. First move is to offer more overtime at all without higher hourly pay and see how well that works. There can also be a work-time account that allows for more free time taken later if one works longer now. But this cannot solve all tight situations, so hourly pay probably has to go up a bit. (By the way Cockshott was asked once on Twitter how to solve this and answered
Die Mauer 😬)
We can have a regulation for forcing people to do some amount of hours when society is really in a tight situation, but this should be for activating part-timers to do more and not extend the normal work day for people already in full employment. Forcing people makes production very predictable. But how can ordinary people be the masters of their own lives if they are constantly forced to do this or that? The solution is to force a lot of people while keeping low the amount of weekly forced hours per person. And let's throw weak relative guarantees at everything. They make life more bearable and are trivial to implement.
>>2281242a central system for job postings would be useful. saying much more than that would be infantile
>>2281417train more physicians
>>2282277>train more physiciansthe cuban solution, nice
>>2281603>(By the way Cockshott was asked once on Twitter how to solve this and answered Die Mauer 😬)I don't get it. What does this mean?
>>2283206I am guessing he meant the Berlin Wall, but I am not sure how it relates. Maybe what he was answering is how to prevent the brain drain?
>>2283235Restrictions on emigration look like an inevitable result of a classless society co-existing with a capitalist one. Whoever would end up in the upper classes of the capitalist society thanks to their high level of skill would personally benefit from emigration. This emigration would happen at the cost of the society that allowed these would-be-emigres to gain these skills through social programs of education, child-rearing etc.
Could someone explain to me how does method of material balances differ from input-output model?
>>2283296>material balancesactually operationalized
>input-outputjuggling with figures
incidentally, Bazarov and Groman were criticized by Lenin for being Machists
>>2284723average CISC fan vs average RISC enjoyer
>>2284723I'm stupid, explain what she means
>>2284881cpus are weird hacked together beasts basically, there are some terrible things possible only on certain cpus due to features being abused
>>2284884i asked chat gpt to explain her quote and it said (short version)
>That's a great quote—it's funny because it's almost true. At face value, machine code is the lowest-level, actual instructions that a CPU executes. So how could it be a "suggestion"? The answer lies in CPU microarchitecture—the internal implementation of how a processor executes instructions. Modern CPUs don't necessarily execute machine instructions in the exact order they're written. They reorder instructions to improve performance (e.g. avoid waiting on slow memory), execute multiple instructions at once using superscalar execution units, and run ahead on instructions that aren't waiting on the results of others. So even though your machine code says "do A, then B," the CPU might internally do B first if it's more efficient. When the CPU reads a machine instruction, it decodes it into smaller internal operations (micro-ops or µops). So, machine code is a high-level abstraction for what actually happens under the hood. CPUs often guess (speculate) what instructions will be needed next and execute them before knowing for sure. If the guess is wrong, the CPU throws away the results. This means instructions might be "executed" before they even should be, from a program logic standpoint. Machine code targets the ISA (e.g., x86, ARM). The CPU implements that ISA, but how it does that is up to its microarchitecture. Two CPUs (say, Intel and AMD) can execute the same machine code but handle it differently under the hood. As you go deeper into CPU performance optimization, you realize that tiny details (like instruction alignment, cache hits, or branch prediction) have huge performance impact. Some "equivalent" machine code sequences run wildly differently depending on hardware. So even though you're giving the CPU specific instructions, you're really influencing behavior indirectly. Hence: "machine code is just a polite suggestion." >>2284682You have not explained anything.
>>2284991see again
>>2269963just try to work a similar problem and you should see the issue. this isn't to say MBP is good
>>2284881CISC machines like x86 don't actually execute the instructions given to them directly. a modern x86 CPU is actually RISC inside, and there's a translation layer inbetween. Ken Shirrif has examples of this on his blog where he looks at how the microcode for various instructions worked at the silicon layer for some older Intel CPUs
>>2284682Look at the pdf you posted. Does it contain an actual comparison of input-output analysis and material balances? Does it even describe any of the two? I can ctrl-f Bazarov and get a paragraph, half of which is empty waffle.
Are you a serious person or is your knowledge of economics and math limited to
slogans.
>>2286169less posting more doing the actual math
Does technical coeficient also include machine detoriation, or just direct production input? For example would bread have steel as its input in input-output matrx if the ovens require steel?
>>2289062Depends on how detailed your matrices are. Cockshott's basic toy programs have steel as an input, but the idea is that ALL products are a cell in the matrix, so for a certain type of bread you would have a certain type of machine as input, which would have a certain types of components (steel housing for example) as an input, which itself would have a certain type of steel (e.g. 304 stainless steel) as an input, which itself would have certain types of machines and material as its inputs, and so on and so forth. Under capitalism, these inputs are 'trade-secrets' though so we only get a rough idea about the reality of production. The big idea is that labor is the single common denominator.
My understanding is that deterioration is 'baked in' to the input based on the expected lifetime of machinery. For example if a machine is expected to bake a billion loaves of bread before it craps out, then the input for that loaf of bread is one-billionth of that machine. Often though, most of the components in the machine are fine, it's just one part that gets broken and needs to be replaced. Labor and parts to maintain the machine (a reality for using machines) is an input as part of the production of bread, but a different variable from 'normal' operation, as to collect data for future production of machines. Keep in mind all these inputs are estimates. They can and will fluctuate over time, giving better data to inform planned production.
>>2289539Really Cockshott doesn't go far enough tbh because he doesn't consider non-labor
time as a variable in production. For example it takes the dough to make bread about an hour or an hour and a half to rise. I'd be interested in how this could be applied to his econophysics, especially with markets as indicators for the production of consumer goods.
>>2289062Depends. An input-output matrix shows the direct relations in horizontal and vertical lines and for indirect inputs and indirect outputs your eyeballs have to ping-pong around in the matrix. The matrix is always about a time interval. You can abstract away some inputs. Just like when you are working with a recipe in a kitchen, the recipe doesn't state the tools. If you are thinking short term
and considering only a modest increase in output, you can use the matrix and these simplifications are unlikely to cause much of a problem. More intensive use of unaccounted resources is not much of an issue if the intensity increases only a bit. But with planning for longer and longer terms, invisible givens have to be turned into visible givens, and some tools have to be treated as ingredients (and tools for making tools). Also, even for the short term it is true that if you plan for a massive increase, you have to do something about your tools (and tools for making tools).
>>2289539>My understanding is that deterioration is 'baked in' to the input based on the expected lifetime of machinery. For example if a machine is expected to bake a billion loaves of bread before it craps out, then the input for that loaf of bread is one-billionth of that machine.Yes.
>>2289711>Really Cockshott doesn't go far enough tbh because he doesn't consider non-labor time as a variable in production.I'm pretty sure he does, but his toy models I know of do not. The standard example of the classical economists is wine. Time dependencies in production are displayed with modified Gantt charts and the like, showing how long something is supposed to take with bars. The bars of processes that have to happen one after another link up and form longer paths, the longest of these is called the
Critical Path. Since this sort of analysis is not only common in business, but also in computer science, he must know about it.
>>2289843I know he has referenced Mechanization Takes Command by Giedion in a video(?), which talks about the use of baking soda and pressurized chambers to accelerate the time needed to transform dough but I can't recall Cockshott ever talking about Gantt's work. Maybe Beer speaks to it and Cockshott treats it as a given? I haven't read him yet.
>>2289711RHP allows dealing with such things, for example that you have to plant in spring and harvest in autumn
https://github.com/lokehagberg/rhp Could you walk me though why does labour credit have expiration period? The reasoning as I understand it seem to be to avoid wasteful production of consumer products that nobody actually wishes to buy at a given moment, but if they put labour credit into bank it signals their willingness to put off consumption and as such resources can be redeployed elsewhere. But considering that we have data on the consumption patterns of population, cant we just make prediction on required output of consumer goods based on them? Making people put their labour credits does not give us any more signals about consumer spending than we already have, does it?
>>2291513>Could you walk me though why does labour credit have expiration period? The reasoning as I understand it seem to be to avoid wasteful production of consumer productsYes.
>But considering that we have data on the consumption patterns of population, cant we just make prediction on required output of consumer goods based on them?We don't either have all relevant data or none. We have some data and can predict things somewhat. We tackle the problem from two sides, we don't just try to get better at dealing with the variability, we also reduce the variability.
We don't want high randomness in how much people spent in a given week. Expiration dates for the vouchers are one way of doing that. A variant of that idea which has been mentioned in the cybercom threads is
publishing dates for consumer items and each electronic consumption point having validity for items dated up to a certain date*. IMHO that feels much nicer, because you have basically the same effect that people are urged to use their old vouchers and yet the vouchers feel more stable than expiring vouchers. When it's not the old voucher annoyingly expiring, but the old consumer items which disappear, people intuitively understand that this is the way of physical things and not some totally arbitrary policy by the government.
*There is no limit in the other time direction, so a consumption point is never too fresh for an old consumer item, and so the (banal and automated) strategy for choosing between more and less fresh consumption points for obtaining an item is to use the oldest points still valid for the item in question.
>>2291738this sounds interesting and I think I missed that old discussion. do you mind elaborating?
>>2291747https://archive.is/jXivPSee comment No. 2204204 (which combines publishing dates with something else, but these ideas can be discussed separately).
Logically, it doesn't look like there is a need for ever-lasting (pseudo-)money. Is there really much of a need for saving up under socialism? People will have guaranteed pensions. Expensive things can be rented or paid over several installments. We might do away with the very concept of buying a house. Living space might be assigned by a completely distinct procedure unrelated to consumer budgets, but on the basis of personal needs (living with or without children, disabilities…) and location of the workplace.
But psychologically… People are used to having money they can hoard. There is still inflation of course, but inflation is less drastic than expiring. We have to think of how people come into the new society with plenty of old memories and expectations. I am sure expiring consumer budgets would be very unpopular. (Maybe people can tolerate expiring-points regulation if there are also a few non-expiring points for everybody; imagine these rewarded special feats and also everybody getting wired a few each birthday, coming straight from the world government.)
I can't actually imagine the variant with publishing dates being really that popular either, but it would probably be hated less. This variant has a matter-of-factness to it: Here is the old stuff still in storage, this means there are people out there who have the necessary consumption points and aren't making use of them.
>>2293455 (me)
>This variant has a matter-of-factness to it: Here is the old stuff still in storage, this means there are people out there who have the necessary consumption points and aren't making use of them.And if one doesn't particularly like what's in the ever-shrinking pile of old things, who is to blame? Should have used the old-stuff points earlier then.
The expiring vouchers VS publishing dates is very much like something we are all familiar with: There are shopping vouchers and there are tickets for specific events. When a shopping voucher expires I get mad.
Those bastards make the voucher expire so early! When an event goes by and I don't use my ticket, I don't get mad as much because I don't speculate about some evil intent, I know somebody made a mistake, and it is somebody I can't be mad at for long. With the publishing dates the voucher does not evaporate, but over time this or that opportunity for getting this or that item evaporates, because
I let the opportunities evaporate.
>>2293474The issue I see with that is that it incentivises unneccesary consumption. Like the the whole point of having wages in the first place is restricting personal consumption, letting people save their "money" is preferable to forcing them to buy shit thry dont want.
>>2295521What
not wanting something means in this context is relative. In capitalism, the decision to not spend money and to hoard instead does not require the specific decision about what to use the money for in the future, and even when one makes such a specific decision, one not necessarily communicates it to anyone who could make use of that information.
Expiring play money gives people a bit more of an incentive to use it. Really forcing people to use expiring play money would not leave the option to just let the play money expire.
But let's suppose for the sake of argument a society that produces a pile of items and the people have to fill out forms about what they want from the pile and an almighty algorithm forces everyone to use up all their play money for a full assignment of usage rights over all the items in the pile. I don't see any problem with that as long as I don't have to take the item and don't have to take care of disposal myself. An assignment of usage rights is not the same as physical possession. (And even forced physical possession would not be quite the same as forced consumption.)
I don't feel forced to consume something when it is available at a price of zero. Expiring play money can put you into a situation that is kinda like that, and the similarity is stronger still with the publishing dates variant.
>>2296196There are two problems:
1. In this system people will try to use up all their money, so in order to not cause shortages, you need to produce equal to the money supply. However if you let people save, and lets say you have statistics that people put 10% of their paycheck into their long term savings account, you can reduce the production of consumer items by 10%, and reallocate those resources and labour somewhere else.
2. It sends a bad message. You are creating undesirable psychological and cultural attitudes by punishing people for frugality. Imagine this mindset being applied to running an enterprise, where employees are actively trying to use up all their inputs regardless of necessity.
>>2296551>if you let people save, and lets say you have statistics that people put 10% of their paycheck into their long term savings account, you can reduce the production of consumer items by 10%, and reallocate those resources and labour somewhere else.Yeah, but in socialism we are making the administrative decision to consciously commit at an early planning stage to a particular split between consumption and building up the means of production. The more spontaneous the hoarding VS spending decisions are, the less useful they are for planning things together.
>It sends a bad message. You are creating undesirable psychological and cultural attitudes by punishing people for frugality.I think frugality under socialism is a sort of mental illness so I agree with sending that "punishment" (which I don't see as such, rather than the absence of reward).
>Imagine this mindset being applied to running an enterprise, where employees are actively trying to use up all their inputs regardless of necessity.Expiring consumption vouchers just expire, they don't really force you to obtain things. And whether anything like expiring input vouchers would be used is a distinct question from using expiring consumption vouchers.
Been thinking a bit more about how to get a square matrix.
Suppose there are several recipes with physical units for making the same output.
First thinking without joint production: For each of the inputs, we note the lowest number among these recipes (might well be zero). Now we only have one pseudo-recipe for the output. We call the result the optimist's physical matrix. For each of the inputs, we note the highest number among these recipes. Now we only have one pseudo-recipe for the output. We call the result the pessimist's physical matrix.
Now to joint production: Perhaps this is easier to communicate when talking about this "financially". The products coming out of a joint process have to justify their production cost together. That means their sum of prices must yield a certain amount together, but this can be split between these products in any way as long as the amount they have to make together is met. We can think in extremes: The price may be entirely covered by one of the joint outputs with the other outputs being free. Only one of the outputs being entirely "responsible" for the physical joint process is then used for the pessimistic look at this output; and assuming another output takes full responsibility makes this output look like coming out of nothing.
With this procedure we get two matrix things and both are square ones.
Empirical square matrix:
Multiple recipes for making the same output are used in one empirically observed proportion. That's just one big empirical recipe.
Joint production: The products fetch prices. The price×quantity of each of these is used to account for each input of the joint recipe between these products in exactly these proportions.
>>2274847
>the God of Logos
Is that the God who made all the corporate logos? A God of commercial arts? Yeesh
>>2296551you could also send the vouchers towards an artistic endeavor you enjoy without wanting anything specific in return (given most art would be freely reproducible). Hoarding your vouchers shouldnt be encouraged, the whole point is that the production correspond to people wants and needs, and you need people to spend them for that.
Remember
Dissent on Mars? The game was mentioned in a 2023 thread as being in development:
https://archive.ph/Afx5a The game is out now and there is an INDEP vid about it on Youtube (and an extremely negative review by MiAh The King). It seems like a sandbox of sandboxes. You set up property rights and other regulations as well as psychological parameters to simulate different economic systems.
>>2297068this is worse than just using an LP solver. much worse
>That means their sum of prices must yield a certain amount togetherwhy is it that so many people that are supposedly pro-planning are still value cucks? why is it so hard to understand that planning is all about elaborating on the economy in physical terms? if you want to do things in terms of abstract labor then you go to the market. read Neurath, I beg you
>>2324099>why is it so hard to understand that planning is all about elaborating on the economy in physical terms?If the three square matrices as described in
>>2297068 are applied to an economy without joint production, they are all in physical terms. If you want to make a square matrix and there is joint production, then you have to come up with an accounting procedure for splitting up production into non-joint pseudo-processes.
Even if you don't care about getting a square matrix, the burdens of production have to be justified by the useful effects. So for joint production, the outputs together have to justify their burdens. This is true independent of whether they are markets or not. The outputs will be evaluated in some form and spooky counterfactual accounting will have to be used for linking specific benefits to shares of burdens. There is no way around this, really. At best we can emphasize the joint nature.
>if you want to do things in terms of abstract labor then you go to the market.As long as there is labor discipline, you can use abstract labor in accounting and planning, with or without a market.
>read NeurathI have read
several thousand pages of Neurath without encountering a single algorithm. He actually had no idea how to do planning in kind.
>>2324970Why not reply with an actual proposal by Neurath. Or do you not know any. How could that be.
>>2289711fermentation of cheese and wine too. hell the peppers in tabasco sauce are fermented in wood kegs for 3 years
>>2326836The article by Thomas Uebel was already discussed in an older thread:
https://archive.is/jXivP in comment No. 1943092. Uebel is making the same point about Neurath not knowing how to actually do planning in kind.
<…it appears that his strong in-kind calculability assumption traded on the future achievement of a research program called “calculation in kind.” >>2326962yeah? the USSR amounts to such a research project
>>2327710this videos two years old?
>>2324545>As long as there is labor discipline, you can use abstract labor in accounting and planning, with or without a market.Addendum: And even something like equal labor discipline across workplaces is not necessary. As long as we have good estimates of how people are doing in different places relative to a standard we are good.
>>2327249Not really, no. Developing plans for ever
completely replacing one-dimensional accounting (for that's what Uebel means by
strong in-kind calculability) was never a mainstream position among soviet economists. They may have paid lip service to the idea, but only for a future period beyond what they concerned themselves with.
For anyone who can read German, you might want to check out
Die Wirtschaftsrechnung in der sozialistischen Gesellschaft by Otto Leichter (1923) for a sensible if boring take on socialism. (Except for this bit: He wants to give higher remuneration to educated people, because he doesn't think much of education in terms of society providing it, but mostly as an achievement and sacrifice of the individual.)
He mentions a certain
Tschajanow (that's how the Russian name looks in German) as a guy among the very tiny pro in-kind crowd in the USSR. Leichter describes Tschajanow's proposal for agriculture, which is far more concrete than anything by Neurath. It requires people coming up with tons of standards for judgments and evaluations and then we can do marginally-productivity analysis with physical inputs. Tschajanow claims that this is THE solution for organizing a socialist economy. But Leichter points out it's really something for comparisons at a place or at most within an industry and not an approach for the economy as a whole.
>>2333305I assume you mean this paper:
https://raetekommunismus.de/Texte%20Grundprinzipien/Grundprinzipien%20Wirtschaftsrechnung%20Leichter.pdfFirefox did a pretty bad job at translating it, but it seems it's just a whole lot of waffle
I am aware that the USSR cucked to value, that it often just "planned" things in rubels, especially in sector B. I am also aware that Neurath never did do an entire economy in kind, since the computational power to do that simply did not exist in his lifetime. that's beside the point. what I am reacting to is this endless flood of "proposals" that amount to just changing the name of the currency and calling that planning. how are these proposals, where each product is stamped with a price in terms of labor, where each workplace purchases products from eachother, not just market socialism? the notion that workplaces can plan in isolation and arrive at good regulation, that production anarchy is good actually, is completely at odds with Capital, and at odds with modern cybernetics
>Tschajanowdo you mean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Chayanov ?
>>2334356>I assume you mean this paperYou should know from the first sentence that this is a small excerpt of a bigger work. Here is a shitty scan.
>I am also aware that Neurath never did do an entire economy in kind, since the computational power to do that simply did not exist in his lifetime.It wasn't a lack of computational power. Neurath did not know how to do it, he just had a feeling it's possible.
>what I am reacting to is this endless flood of "proposals" that amount to just changing the name of the currency and calling that planning.If you follow the way Marx and Engels wrote, labor vouchers as proposed in TANS are not money. And while places like the GDR did not literally implement this since people could give cash to other people, there was no capitalist money circuit. The split between investment and consumption was set by administrative fiat. The problem was the opposite of what you are complaining about: They did something very different from capitalism, but lacked the language to express it and stuck to capitalist terms like money and profit, terms that only in some longer texts had the proper qualifications added. And this lack of clear short terms made it easier for revisionist changes: 'What's the big deal with a bit more private initiative if we are already doing profit and money accounting, my fellow comrades?'
>how are these proposals, where each product is stamped with a price in terms of labor, where each workplace purchases products from eachother, not just market socialism?Cockshott and Cottrell do not propose workplaces purchasing their own means of production. The means of production are pooled together and everything is one big "company". Likewise, Leichter refers to big trusts under capitalism as a reference point and he says everything would be a big trust. According to Marx (as well as common sense), the allocation process within a company is not a market. Hence, if you follow Marx you cannot argue that resemblance between a proposal for socialism and the internal accounting of a capitalist firm is evidence of it being a proposal for doing rebranded capitalism
!
>the notion that workplaces can plan in isolation and arrive at good regulation, that production anarchy is good actuallySuch a claim is neither in TANS nor in Leichter's proposal.
>do you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Chayanov ?That must be him, yes.
>>2338732>It wasn't a lack of computational power. Neurath did not know how to do it, he just had a feeling it's possible.right. but Gosplan was perfectly capable of doing it, if only for a very limited subset of the economy. we know that we can do it for a much larger set these days. whether it can be done for the entire world economy is an open question
>If you follow the way Marx and Engels wrote, labor vouchers as proposed in TANS are not money. And while places like the GDR did not literally implement this since people could give cash to other people, there was no capitalist money circuit. The split between investment and consumption was set by administrative fiat. The problem was the opposite of what you are complaining about: They did something very different from capitalism, but lacked the language to express it and stuck to capitalist terms like money and profit, terms that only in some longer texts had the proper qualifications added. And this lack of clear short terms made it easier for revisionist changes: 'What's the big deal with a bit more private initiative if we are already doing profit and money accounting, my fellow comrades?'fair point. and yes I know that it's not money, but it's still exchange. exchange-value is a more general concept that applies to more than just money. what I am complaining about are proposals that amount to workplaces exchanging products with each other, without a global centralized plan. to me this seems like it cannot result in anything other that a reconstitution of private property. we cannot permit workplaces to go against the will of the entire class. we must struggle against the notion that reducing all the qualitative properties of each use-value down to a single number, a price, is somehow a good thing rather than a bad thing
>Such a claim is neither in TANS nor in Leichter's proposalI'm not replying to C&C or Leichter, but to anon
>>2297068I'll see if I can do something with the scan when I have better internets, thanks
>>2338732> I. The problem of accounting in business . 7 1. The problem of accounting in business . All economics goesvonderTatsache,thatpeople recurring Silent needs and with have to budget a stock of elaborated goods. The goods , the were created in a production period are consumed and the recurring Needs necessary the human to a new production period , so that the whole economic life of man other than a Cycle of Production and Consumption is . Any creation of goods intended to shut down from need nissen serve , and with it every satisfaction of need nissen has certain expenditures of labour-power and factual production requirements , which in turn Results the application of labour-power are to Prere . Any satisfaction of needs is not only with a certain suffering of work , but also with the devotion of know goods purchased , which means impoverishment. The Economics has coined the term costs for this and really these costs are d . h . the fact that to everyone Needs satisfaction certain Expenses necessary are , maybe the only common Characteristic all economics shape started from the economy of primitives to Communist Economy of the highest order . The Re production of daily wear-out life force , recovery the daily the basis walking or in the verse consummate Goods caused continuously Costs . When Life to become bearable for the person, then must the cost of living If possible, if possible be low , d . h . the working sufferer and other expenses , by the he the satisfaction of his needs allowed in the Ver equal to the satisfaction caused by the satisfaction of needs not to the immeasurable grow. The farmer People must therefore seek, effort and goal , costs and being Poor satisfaction into a tolerable harmony to bring yeah I'm not reading 108 pages of Gerlish
>>2347225Each are arguing like playing both defense lawyer and judge acting out two different criminal cases.
Victor Magariño: I'm doing the defense of socialism. Socialism is innocent until proven guilty, so if you don't prove its guilt, socialism wins. I'm also the judge here and I decide what is convincing evidence and what is not.
boredk: I'm doing the defense of capitalism. Capitalism is innocent until proven guilty, so if you don't prove its guilt, capitalism wins. I'm also the judge here and I decide what is convincing evidence and what is not.
boredk is repeatedly making an extremely stupid argument: "NO COSTS ATTACHED!!" He claims markets attach costs to expressing wishes, and if you do a survey people will just state they want infinite apples…
First of, people can have individual consumer budgets even if the means of production are all in the hands of one big pseudo-firm, so how is that a killer argument for private ownership of the means of production?
And since changing the income distribution will change the demand data, how can you put so much faith in just market-demand data?
And of course we can limit expressions in surveys to what's technically possible and nerf exaggerations by the way we count them. When you do a survey about how many pencils and apples to produce, you could ask people for the
ratio between these rather than absolute amounts. And here is an algo proposed years ago for assigning quantities of a produced pile of a thing:
https://pastebin.com/bPyr7Vau Try and see what happens when a person is honest, gets fewer units than he wanted, and then replace his honest input with an exaggeration and repeat the calculation.
boredk is a programmer. If markets are so great, why does computer science even exist? Wouldn't all computing problems just boil down to something you could put in a short booklet.
Here's the preferences for your agents. They all participate in a virtual auction. The end. >>2347703Kill Austrians. Behead Austrians. etc etc
Victor could have said "just measure it" to boredk's incessant "how 2 find demand???" and he'd have saved everyone several hours. Victor also seems to think there would be people whose job is "planner" and that there would be a "central planning board". he doesn't seem to have advanced past 1920 on this issue. there's also this inability to separate paying for things in distribution and paying for things in production. the two are
very different
>>2347703TL;DR: shallow and pedantic
The Critique of the Gotha Programme is wrong!Workers can
get back their full contribution as income!
The draft of the Gotha Programme said that "…the proceeds of labor belong
undiminished with equal right to all members of society". Marx claimed this to be impossible. The published Gotha Programme does not this statement anymore. But was it logically necessary to yeet that statement? Was Marx right that there must be deductions?
Here is what Marx did not like about the bit with undiminished proceeds:
<Let us take, first of all, the words "proceeds of labor" in the sense of the product of labor; then the co-operative proceeds of labor are the total social product.
<From this must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.
<These deductions from the "undiminished" proceeds of labor are an economic necessity, and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity.
<There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption.
<Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htmWe might be able to define contribution in marginalist terms.
Marginal contribution is a very brittle concept because depending on what time horizon we are thinking in, different things are fixed and fluid, and so our measure changes. Moreover, once we have settled on our accounting norms for measuring the marginal physical output, we can still set the selling price in this or that way, resulting in changing the marginal monetary output of the same action. And what's the marginal contribution to somebody's utility is still another question. We can set the marginal contribution as relative to some expectation value and call anything falling short of that a loss caused by the less-than-perfect person being there and preventing a better person from doing that task perfectly. It seems to me there is so much wiggle room with marginalism that we can define anybody's marginalist contribution to be as small as we want. Playing this definition game is one way of giving everybody back their whole contribution. But let's do something else.
Of course, people can
donate and that is not a forced deduction. Of course, joining a
voluntary insurance scheme is not a forced deduction either. But there is more: THE KETCHUP ARGUMENT. For this, we will first look at a a seemingly off-topic scenario and then draw our conclusion.
Consider a company that sells sausages. The company promises to not raise sausage prices for the next twelve months. Six months later, a customer complaints: He always eats the sausages with a special ketchup, and this ketchup got more expensive. Well, ketchup getting more expensive might be a reason to be sad, but this does not mean that the sausage company broke its promise about its sausages (even if the same company is also the only one selling this ketchup).
Now consider the following. Imagine you live in a society that promises its citizens this: Doing an hour of labor enables you to buy an hour of labor, without the qualifier "after deductions". You check for the so-called "labor-minute price" of a pretzel you bought. There is a public database about cost accounting in production that clearly shows that
natural resources have positive fictional labor minutes assigned already before the factual labor time gets added to that. Well, that might be a reason to be sad, but you doing an hour of dog-sitting does indeed enable you to buy a full hour of another person dog-sitting for you. So, is society really breaking its promise? You might be sad that giving one hour does not get you one hour
plus some other stuff (resource inputs), but that was not the promise. The promise was:
You can get one hour for giving one hour. That promise is kept.And so, with green taxes for resources like land, we do have our funds for stuff without taxing labor. In conclusion, Marx was wrong. Dog-sitters of the world, unite!
>>2348697Not written by Marx and that section you linked does not even refer to Marx. I don't believe you have fully read the post before writing your phony reply.
>>2348712Marx never lived to see a complete proletarian State. Therefore Marx has nothing of cognitive value to say about such thing from materialist point of view. Proletarian State textbooks clairify your issue
>>2348725Post
>>2348685 is against a specific claim by Marx. Whether you try to support Marx in this or the post against the claim, it does not make sense to link
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch37.htm since it does not make a statement about the claim. If you don't care about what Marx said, there is no point in replying at all.
>>2348831Marxism is not Karl Marx Thought
>>2348831his refutation of Marx's claim is refuted within www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch37.htm
his farcical take on socialist value distribution can be corrected by reading that chapter
>>2349133>Marxism is not Karl Marx ThoughtPost
>>2348685 is explicitly about a statement by Karl Marx and not somebody or something named "Karl Marx Thought".
>>2349152>take on socialist value distribution can be corrected by reading that chapterThere is no conflict whatsoever between post
>>2348685 and that chapter, hence the chapter cannot be a correction of the post nor vice versa. The entire point of that post is about a logical compatibility that Marx believed to not exist. The chapter posted makes no statement for or against its existence.
>>2356427I of course agree with TANS (and Marx and Engels) that we will continue to estimate and measure labor time (and that we will take into account task training for the production cost of a product while not using received training as justification for higher income).
Still, wouldn't we want to plan as much as we can with different individual abilities as they exist in different individuals? Think of a huge checklist of abilities for each person (most fields empty, fixed in the short run).
>>2356540>Still, wouldn't we want to plan as much as we can with different individual abilities as they exist in different individuals?yes. this is a huge deficiency in Cockshott Thought. any planned economy will quickly find itself having to deal with not just the total amount of labour power at its disposal, but also what
kinds of labour power there are
im going to be reading some stuff on this soon, but I wonder if anyone can answer a basic stupid question of mine. For a computer to centrally plan all activity within a system, it must have total visibility on that system right? Isn't this a big privacy issue?
>>2357635privacy in production is bad. in consumption on the other hand, yeah we probably don't need to know
who buys the dragon dildos, only how many we expect to be needed
>>2357635The issue with surveillance and privacy is when there is a lack of symmetry. It's the lack of symmetry that makes it a power thing: "I see you
but you can't see me." Universal lack of privacy would be awkward at first, but not a power thing. That said, it is possible to compute with privacy, it just adds some complications. See: voting.
>>2357639And let's think about who at the warehouse of the online shop needs to know what. The person picking the item from the storage space (if that is even a person) does not need to know who receives it, the person putting the item into a postal package (again, if that is even a person) does not need to know who receive it either: When the item is put into the postal package, the package gets a code attached (barcode or QR code or RFID). The package goes down a conveyor belt, a machine checks the code, retrieves the associated address from a database, and puts the address on the package. It sometimes still happens that a person sees the information (e. g. when a package accidentally opens). So the people working there are also under oath not to share this information.
When a big family goes to the supermarket, usually one wallet pays for everything. The supermarket does not need to know how the items are assigned within the family. Even with online shopping of individuals all using their own wallets the requests could be routed through households and a cluster of households, with the item sender by default only knowing the household cluster.
Joshua Dávila AKA The Blockchain Socialist wrote a book called
Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It. Please read this wonderful review:
https://theluddite.org/post/blockchain-radicals.htmlIf you just want the verdict:
The book is ass.>>2358515
this sounds like a multi-armed bandit problem. you just have to estimate what different production methods will cost over time. we can't know the future exactly
>GIMMI MY FREE TIME
if we optimize on social labour then we can give workers more free time than they have now. since the RoE is ~100% worldwide, this means a 20 hour work week
>>2357635<For a computer to centrally plan all activity within a system, it must have total visibility on that system right? Isn't this a big privacy issue?I mean no more than capitalism? Isn't all that data and far more already captured? it would probably be less considering advertising wouldnt be as much a thing so you wouldn't need detailed machine learning data
>>2360680Explain to me first how this is communism.
>>2360720Ok, let me rephrase it, could this kind of economic planning be implemented side by side with already existing capitalist economy?
>>2360809So the people working at these nationalized enterprises are paid with labor vouchers with which they can only get goods provided by the state. But goods by the state could only be from said nationalized enterprises which likely doesn‘t cover everything a person may need. To remedy this the state would start buying from private enterprises to provide said goods to people only paid in labor vouchers. The money for that either comes from tax payers using normal currency or from the state selling to other countries to then buy goods from private companies as to be able to provide these goods to people paid only in labour vouchers. That sounds cumbersome and unnecessary to me and would likely lead people to want to be paid out in normal currency instead.
Isn‘t this ultimately the Chinese system just with time based labour vouchers instead? If China doesn‘t use time based labour vouchers while existing under global capitalism then I‘m guessing the answer to your question is no.
>>2360680I don't see why not. not even the USSR was fully planned. we're going to have to deal with the market for possibly hundreds of years. it is important however that the thumb is put down hard on domestic Porkies
>>2360823speaking of China, does anyone know to what extent planning is used in the PRC today?
>>2360826From what I read there is no equivalent of "detailed" planning. Their main planning body is National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which sets long term economic goals. State implements its plans though tax cuts and subsidies towards favoured industries, regulations, monetary policy, public works. Pretty much the same as any other country, just to larger extend than most.
>>2360842in other words indicative planning? boo
>>2348685Arguably the public taking a share from what a diseased person owned (or even all of it) isn't a forced deduction from labor either. Have you ever heard a dead person protest against it?
>>2363523 (me)
FUCK. Meant to write:
Arguably the public taking a share from what a
deceased person owned (or even all of it) isn't a forced deduction from labor either.
>>2360680Cuba exists, you know? It's very similar to what you're describing.
Short answer is: no, you can't, since the global market will block you out due to your socialist economy. It happened *every single fucking time*.
>>2378272yugoslavia had some interesting differences and effects, i don't recomend people to just discart it away like some do.
>>2378272Also, from Wikipedia:
>The exact nature and extent of market socialism in Yugoslavia is debated by economists. The market mechanism was limited mostly to consumer goods, while capital, labor, materials and intermediate goods were allocated by different means.[33] The Yugoslav model didn't have much in common with the classic model of market socialism imagined by Oskar R. Lange. John Roemer, an advocate of market socialism, had a very negative view of the Yugoslav experiment, claiming that Yugoslav companies weren't run on true market principles of competition and profit, and that they instead relied on soft budget constraints and were subjected to political control, which created a deeply inefficient system that ultimately collapsed.[34] While admitting that it is somewhat problematic to use the term market in the context of socialist countries such as Yugoslavia or Hungary (after the introduction of New Economic Mechanism), János Kornai believed that the term market socialism is still appropriate because such countries at least partially experimented with markets under socialism which would otherwise remain only an abstract idea.[35] >>2378272>>2378282Mass unemployment as a permanent feature is "quite interesting". It brings out "interesting differences and effects".
bought arguments for socialism, has cockshott amended any of the ideas and arguments put through there since its publishing?
>>2379850great book, one of cockshotts best and one of the first leftist texts I ever read. Arguments for socialism has most of his core ideas that he later expanded in How the world works and other books and in new videos and lectures. The book itself is a compilation of articles.
>>2379773>repeating capitalist liesthe mass unemployment meme is fake you fucking retard, do you also believe soviets stood in bread lines for hours on end? why don't you start informing yourself?
>>2381337>the mass unemployment meme is fakeFirst time in my life I'm hearing this.
>>2378272nobody is talking about this, but a lot of yugoslav economy was mafia economy. Source: old yugoslav friend who tells me mafia stories
>>2381364wow it must be amazing to step out of the liberal microsphere
>>2382354Would you count books from the GDR as liberal? I assure you that statement about Yugoslavia was repeated all across the spectrum and still is. Do you dispute that millions of Yugos left the country to work in the West (that was decades before Yugoslavia's collapse)?
>>2378282>yugoslavia had some interesting differences and effects, i don't recommend people to just discard it away like some do.Yugoslavia model shouldn't be discarded on a scholarly basis. Especially since there's a market socialist tendency that is been advocated in modern day by left social democrats, and market socialists, without out taking in account the Yugoslav experience. Without study of the economic models of historical socialist or so called "socialist" countries, economic thought, and economic programs among socialist will remain underdeveloped.
>>2382763>Do you dispute that millions of Yugos left the country to work in the West (that was decades before Yugoslavia's collapse)?You keep repeating capitalist talking points, *literally* the same shit that was said about the USSR.
>>23834771. It's not a capitalist talking point if everybody is saying it. The formula of Pythagoras is not a capitalist talking point.
2. It's not mere saying but observation that millions of Yugos worked out of country.
>>2391826data are always imperfect. so long as you can estimate their accuracy this is fine
>>2391826>>2391829to a certain extent yes, but you need to roll out the planned economy gradually and build an observability function
The NumbersixerMarx:
<…the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htmAnd how do we increase disposable time? In no particular order:
1. We get rid of involuntary unemployment.
2. The former ruling class now also works.
3. We do thorough investigations into demand to avoid unwanted production.
4. We cooperate to reduce redundancies in production.
5. There are technological improvements (not a uniquely socialist point, but whatever).
Inspired by Lenin (or Engels or Trotsky), one might add another point:
6.
We enforce utmost discipline at work, military style.Is number 6 a sensible policy? Why do we want to minimize work time?
Because it sucks. Counterpoint: How much work sucks is not a fixed fact of life. Even that work has to suck at least a little bit is not a given, since people also do voluntary unpaid work in their free time.
The numbersixer might give in a bit and say:
OK, we won't need much discipline when working on luxuries, but everybody will work a short time in producing basics and that's where we need the discipline.But is that really logically necessary? Consider food (what could be more basic). Do you work as quickly as physically possible when preparing food, never pause, never chatter? Do you maximize calories produced per minute? A situation where we have to think like that is not inconceivable, it's just that I'm not in that situation and you who is reading this is probably not anywhere close to that either. For many workplaces it is easily conceivable that the work could happen at a different pace. It is not at all obvious to me how one can declare that the fastest physically possible pace must be the most rational way of doing things (not even Fred Taylor, the guy Taylorism is named after, advocated for maximal exertion).
The numbersixer replies:
You forgot the free time. Through maximum disciple you get maximum free time!There must be more to life than doing nothing! Or doing something completely self-directed alone in a tiny room. Like being able to influence your own working conditions even while working as a member of a massive group. I might actually prefer to work longer without more remuneration, but at slower pace. The socialist planning procedures ought to be flexible enough to deal with that, just like they ought to be flexible enough to deal with people working default pace choosing overtime or part-time schedule with corresponding changes in income (or just building up accounts for "stored" extra hours and emptying them later with monthly remuneration staying the same throughout).
>>2391955there's no gommunism button, no. we might make leaps from time to time if conditions are right
>>2391961just don't autistically hyperfocus on minimizing labour time. shortening the working week is probably a decent direction to go in. this gives more time for hobbies
>>2391955>>2391829Would it do any good to make the bot/algo now and kinda predict how things will turn out and how it could've been mitigated? Or would it be a waste of resources?
>>2392032we need the data first of all. without real data we'd just be engaging in mental masturbation
>>2391961I don't get this. It was always about "socially necessary labor time" which means the average of time needed to do a certain amount of work. Of course given more efficient technology and shit you'll be able to cut down on the time needed to produce something, but it doesn't mean that you won't allow "normal paced work". tbh this feels like a straw man
>>2392032the only data available to us is things like global market trading and stuff, but it's not enough
you would need intricate details on production of most companies, and the data is obviously not available anywhere
the best way to achieve this (besides revolution) would be to have one of us inside the financial department of each of the big corpos of the world, I don't see it happening
>>2394178>"socially necessary labor time" which means the average of time needed to do a certain amount of workBut anon, that's about the normal price of the product (that is disregarding gluts and shortages, sin taxes and other things I don't strongly feel about one way or another). The post is about remunerating the workers, which is something else. An example that illustrates this difference between setting prices and remuneration: It will not happen at once that some procedure for making a mass-produced item gets replaced by something superior using different machinery. So for some time people will work with the updated procedure and others with the old procedure. The item's normal price is then based on the two procedure's weighted average (each procedure weighted by number of units it produces). But the expectation of how productive a worker should be when producing said item will use at least two base standards, depending on where you work (the base standard expectation getting further modified by other issues like being old but still capable of work).
>it doesn't mean that you won't allow "normal paced work". tbh this feels like a straw manRead the post again. Of course there will be some standard of normally paced work. The point is that individuals should not be forced to work at one standard pace if it is technically possible to organize work at varying pace, which is almost always and everywhere the case, it just is a tiny bit annoying to do that organizing for the people with the decision power over that, which is why this often doesn't happen.
People on the radical left often dislike the idea of piece wages and they have some remarks by Marx they believe back up their position. But those remarks were about capitalism. If society is otherwise different enough (no threat of being unemployed for once, no threat of being homeless), then basing part of individual remuneration in individual output and allowing the worker a variation in pace can be better for me than administration exactly fixing my pace (even if at a humane level).
>>2392328Fair. Is it possible to do predictability. Take past trends and predict outcomes. Or is that just advanced masturbation
>>2394183What I fear (and to be fair a long way away) is you have the revolution, you want to that command economy but you would need to train on fresh data. I assume the data won't just be given, most likely destroyed. So you start with nothing and would have to build from there. Again, it happening is a low outcome from the jump. But never hurts to be prepared.
Xiamen University has a course on economic modeling in Python.
Cross-posting in case anyone's interested in studying along with me:
>>>/tech/30632>>2397676As someone who worked in IT oof yeah this hits hard:
> Tinkerer: Lives on the foothills. A worker who enjoys exploring the computer system, but maynot fully understand it.
> Programmer: Lives on the peaks. A guru who understands the system inside out. Has formaltraining or extensive experience in computing. The programmer may have an application
support role, but more often is not accessible to ordinary workers.
We were all tinkerers.
>>2399126a bit wishy-washy but the meta tool idea is interesting. ties into previous discussions about "modules"
>>2399127the idea of a planning bus is interesting
>>2399129>someone talking about actually existing planning rather than complaining about what they believe Soviet planning was likefinally some good fucking food
>>2399107Cockshott swinging for the Baristas being productive (rightly so) and saying what he has always been saying about the rate of profit and so on. I think I agree with everything. I would call this really good for newbies if the audio wasn't so ass.
>>2399126Watched them all.
Raphael Arar - "How to Plan an Economy: Speculative Tools for Democratic Economic Planning": Artsy-fartsy wank.
Stephan Meretz - "Dimensions of Planning in Commonism": He just postulates things like free access without giving a convincing reason why that would work. He has been going at it for more than twenty years, so I'm giving up on this guy ever making a useful contribution to anything.
Antoine Jourdan - "Democratic Economic Planning: Lessons from the French Post-War Experience (1944 - 1966)": That was okay.
>>2400052>IIRC correct I'm an idiot lmao
>>2399924>Stephan Meretz - "Dimensions of Planning in Commonism": He just postulates things like free access without giving a convincing reason why that would work. He has been going at it for more than twenty years, so I'm giving up on this guy ever making a useful contribution to anything.him and a couple of others are why I have very low faith in anything coming out of Germany
Had a brainfart about fixed prices, subjective preferences, and item sets.
Suppose people fill out forms about consumer items and what they are worth to them in communist play money. But the items have fixed prices. Since we can't read minds and don't have perfect planning, this will lead to gluts of some things and shortages of others. We can have buffer stocks of course, but these can't solve everything. The banal idea is to modify prices then.
It is well-known wisdom in capitalist society that prices bouncing around is freedoms and the more the prices are bouncing around the freedomser it is. But what if prices bouncing around is actually fucking annoying?
Maybe we can try something else before changing prices: We can ask people to evaluate consumer items and sets of consumer items (taking by default the set evaluation to be the sum of component evaluations unless otherwise specified). A person's evaluation of item A might be lower than its price and that individual's evaluation of item B might be higher. Suppose that person's willingness to pay for A & B together is at least equal to the default prices of A + B, then that person should be OK with receiving the set A & B for the sum of fixed prices of A + B if that's the last opportunity to get B.
So, doing offers of item sets for simply the sum of the component prices can be a way to deal with gluts and shortages while keeping prices fixed. But this does not always work out. Simple example: There is only one item everybody is willing to pay more than the fixed price, for everything else the subjective maximum price is lower than the reference price.
Looks like if such a mechanism is to be used at all, it will only be used for partial protection against price changes as a part of a bigger assignment mechanism that can have price changes.
>>2407574>Suppose people fill out formsno
>>2408109Breaking news: An economy requires information. If you don't provide information yourself, "experts" will decide what you consume.
We can fiddle with prices and quantities through a method of trial and error, and more breaking news for you here, trial and error is error-prone. It is very error-prone, because how many units sell at price X does not actually tell you how many units would sell at a price 20 % higher or lower. Reducing errors requires more information. We can dedicate time to stating preferences and plan more to avoid a bigger amount of time, and for the most part less pleasant time, of working and wasting natural resources by producing directly for the landfill.
>>2408554just have a fucking normal ordering system it's not hard. we can provide rebates to people who pre-order things since that makes planning easier. if we can quantify how much labour is saved by such preodering, even better
>>2408716>just have a fucking normal ordering systemAnd what people do for ordering and pre-ordering is filling out forms. And how do we get more information out of that? Why limit yourself to what is normal in this society at the moment? (Why even post here if you have that attitude.)
Check the INDEP Youtube page, they just got 31 new talks now! Each around 20 minutes.
>>2411452 (me)
Jan Groos and Christoph Sorg – "Creative Construction": Ugh, they are gesturing towards some slideshow, but the camera only shows the people presenting and there is loud backgrounds noise. I fear this will be the default for the whole lot (Update: Yes!). Anyway, extremely broad speech about having a discussion, OK as an intro to the whole project I guess.
Alfredo Olguin – "An Applied Perspective on the Economic Calculation Debate using neural networks": How to forecast stuff at co-op level. OK.
Ferdia O’Driscoll – "Beyond the Misconception of Socialism as a “Planned” Economy": Meh. He says people are unclear about what planning means to them. To me it means the tendency to increasingly figuring out beforehand what you will do. Of course there is some planning in capitalism. Of course not everything will be planned in socialism. Socialism is defined relative to capitalism. So to speak of things like democratic planning just means we will figure out more beforehand compared to in capitalism (I'm not giving an exact percentage here and I don't need to in order for this to be a meaningful statement). He seems to share the leftlib view: muh totalitarian regimes, global optimizing bad. He claims to not be for basically just co-ops with market relations, but it really seems to me this is what he wants and that he really needs to look into what people doing econophysics are saying about market mechanisms.
Ferdia O’Driscoll – "Understanding Rewards in Socialism using Self-Determination Theory": He defines class by income differences and is worried that income differences in socialism will generate classes 🙄 Otherwise good talk.
Thomas O’Brien – "Planning vs Political Economy":
This talk is shit from a butt. O’Brien asserts the USSR had classes without elaborating the point. O’Brien tries to dismantle Stalinist propaganda about the USSR without even knowing what the propaganda says, he's just making up what he believes it to be like and then criticizes that. Stalin's claim wasn't that markets don't matter because we are planning a lot beforehand. Stalin said because the agricultural sector is not fully integrated into planning yet (and that's a bad thing!) there still has to be market exchange.
O’Brien claims that Marx and Engels had no concept of central planning. Erm but Marx and Engels talked about using labor time instead of monetary accounting, a difference here is prices not having to bounce around to deal with supply and demand, and being able to get by without these adjustments requires highly centralized coordination, no? O’Brien even quotes Engels talking about society having
one single vast plan and tells you with a straight face that means something else!
There is a short bit in Capital Volume I where Marx talks about communism and it requires a big plan in his view:
<Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied after an agreed-upon plan as the combined labour power of the community.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htmI can tell you why O’Brien must have missed the bold part. Because it is not there in the English version! I just put it in myself because it is in the French version of Capital (dépensant, d'après un plan concerté, leurs nombreuses forces individuelles comme une seule et même force de travail social).
demand can already be predicted with big data. They know what youre going to buy so they just make the supply. its not demand and supply anymore its supplmand.
>>2411780here is a product by amazon to just do that as a source
https://www.databricks.com/solutions/accelerators/time-series-forecasting-genaikeep in mind this is done within a market economy which is way harder than a planned economy.
Alejandro Ruiz and Julia Zimmerman – "Information System Boundaries in Democratic Economic Planning": It's about the data schemas and the need to keep them up-to-date and how they simplify things. Super-basic but OK.
Alex Creiner – "Problems With the Money Signal and the Necessity for Planning in Kind": High-level stuff about capitalism in general running into a crisis because of the system's basic mathematical properties, inspired by Marx and Morishima. This might be the most important talk of them all, but it's really hard to follow without the slides.
Leone Castar – "Learning to See and Meet Human Needs in a Postcapitalist World". How to come up with a good measure of efficiency using the example of quick travel to show this gets very complicated. OK.
Jan Groos – "Playing Postcapitalism" annoucing a project (not even started yet as I understand it and still seeking funding) a new MMORPG with an alternative economy with the help of Walther Zeug, he talks a bit about inspiration from A Tale in the Desert and Eve Online. OK that sounds interesting, but the obvious question then is why not just cooperate with one of these existing projects instead of starting from scratch?
Walther Zeug and Jakob Heyer – "Holistic economic accounting for a cybernetic planned economy" Proposes huge imput-output matrix for all sorts of flows (that part is OK) and talks about universal basic services and things priced in multiple tokens ("three-dimensional prices)… Eeeeh. What's the point of free services? Stuff needs to be rationed because there is a limited amount of it. This limit exists in the sum of things. Turning this limit into an equal per-head limit is unnecessarily restrictive. Simply put, a selfish person who does not strongly care about using something might still use it because it is free to him. Another person might be very interested in using more, but runs against the personal limit. Pricing things solves this, with the caveat that we cannot allow massive income inequality. And one dimension for price is enough. Ask yourself: How to we stay within the aggregate bounds while allowing as much individual freedom within that as possible? And you will see that basic universal services and multi-dimensional prices for consumer goods make lives much more samey because these rationing methods reduce individual choice compared to the more simple policy of rationing by equal or roughly equal personal budgets.
Sam Bliss and Adam Wilson - "The unplanned magic of actually existing non-market economies" Talk about experience distributing food for free. Meh.
Mitchell Szczepanczyk and Jason Chrysostomou – "Annual Participatory Planning": Finally somebody working on software you can look at! He mentions something called
Participatory Planning Procedure Prototype (PPPP) which he says was the basis for what's in chapter nine of the 2021 book "Democratic Economic Planning" by Robin Hahnel (seems to follow neoclassical reasoning) and he tells you to check out his stuff on GitHub.
Mitchell Szczepanczyk – "Computer Simulations of Participatory Planning": More of the same and he talks about his newest stuff. Sounds promising.
Participatory Planning Procedure Prototype (PPPP, AKA Pequod):
https://github.com/msszczep/pequod2https://github.com/msszczep/pequod-cljshttps://github.com/msszczep/pequod-plus <-most recent and sophisticated version
Participatory Economics Classroom Simulation (PECS):
https://github.com/msszczep/pecsParticipatory planning app:
https://github.com/msszczep/par_planning_app>>2411687Tom has been spreading this reactionary nonsense for quite a while now. He recently posted a video where he agrees with Hayek, claiming that exchange value is good actually. Deeply unserious
There are a couple more INDEP talks and I'm still watching, but I'm not going to comment on all of them. There are several talks about care work and maybe I'm shitty for not covering those, but I just assume that people ITT lean male, young, and childless; and so don't care much about that (you see it's not me being sexist, it's you :P). At the end of her presentation Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault mentions an obscure idea from TANS (that chapter wasn't even in the first German translation!) about people living in bigger groups than traditional families and having some internal voucher system that covers internal work, which of course includes care work.
>>2413942Well if he finds the argument about tacit knowledge so compelling, he can just say that. But why all this passive-aggressive (and uninformed) shittalk about others. He claims Cockshott classifies the USSR as socialist just because of planning, but there is another reason: A bureaucrat did not really own a factory, so the bureaucrat could not sell it and the child of the bureaucrat could not inherit it.
Simon Sutterlütti – "Economic Planning: Learnings from the GDR": His childish mannerisms fit the content. To him, whenever there is some duty to work it's some sort of capitalism or whatever.
Johannnes Buchner – "Strategic Triangle of AI for Ecological Economic Planning in a Circular Economy": He seems like an interesting dude but AAAAAH MY EARS. He has an interest in
critical mathematical economics. Talk is a mess. He is fascinated by Alpha Zero learning to play Chess well just from the rules and playing against itself, but doesn't really make a clear bridge from that example to socialist economics (or maybe he did, and I could not hear him over the loud buzzing sound). He states an interest in the
Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem and how that relates to socialist economics. Well, he shouldn't just state he is interested in it. He should say instead: This result is proof that a big centralized auction for the resources and products has no termination guarantee, unless we put in
additional constraints that make it terminate (just thinking for a few minutes should tell you that, because not only is there no iron rule about the size of demand changes in relation to price changes, there isn't even an iron rule about the direction of these demand changes.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%E2%80%93Debreu_theoremFikret Adaman and Pat Devine – "Social Participatory Planning on the Question of Climate Crisis": They believe green taxes are a too naive approach because of complexities like social inequality etc. They don't like aggregating preferences of given fixed individuals with their given fixed opinions and emphasize
procedural rationality, people discussing things and solving things collectively.
My response: Yeah procedural rationality sounds nice, but how do you model that, so that you can actually distinguish between better and worse procedures of discovery and discussion? The most basic modeling of voting starts with a fixed issue and fixed voting options and people with fixed opinions about these options, which the voters simply state honestly. Then the next step is to think about strategic manipulation (voting for the lesser evil, making deals when voting on multiple issues). Much very precise thinking has been done here. But how to model people changing their stated opinion
because they actually change their opinion for real? How do we model people "unearthing" new voting options for how to deal with an issue? And how to model people "unearthing" new issues? Either you are a giga brain or you just give up on the math and do a vibes-based analysis. Or maybe let people try out some procedures and poll them on how they liked it.
>>2414410just buy the data from facebook
>>2414583Data about what?
>>2411687>Thomas O’Brien – "Planning vs Political Economy": This talk is shit from a butt. O’Brien asserts the USSR had classes without elaborating the point. O’Brien tries to dismantle Stalinist propaganda about the USSR without even knowing what the propaganda says, he's just making up what he believes it to be like and then criticizes that. Stalin's claim wasn't that markets don't matter because we are planning a lot beforehand. Stalin said because the agricultural sector is not fully integrated into planning yet (and that's a bad thing!) there still has to be market exchange.Tom O'Brien has taken a reactionary turn ever since he started hanging out with anti marxist parecon people who shill sraffianism and market socialism
>>2411452>>2411687not either of these anons but here are some thoughts:
>Jan Groos – Playing PostcapitalismMMORPGs take ages to develop. seems like a bad choice
>avoiding muh technocracygod I hate theorylets that use this word without understanding what it means
but yeah games are useful for propaganda. see for example half.earth
>Aaron Benanav – Constructing a Socialist Investment Functionlots of waffle to say that investment decisions need to be democratized
the bit about incommensurability is pretty good. Neurath makes similar points
>Thomas O’Brien – Planning vs Political EconomyTom is saying a bunch of nonsense right off the bat. for example, he is implying that the USSR wasn't democratic (it was far more democratic than any bourgeois dictatorship), that wage labour in itself is bad (even though him and Donal propose wage labour), and likewise with exploitation (even though all societies must produce a surplus product)
Tom also makes a big deal about Marx and Engels not talking about central planning. this isn't so surprising given that the technology to do so literally did not exist in their lifetimes, and hence it would have been literally unthinkable
>ex-ante is when there is no feedbackplease read some actual control theory, Tom, instead of arguing against straw men
Tom also seems to think that Soviet planning was a yearly thing, which it was not. the Parecon people also repeat this lie
>the problem with the market is exploitation, not exchangethis is so silly I don't even know what to say. exchange hides information. all aspects of a commodity is reduced to its price
>planning is not an economic categoryit literally is. that's the entire point of the planning debate. we wouldn't be talking about planned economies if planning wasn't an economic category. it's not an
exchange category, but that's also kind of the entire fucking point
>we should just have the right social relationsvague hippie nonsense
anyway this is just Tom repeating what he said in the other video that was posted ITT. I fully expect Tom to lib out in a year or two, since this line of reasoning ultimately leads to market "socialism"
>>2415610INDEP is kind of shit, we need a marxist alternative to this neoclassical econ parecon bullshit
>>2415181>Tom O'Brien has taken a reactionary turn ever since he started hanging out with anti marxist parecon people who shill sraffianism and market socialismTo me, Parecon appears much closer to what's in TANS. Parecon makes a big deal of federalism, but federalism still has a center. Parecon also has a notion of optimizing something. O'Brien is against the very notion of optimizing. He stated that on his podcast in a discussion with and in contrast to Tomas Härdin and he stated it again in some INDEP group video chat prior to the conference (Härdin was also present, but was silent throughout).
I have to confess I don't see at all how reading Sraffa leads one to have faith in market processes.
>>2415931Tom is against the concept of in-kind coordination altogether, not just optimization. he explicitly agrees with Hayek, probably because he doesn't know how Soviet planning actually worked. he's arguing against anti-communist lies about planning
we don't necessarily need to optimize - in the initial stages we might just do goal programming:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goal_programmingfinally, if we're not optimizing on say labor, then we're squandering it. in some cases this may be fine, but we should be explicit about it
>>2415610>Kyle Thompson and Joost Vervoort – Planning With the Troubledoesn't say much. seems to just present results from some workshop
maybe it would make more sense if the actual slides were in the video?
>Cecilia Rikap – From corporate and military planning to democratic planninganother talk that says very little. she just seems to talk about what a bunch of companies are doing
>AI AI AIsigh
>Andrew Reeves – Lessons for Democratic Economic Planning from Ecological Macroeconomicsseems like he's worked with input-output and economic modelling
>muh raw mass equivalentsoh god he's a Hickeloid. he even does the same spiel about concrete (not social) labor time being "appropriated" by the North
>muh degrowth>muh self-determination>muh noble savageat least he finishes by saying we need planning
>>2416835>Robin Hahnel – A Participatory Economy in briefjust regular old parecon. I ended up skipping it because if you've heard Hahnel once then you already know what he's going to say
>Iacob Gagné-Montcalm – A conceptual framework for understanding industrial sectors in Québechard to follow without the slides. but sounds like a way to understand industry in material terms, which is promising
>Jan Groos and Christoph Sorg – Creative Constructionneeds slides. but yes we could talk of planning as creative or even cooperative construction
>Simon Sutterlütti – Economic Planning: Learnings from the GDR<the GDR was capitalist because it had wage laboris it so difficult for these people not to smear past socialist experiments? if they've read Capital then they should know that to be capitalist an economic system has to have
private ownership of the MoPs. planning also means that exchange value does not play a major role, unlike a capitalist economy
the bit about soft budget constraints is decent. Kornai makes the same point I think
<we need to abolish wage labor right now!<people will do the right thing because.. they just will, ok?ultraleftism
>Bengi Akbulut – Organizing the field of needs: Planning for Social Reproductionyep, we also need to deal with the reproductive sector. this has been brough up in these threads many times
<What is the workplace?this is a really good question. Kollontai argued in favor of public creches and the like. we could imagine many more household tasks that could be made "cheaper" by socializing them. cooking could be socialized by communal kitchens. same with clotheswashing. we could go so far as to say barracks communism is good actually
>>2414410none of these guys even have a synonym for penis in their name
I think its time for everyone to admit INDEP is dogshit and we need an explicitly Marxist planning institute for new central planning
It's interesting to me how big tech has created this sort of paradox of capital. They discovered an infinite money glitch and now capital is reaching its zenith of concentration, precisely the the point at which it fails. With AI they are trying to eliminate all loose ends, the creator economy, software developer pay, as much white collar work as possible. Then what? The situation is much like a virus that became too darwinianly successful for its own good. It spreads until across the population until it kills off all its hosts.
>>2419109Beggars can't be choosers. I have no problem working with Parecon people.
>>2419109>we need an explicitly Marxist planning institute for new central planninggo found one then instead of whining here. but also it's important to attack incorrect ideas. we can't be too abrasive about it either, because then people won't listen. it's one thing to bitch ITT
>communist mmorpg
Unless you make it so people have to sit in lectures to become doctors in the game might as well skip the realism and just make it like neopets
>>2419251>They discovered an infinite money glitchAnd what would this glitch be? Please, I need money…
>>2415610>>Aaron Benanav – Constructing a Socialist Investment Function>lots of waffle to say that investment decisions need to be democratizedLast three minutes:
sortition bad; funding proposals with most votes should win. Feels like he only started thinking about these democratic procedures during his presentation. Bah! Sortition means selecting people by lot. He thinks that interferes with people organizing around an issue, but there are many ways of doing sortition and it is certainly possible to combine it with constraints, for example guaranteeing representing various age groups by segmenting the population into distinct lotteries. We can do likewise with self-declared group identities. And I think it would be horrific to make cultural funding dependent on majority decision rather than using a procedure that lets minorities still control a small share of the budget.
Jean-François Colomban – From the Socialist Calculation Debate to Ecological Economics
I have no comment really, but can anybody guess the German economist's name he is trying to say at 11:29 (sounds like "K-Paul Incel")?
>>2424969there are also cases where we
don't want democracy. democracy assumes a sufficiently educated and class conscious population. if this is not the case then aristocracy is the appropriate regime
>>2425294>democracy assumes a sufficiently educated and class conscious populationNot necessarily because you can learn by doing.
>>2425951how is this 5 MB?
>>2250715> How do you deal with military Ideally conditions would be that some chunk of the military defects to the communist side once they realize they're working for capitalists. Otherwise well civil war
>>2427333there's also military planning to consider. some of the DEP stuff goes out the window the moment you have to deal with spies
>>2426361NTA but it's animated and has a resolution of 758x2408 per frame but images no longer expand completely unless you open them in a new tab
>>2429464did you translate this yourself or by machine? I'm guessing by machine due to some amusing mistranslations
>svenska enkronor Swedish 1 SEK coins<Swedish unicorns>Marx<Marcus>5000 spänn 5000 SEK<05:00 bucks>det här kopplar this connects<this disconnects>fix:a korgar fixed baskets<fixer-uppersstill probably good enough to get the gist
INDEP put out a post-conference chat video.
My own thoughts on the INDEP conference: I found it extremely superficial. Everything was so short and nothing in-depth. Maybe they had some deeper discussions after the presentations, but only the speeches are online. And where are the slides?!?
I hope next time, they film everything with a triple setup:
1. one camera fixed on the speaker's platform
2. one camera fixed on blackboard/slides
3. one camera moving around
You only need one person for this, because camera one and camera two are really just fixed in place. Audio should be directly recorded from the speaker's microphone, but again, redundancy is important because the speaker might move away from the mic or their might be an interjection from the audience.
>>2429823>And where are the slides?!?the slides are on the website. but not all of them:
https://www.indep.network/recordings-of-talks-at-indeps-first-conference/>You only need one person for thisyou need someone to edit it too, or to operate OBS or something similar while the talk is going on, cutting between the cameras
>Audio should be directly recorded from the speaker's microphone, but again, redundancy is important because the speaker might move away from the mic or their might be an interjection from the audiencetotally agree
>Louis-Maxime Joly – Local currencies and inter-community monetary federalismmarket socialism. at least it demonstrates yet again that calls for "decentralized" planning amount to exchange
why do INDEP orgas think it's a good idea to keep bringing anti-planning talks to a conference about planning?
>Alfredo Olguin – An Applied Perspective on the Economic Calculation Debate using neural networks.more AI nonsense
>Ferdia O’Driscoll – Beyond the Misconception of Socialism as a “Planned” Economypoints out that we have imprecise language. which is true. the notion that we don't agree on what "the market" is is also interesting
>Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault – Bringing social reproduction in: informality, care work and provisioningbasically it's difficult to model care work for the purposes of planning, which I agree with. for some sectors we can do very little except assign a budget in terms of abstract labor. sometimes it is sensible to rationalize care work and sometimes it is not
>Alejandro Ruiz and Julia Zimmerman – Information System Boundaries in Democratic Economic Planningthere's no slides for this so it's hard to follow
>Gabriel Wainio – Materializing Information Sovereignty Between Earth and Cloudmostly concerned with energy efficiency of the IT infrastructure for planning
>Ferdia O’Driscoll – Understanding Rewards in Socialism using Self-Determination Theoryphilosophizing around motivation. rewards do be tricky. oh and more whining about hierarchies
>Audrey Laurin-Lamothe – Planning from carethe bullshit jobs statistics is interesting
>Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine – Social Participatory Planning on the Question of Climate Crisisparecon is the solution to the climate crisis. nothing new here. they think planning can be done via meetings. planning is to be done in aggregate, despite this being a bad idea (as demonstrated by Cockshott)
>Johannnes Buchner – Strategic Triangle of AI for Ecological Economic Planning in a Circular Economyterrible audio. quite a bit of irrelevant AI stuff. he seems to be referring to figures that are not in the slides. kinda meandering. the bit about viewing the economy as a game where "pre-products" (inputs?) are replaced with products (outputs I guess) seems to just be a needless discretization of technical coefficients
>Alex Creiner – Problems With the Money Signal and the Necessity for Planning in Kindfinally someone who actually understands control theory. he seems to have slides but they're not on the INDEP website. goes over his take on Marx' reproduction schema and his solution to it, based on the work of Morishima. he has a series of videos on YouTube about this
https://www.youtube.com/@TexTalksSometimeshttps://www.desmos.com/calculator/0a1w2hb91a^ this is the thing he uses for slides
>>2412231
>Simon Tremblay-Pepin – Meet me in the middle? Democratic planning from macro to micro and backvery meta. points out that we can't just have a single unit of account. emphasizes non-commensurability. also we need an institution to talk about our institutions
>Sam Bliss and Adam Wilson- The unplanned magic of actually existing non-market economiesI liked this talk. no slides. talks about small self-sufficient economies, gift economies, mutual aid food networks etc
attempting to mimic market economics in non-market economies leads to all kinds of weird stuff
giving food to people is cool and nice
personally I think there's a lot of foods we could just give away. but perhaps not foods like meat
>Leone Castar – Learning to See and Meet Human Needs in a Postcapitalist Worldwe can't regulate what we can't see. what we see affects what we do, so we have to be careful about what we measure and how we use those measurements. lingers too long on the transit example
TL;DW: optimization is easy to get wrong. it's better to iteratively improve on things
>Anders Sandström – Adding realism to the Participatory Economy Modelthe bit about disaggregation only being necessary when the costs of the constituent parts are different from the aggregate is interesting. unfortunately it seems he's talking about prices, not the actual inputs. besides this it's again just parecon
>Mitchell Szczepanczyk and Jason Chrysostomou – Annual Participatory Planningoh no the slides use the corporate artstyle!
progress report on some parecon prototypes. it's pretty cool to see them making progress, even if I am skeptical of some specific points in parecon
>Dominique Arsenault – Industrial Commons and Democratic Economic Planninga lot of anarchist stuff. points out that free software and open hardware are commons
>Mitchell Szczepanczyk – Computer Simulations of Participatory Planningcontinuation of the previous talk
the IFM stuff sounds like a better way of dealing with the coordination problem than the previous IFBs
>production functionsboo
>Walther Zeug and Jakob Heyer – Holistic economic accounting for a cybernetic planned economyno slides, but it sounds like the same three-dimensional prices that he's talked about before
>Jean-François Colomban – From the Socialist Calculation Debate to Ecological Economicsabout the works of Karl William Kapp. haven't seen Kapp mentioned ITT. he seems to agree with Neurath
>>2430795>>Alfredo Olguin – An Applied Perspective on the Economic Calculation Debate using neural networks.>more AI nonsenseIt's not nonsense. He got real-world experience. It's just that everybody now says "AI" instead of "Machine Learning". (And I just call ML "statistics".)
Placing link in relevant thread in case the OP with the link gets
https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/index.htm deleted for low effort OP
Recent developments in AI make me question my market based socialist views in favor of this science fiction communism.
>>2426361>>2429537another fact people sleep on is a gif is less optimized than a soundless mp4 and will usually be bigger
what is the problem of using ai for crunching numbers ?.
>>2431836most codecs are than gif, yes. especially ones that have had almost 40 years of development over it. but an mp4 doesn't work the same way in the browser. it's got a seek bar and stuff. it doesn't minimize again when you click it. completely unusable
>>2431826why did AI of all things make you finally snap
>>2431855>>2431826anon have you read TANS?
>>2425227finally watched this earlier tonight. very good.
>>2433539Why? They aren't exploited and they don't exploit… The problem (one of them lol) with the NHS from what I've heard is that while it's a single payer model, the supplies the NHS buys are from the market, where they charge the system way more than what medicine/products are actually worth, which is a big gimmie for big pharma. Sort of like how the Pentagon pay $100 for $1 bolts.
Revolutionary republicans: We don't need kings and nobles. Us citizens can rule society just fine.
Old socialists: The working class will directly administer civil society.
Modern people: Damn this shit is hard we need an AI God to do it for us.
>>2438716Stalin literally lamented about how this shit was hard and how all the incentives were perverse and he was an old Bolshevik. There's a reason Kantorovich won the Stalin prize.
>>2438716>Damn this shit is hard we need an AI God to do it for us.numerical linear algebra isn't AI its just doing a massive spreadsheet anon.
>>2433539another banger on cockshott's channel
What's the best Cockshott book to start? I've watched dozens of his videos, now I'd like to dig a little deeper.
>>2433539>total MD deathdid you even watch the video or did you just want to say something edgy
>>2439937Well Arguments for Socialism is his easiest, most accessible book and has all his core ideas. You'll be familiar with it if you've seen his videos cause plenty of Cockshott's videos are just little pieces of his books or blog posts. And Towards a New Socialism is more math heavy but his most iconic text.
>>2431826What's sci fi about it?
>>2275916you must be a euro, the closest thing to that in the states you can actually study is systems (or even industrial) engineering
>>2440516not gonna watch this trash, cybernetics is a bourgeois pseudoscience
>>2440889if you watch it you'll be treated to Tom absolutely butchering Marx, twisting Marxism into being pro-exchange. he's become the thread's favorite hate target lately
>control theory is pseudoscienceif you want good regulation of society then it behooves you to learn what makes for good regulation
>>2440516marxism already implies a correct understanding of the sciences, why is every youtuber some retarded grifter on god
>>2440940>good regulation of societyoh yeah definitely what communism and the proletarian class struggle are about, Efficiency(tm)
>>2433539>>2438612>all the bourgeois no matter how small or poor benefit in some way from capitalism thus have a stake in maintaining it (what relation to capital clearly means despite pseuds thinking its about only owning a literal store)>capitalism itself can only be sustained by the exploitation of the worker, proletarian or not<omg whats wrong with le petit bourgeois (from my personal moral pov) :((((retard
>>2441871efficiency is important, but that's not my point. you need control theory in order to bring any given system (society) near some set point (decent QoL within environmental bounds). sometimes that may mean a departure from "efficiency". for example, we may keep reserves of strategic resources even though doing so is "inefficient", because it makes the system more robust
>>2442007because hes british
>>2442007nah man, cockshott's whole point is that elections are outdated and a dead-end
Third part of the series of vids about British doctors is out on Cockshott's channel. IMHO the most interesting part is about the history of doctors going on strike in Britain (12:48 to 14:27).
>>2442007Electoralism puts an aristocracy in power and is very well suited to bourgeois class rule
>>2446754very waffly. but it's fun to hear him point out that the TPS is not the end-all-be-all
>>2446754Guy sounds like a wanker (labor time accounting is a trauma response hurrdurr). He mentions the works of Eliyahu M. Goldratt. We actually had threads for reviews of management books (back in 2019 on 8chan/bunkerchan) and Goldratt's stuff was among those books. I have no idea if anyone archived those threads. Anyway, a bias of Goldratt's stories was that he really assumed the bottlenecks to be stubborn and stick in the same place for days, whereas in reality you really can get to the point that the bottleneck switches positions after a few minutes. By the way, Goldratt got into legal trouble for making false optimality claims about his management software.
>>2440889>not gonna watch this trashwhy announce your intention to not do something?
>cybernetics is a bourgeois pseudosciencewhy? elaborate.
>>2447108Roger is a contrarian, but at least he admits that he is
>Anyway, a bias of Goldratt's stories was that he really assumed the bottlenecks to be stubborn and stick in the same place for days, whereas in reality you really can get to the point that the bottleneck switches positions after a few minuteshence why you want inventory as a safety margins. the TPS people are autistically against that
>>2447210Lean production is for overall low inventory, not zero inventory. It's also not really a goal to cut inventory equally in every place (that would be autistic), but to cut inventory in the big picture. Achieving this might involve actually increasing inventory in some spots or even creating inventory spots where there aren't any currently.
My impression of Tom O'Brien is that he really has a very one-sided and extreme view of DA POWAH OF LEAN because he just read texts introducing it and he stays in the hype zone of the early convert for longer than a manager would, simply because he is not a manager. Without the real-world check, you have to be much smarter and very self-critical to learn at the same pace as a dumb person trying it out for real.
>>2448076>Lean production is for overall low inventory, not zero inventory. It's also not really a goal to cut inventory equally in every place (that would be autistic), but to cut inventory in the big picture. Achieving this might involve actually increasing inventory in some spots or even creating inventory spots where there aren't any currently.this is still ass-backwards. your need for inventory depends on how accurate your model of the production line is, and how much variance (noise) there is. if you
know what a bunch of work stations in a production line will do, and the probability that they will keep on doing that, then you should be able to work out the appropriate level of inventory so as to keep costs down while maintaining steady throughput. if inventory is cheap enough then using more of it is no harm, so long as you have proper regulation
one question I find myself asking is how can this lean stuff actually be instrumentalized? how is the necessary politics brought into it?
>he really has a very one-sided and extreme view of DA POWAH OF LEANhis zeal is very strong, yes. the same goes with his views on Marx, since they too are detached from reality
It wouldnt be socialism as no one would have to work. Unless you start advocating for the robot rights.
>>2457826>The principle of exploitation is as straightforward as the principle of its abolition. The abolition of wage labour can only be achieved by abolishing the separation between labour and its products, and by returning the right to dispose of these products, and thus the means of production, to the workersby "the workers", does the author mean the workers at a particular workplace, or the working class as a whole? if the former, then it's the same reactionary nonsense we see from anarchists and market "socialists"
>The enforcement of labour-time accounting, i.e. the use of individual labour-time as a measure of a worker’s share in the product of socially averaged labour-time, makes exploitation impossible and leads to the socialisation of the means of productionthis seems to imply that non-workers (the sick, the elderly) should have no share in the surplus product, and indeed that no surplus product should be produced. how they imagine investments should be handled is not clear
>Without this foundation, any attempts to reorganise the labour process would rely on moral appeals or administrative orders instead of decisions made by the associated producers themselvesapparently "administrative orders" and "decisions made by the associated producers" are different things in these people's heads. this reeks of cold war anti-communism
>This concept is intended to prevent two undesirable developments: […] 2) The state-communist danger of the central apparatus treating the operational units as passive executors of its directives.this reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Soviet (and Chinese etc) planning
>In capitalism, accounting in value terms is the private record of capital’s command over labour; in council communism, accounting in socially-average labour hours is the public record of the producers’ command over their own work and product.<if I change the names of things (value -> SNLT) then I have changed the things in themselves!at least the public accounting bit is decent though. it's the one actually good thought the GIC has produced. it's a shame it's hidden among a bunch of much
as expected the text has nothing to say about Neurathian pseudorationality. apparently labour time accounting and talking is enough to deal with global warming
>>2457850>by "the workers", does the author mean the workers at a particular workplace, or the working class as a whole?The latter. Hermann Lueer is the number one promoter of the GIK text in the world so he has the same take as them.
>this seems to imply that non-workers (the sick, the elderly) should have no share in the surplus product, and indeed that no surplus product should be producedDon't be silly. Professional caretakers get remuneration and there is a deduction for that (and for people doing R & D and other stuff) and that logically means that the individual worker cannot own their output as an individual. This is covered in the GIK text.
>global warmingThe GIK text is almost a century old by now.
>>2457986>Don't be silly. Professional caretakers get remuneration and there is a deduction for that (and for people doing R & D and other stuff) and that logically means that the individual worker cannot own their output as an individual. This is covered in the GIK text.then why tf do they feel the need to point this shit out? there's no need to spill ink over saying that the DotP is when the proletariat decides things. it just strikes me as arguing against straw men
>The GIK text is almost a century old by nowyes, but none of the people who cite it do anything to address global warming. global warming is also far from the only such concern. see Neurath, who was writing about planning in the late 1910's and early 1920's. or the Soviet debate, which was very lively
Pinned tweet by @BenBurgis
<On Saturday, September 13th I'll be speaking on a panel on post-capitalist blueprints at the @jacobin conference in NYC
AFAIK he shills for market socialism. I don't know if he is familiar with the critique of that using money distribution models of econophysics.
>>2477554I've come to the regretful conclusion that 2/3rds of people advocating for "planning" are just market socialists in disguise
if you ask chat gpt to apply category theory to economnics it basically starts talking in marx-like terms even if you never mentioned marx to it before
>>2477677The word "twink" has become completely fucking meaningless.
>>2488453COCKSHOTT OR BUST
BYE
>>2477554BEN BURGER IS CRINGE LIB
>>2488453I have no idea why Tom is so hellbent on shilling Toyota methods in socialism, in general the world has been moving away from JIT production since the pandemic, if Tom thinks pull production methods are some panacea I have seen them in action in software engineering for a good breakdown of why they are wrong see this
>>>/tech/26448 >>2488860the true genius of toyota is not JIT production, its using your dominant position and subcontracting to squeeze the subcontractors hard and drain all the profit. Its a model also used in the supermarket industry and franchising in general, subcontract the actual stores to "independent" managers who own it, but control the supply and central procurement and get all the profit. Small owners are very good at exploiting their employees (and themselves) harder than a big company could (because they face harsher regulation, taxes, and more easily organized labor, its the small business advantage against big company who get economy of scale)
(I once wanted to translate this excellent article to post it, but now that AI can do it for me, I will simply post the link)
https://www.econospheres.be/Delhaize-le-gout-amer-du-vrai-capitalisme >>2488453At 11:49 there is a statement from AcidCommunistAachen that in
Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx endorsed unequal hourly remuneration under socialism, that is the quantity of your individual output is remunerated on the basis of how many hours it takes on average for people with the
same job to achieve this.
I think this is a bit imprecise. What is the same job? New and improved tools are not instantly available to everybody in sufficient quantity, so some will work with outdated tools. Your performance should be judged relative to people working with the same tools. So for remuneration, we will have several standards on the basis of using old or new tools. (But when it comes to the price of the output, we will pool the processes with the old and new tools together for averaging.) I do believe that the person agrees with what I'm saying here.
O'Brien points out the distinction between producing more due to differences in technology and due to different natural endowments. It is clear that he doesn't like rewarding natural endowments. He tries to make this point by interpreting Marx correctly, using the same passage in CotGP. He notes that there is a common "misinterpretation" of the text, a "basic mistake" and that it actually aligns with his position. I'm a native German speaker and it's clear to me that O'Brien is misinterpreting it. This guy who can't read German refers to Andrew Kliman, another guy who can't read German, on how to interpret Marx. (He is confident in his position, so he could and should just state it without reference to the authority of Marx. He actually seems to come to this insight right after the Kliman shilling.) O'Brien claims rewarding natural endowment would stratify society. Yeah OK sure. He illustrates this with a society pyramid with slaves at the bottom and a literal pharaoh on top! Now that's what I call a basic mistake. If there is no extraction mechanism that takes from the bottom and gives to the top, you don't have a class society.
He seems against remunerating unpleasant labor for more, claiming this has been gamed in communes, so time and again these people have come around to chore rotation. So his argument is: If it can't even work on a small scale, why would it work on a big scale? Now any mainstream economist can tell you that's a silly argument because it's easy to game a tiny market compared to a thick market with many participants. We can say the same about voting procedures that look very different from what we normally call a market. A solution of equal chore rotation of course does not require weighting the chores, but equal duties are not feasible when there are many different tasks. For organizing production on the big scale, there is no way around weighting arduous work, irrespective of whether that information is used for different remuneration or for equalizing the "weight" of different packages of concrete chores.
For the rest, I agree with him: For complex labor, we can add the training time to the produced output. We can put a physical use-limit per year on a natural resource and use demand data to increase its price accordingly or set its price somewhat arbitrary fashion and this is neither abandoning labor-time accounting in the big picture nor against Marx and Engels. O'Brien quotes Engels in support of still having rental payments:
<Just as the abolition of property in land is not the abolition of ground rent, but its transfer, although in a modified form, to society. The actual seizure of all the instruments of labor by the working people therefore does not at all exclude the retention of the rent relations.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch03.htm Would creating a cybernetic system of economic organization to achieve communism, but one which in a way enslaves humanity to this system of machines, be an advancement towards communism that simply leaves us with a new contradiction to overcome, or a tragic mistake that could have been avoided? What mechanisms of avoidance are there? Is there any theory on this that isn't bourgeois?
>>2488941>the true genius of toyota is not JIT production, its using your dominant position and subcontracting to squeeze the subcontractors hard and drain all the profitTRVE and HONEST gommunism
>>2488860>I have no idea why Tom is so hellbent on shilling Toyota methods in socialismit's because what Tom is saying is deeply reactionary. he
explicitly agrees with the Austrians. specifically Hayek, as has been pointed out ITT many times
Donal as far more interesting. I don't understand why he attaches himself to Tom
>>2488987class struggle sharpens in communism
>>2489137>class struggle sharpens in communismCan you link me some theory on this
>>2482838fr. bro looked masculine. just shaved
>>2488987>one which in a way enslaves humanity to this system of machinesbut what does that imply?
>>2489350A cybernetic system which is set in stone and not flexible enough or subject to change, or one which becomes too abstract and over generations people forget the theory behind how it works necessary to know how to properly evolve it
>>2488453I find it really funny that around 30:30 Tom just flat out admits that labor time accounting is the same as money accounting
>picrelis Tom a clangfag?
>>2488958>This guy who can't read German refers to Andrew Kliman, another guy who can't read German, on how to interpret MarxI only read a little bit of German, and even I have come up with multiple places where the English translations don't do the original text justice. this is why it's important not to treat Marx as some kind of prophet. especially since Marx is wrong in many places
what I think O'Brien is doing is using Marx to try and justify his own eclectic views. except of course where Marx' words directly contradicts O'Brien's views
If/when this site dies, is there presently a single other community on the internet that is capable of having this Marxist cybernetics discourse like this thread?
I thought CASPERForum at first would be it, then it went offline
Then I thought indep.network would, but got overridden by the parecon libsocs.
Could cibcom.org be convinced to add a forum to their website? Is there some corner of Lemmy or Mastodon I'm unaware of? We need something concrete. I hate this loosey-goosey situation we're in right now, as imageboards / leftypol shrinks every year, Reddit constantly purges far-left /r/, lemmygrad is spearheaded by red socdems, Tiktok just got bought by zioyankees… I'm NOIDing comrades.
>>2489622cibcom was moving towards an international section for a while I think, but indep becoming a thing probably put a damper on that
we probably need to struggle within indep
>>2489622Idk, but just in case someone thinks he need to set up a web server, availability, all that, which will cost some money.. I found syndie.de, it is not a customization of a web browser. It is a program, like a forum. But everyone can make a mirror AFAIK. It supports https, i2p. If you worry someone will DDOS your home computer, keep an i2p mirror, although I'm not 100% sure it will save you from an attack.
>>2489635running a forum isn't terribly difficult. bots are an issue though, but it can be handled by having a custom question during account setup, like asking who wrote Capital
Jenny. Anubis can take care of some of the DDOS nonsense
>>2488860>I have seen them in action in software engineering for a good breakdown of why they are wrong see this >>>/tech/26448oh god I fucking hate agile with a passion. I thank GNU every day that I can work on projects that have a spec up front and a fixed price
>>2488987>that simply leaves us with a new contradiction to overcomeyou can't escape this, no matter the system
>>2489325what even is this shit, fuck off
>>2491066do not besmirch Ian Wright (pbuh), the Prophet of Capital
>>2489325watched this earlier. there's a bunch of good stuff in there. didn't know Wright is working on a book
>>2491066lol is this the best that counter revolutionary science can come up with these days.
>>2510951holy shit if anyone know anything about this, your time has come
also props to the one guy who made a compilation of all the noises in his vids, Im somehow convinced this is thank to him
>>2510951almost any mic with a pop filter and a boom arm should do. and with a cordoid pattern. mine can be switched between omni and cordoid
>>2511182it's a treasure
>>2521582>What the fuck can we do while we wait for something to change?Go to venezuela.
>>2521589>just go to a "red" succdem countryyeah I don't think that'll change anything bro
>>2489655yeah anubis doesnt really stop ddos, it just stops bots on one site its not a replacement for global CDN and cybersecurity infrastructure with like 100s/1000s of guys on staff whose full time job is to identify and mitigate ips being used for DOS. At best anubis will prevent low level botting not true DDOS
Thoughts on Viktor Novozhilov?
>Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov (Russian: Ви́ктор Валенти́нович Новожи́лов) (27 October [O.S. 15 October] 1892 – 15 August 1970) was a Soviet economist and mathematician, known for his development of techniques for the mathematical analysis of economic phenomena. He was awarded the Lenin Prize (1965) and served as head of the Laboratory for Economic Assessment Systems at the Leningrad office of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Valentinovich_Novozhilovhttps://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/novozhilov.htmI'm reading through pdfsrel
>>2523950rare cock. where is it from?
>>2510951paul's real problem isn't just his microphone, but he records at too low a volume. youtube normalizes it if you go too high, but if you go too low youtube doesn't do anything. he records too low and then you have to turn it way up. if you forgot to turn off autoplay you get ear raped by whatever comes after him.
>>2524279>post your rarest cockshere are some rare ones. also who is the dame?
>>2524301he also seems to never do retakes
There is a new video on the INDEP youtube channel:
Talk with Al Campbell - Protagonistic Planned Socialism (PROPLASO) and Human Development26 minutes in he repeats the usual hysteria by mainstream economists about voting: He claims Arrow's Impossibility Theorem shows the impossibility of aggregating ranked preferences into a group preference in a way that the result is fair and rational according to specific technical-mathematical demands… Hrrrrmpf I hate when people talk like that. Arrow's theorem really showed the impossibility of
guaranteeing such a result, saying nothing about the probability of that actually happening aside from it being above zero. So I'm checking Campbell's paper
Moving Beyond Capitalism (2022) on his website
https://dac27.ch/ and there he actually correctly states that "no aggregation process can always guarantee" such result and that there is a "search for procedures that are “as good as possible.”"
Well IMHO this search is pretty much over since we arrived at methods that satisfy something called Independence of Smith-Dominated Alternatives. Schulze Condorcet and MAM (Maximized Affirmed Majorities) are about as good as it gets, since they also give you reversal symmetry, independence of clones, and mono-raise. Look up that stuff, you will enjoy it (if you got Autism).
What Campbell does both in that paper and his talk is that he distances himself from the standard assumption of socially atomized people with fixed opinions. He seems to believe that social interactions strongly reduce the frequency of the problem Arrow pointed out (perhaps even reduce it to nothing?), but in neither paper nor talk does he actually model that. That said, it's intuitive enough to imagine
some reduction if we believe that talking to each other tends to make views more similar.
Pretty vague overall and he seems to have no algorithms.
>>2526753watched the talk the other day, seemed to me to be a whole lot of nothing.
>>2523950>>2523967man he sounds so much younger here even though it's just 6 years ago
uh oh planningsisters, the anarchists have published a
critique of us
https://www.indep.network/new-book-provides-an-anarchist-critique-of-cybersocialist-theories-and-visions/>Academics Rhiannon Firth of the University College London and John Preston of the University of Essex have published a new book Utopia in the Factory: Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics that critiques the theories and visions of techno-optimistic socialists that are based on cybernetics, automation, artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 for being unable to include human forms of creativity and working practices both theoretically and practically.it might be more accurate to say that the book aims its critique at Klaus Schwab (
friend of the thread!). TANS is not mentioned at all
>Cyberneticians assume a tight correspondence between humans and machines. While there is no resistance or feedback, the two had the potential to form a single entity or ‘black box’. For both mechanic or organic devices, the principle is that it is more important to observe what things do, their outputs or behaviours, rather than to grasp their inner workings (Beer 1981).this is interesting because the Internal Model Principle (née Good Regulator Theorem) states the complete opposite
this bit gave me a bit of a chuckle:
>[Cybersyn] was built in close collaboration with Stafford Beer based on his Viable Systems Model (VSM) and consisted of a network of telex machines that would monitor key production indicators on material supplies and worker absenteeism. This attempted to correct anomalies by alerting workers or in more drastic situations by sending information to the central government. Decisions on responses to emergencies would be made by managers in a centralised Control Room, with directives issued via the telex network. This illustrates how cybernetics, despite seeming to operate according to a decentralising logic, also embedded monitoring and top-down control functions: workers were expected to behave in ways that were modelled and planned, with deviation reported upwards and directives cascaded downwards.indeed it is rather funny when people in the planning debate use Cybersyn as a counterpoint to supposed "command economies" like the USSR, despite the Cybersyn control room being literally modeled after RAF Bomber Command
>>2528370I have only poked around in the book for a few minutes, and my superficial impression is that they are irrational and in the grand scheme of things ultimately useless/reactionary romantics, like
William Morris. They don't define tacit knowledge as knowledge that isn't formalized, but as knowledge that CANNOT be formalized. Then they point at every place and announce:
This place must be full of tacit knowledge.>TANS is not mentioned at allBut AARON BASTANI'S
Fully Audomaddig Luggsury Gommunism xDD gets analyzed so you know this is some serious scholarship.
>>2528925the notion that knowledge can't be formalized/quantified is not unique to these clowns, unfortunately
>>2528370This book is crap.
Also, they have a problem with "vanguardism" whatever that means. Anarchists tend to confuse cybernetics with managerial science.
They are also very retarded.
IT"S OVER PLANNING SISTERS.
AN ANCAP HAS DEBUNKED CENTRAL PLANNING!!!
>Also unironic milei supporterhttps://www.youtube.com/@WhatIsNotSeen>>2528966I have an anarchist cousin. Knowing the guy personally made me hate anarchism in a way which transcends theory, philosophy etc. It makes me sick,
>>2529125You gotta elaborate my dude. Spill the deets.
>>2511592he said he's running out of things to talk about :(
he's also very oldwe have to carry the torch!
>>2528966what do we reckon the odds are that this John fellow hasn't read On Authority?
>they have a problem with "vanguardism" whatever that meansprobably Leninism
>>2529029oh boy retard kino
>>2529354at least he doesn't feel the need to talk more about the gays
>>2529029the funny thing about the line of reasoning this video puts forth is that it's nearly identical to what the GIC people argue
I prefer an anarchist critique of cybersyn to dengoids saying it isn' possible cause "material conditions" and "gdp".
>>2529430China plans its economy THOUGH. So many think the PRC == its SEZs but it's not.
>>2529436to which extend do they even plan? do you have any books or something to read?
>>2529568good question. here's the 14th 5-year-plan, I think:
https://digichina.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/DigiChina-14th-Five-Year-Plan-for-National-Informatization.pdfthese are only 17 targets. undoubtedly these are broken down at the regional level
>>2529615oh and these are investment plans/goals. investment planning and day-to-day planning are different things
>>2529419>GIC What's that?
>>2528370>Schwab You intended to be sarcastic. I'm sorry, but it falls a bit flat.
File one.
>>2529436That's not what central planning in the context of Marxism is.
File two.
Wake up, comrades.
>>2529643MZT is a dead ideology, much like Karl Marx Thought is. Marxism is constantly evolving, so it is no surprise that the CPC is as well
>That's not what central planning in the context of Marxism is.the word "planning" has multiple meanings. the CPC has rejected the
old method of planning. that doesn't mean it has rejected planning. there are
new methods of planning yet to be implemented
what we will need to do is come up with is methods to fully centralize planning. this was not possible in the 1920's, nor in the 1950's, when the USSR and the PRC respectively instituted their planning systems. these were systems of the old kind. they were highly decentralized. they used aggregate indicators and disaggregation of arrived at allocations to make the planning process tractable. today we would not do this. today we have the IT necessary to 1) fully centralize planning and to 2) fully disaggregate planning. we would also not cuck to exchange by substituting planning with exchange as the Liberman reforms did. attempts at doing so must be combated
despite the call for disaggregation above, there will unavoidably be many goals set in aggregate terms. it is not possible for any decision body to decide on every little detail everywhere. what we
can do is set goals like "increase rail transport capability by 50% by 2030". this is an aggregate constraint. the details of this would need to be handled by railway workers. but said details must also go into the one, single, global, centralized planning system, so that the exact need for say steel for rails can be checked against production capabilities and against environmental constraints and so on. the long term effects of say concrete vs wooden sleepers must be evaluated against this singular planning system. any attempt at "decentralizing" such a process always amounts to exchange
can we out-compete capitalism somehow using cybernetics? kind of like the bourgeoisie did with capitalism?
>>2529887there is potential to create something that is better at regulating production than capitalism is. Capital has various blind spots. Capital also likes to create crises
>>2529643Should we expect communist states to change the entire global mode of production at a moment's notice? Honestly, I dunno if Cuba, China, and DPRK combined have the means.
Cybernetic economic planning is already being used by the world bank via linear regressions and optimized via ai. Demand forecasting also turns big data into big business. All of this is autism that could be channeled towards making you look like a quant wallstreet big shot.
Cockshott is working on a new book about geometry and computing btw.
>>2269973Yup, he is a member of the CPB, as of about 2023 I believe.
t. CPB member
>>2529436>China plans its economy THOUGH.Indicative planning, not directive planning of the Soviet type.
>>2546530true, China uses indicative planning
>>2523747three chapters in. so far it's good stuff
>>2524279Crap. That's super dapper and lady looks fine too.
>>2551667nothing new in this talk
>>2551671I was a bit worried when I heard "foo-bar partnership" thinking they were talking about public-private partnership. which of course they aren't
On the
Beyond Capitalism papers by Aaron Benanav. I read that so you don't have to.
https://www.aaronbenanav.com/papersThe first part is about the stuff he read. The second part is about the actual proposal. In total over a 100 pages. 5 pages would have been enough IMHO. I think you should definitely skip the first part (I also think he misrepresents Lange/Lerner as wanting just a big central auction for everything). Or maybe skip both papers and listen to the podcast instead at 2x speed:
https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e50-aaron-benanav-beyond-capitalism-i/https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e51-aaron-benanav-beyond-capitalism-ii/IMHO the podcast is better as it also covers his idea for transition in the last half hour, which didn't make it to print.
He got no algorithms. He is definitely not a vanguard-party guy, he likes elections with proportional representation, sortition, and direct democracy, and isn't entirely sure about which parts these should play exactly.
He wants to break the automatic m-c-m' cycle by separating consumer spending (he calls that system "credits") and spending of pseudo-firms (calling that "points"). He notes similarity with the Soviet Union in separating that, but wants to be more thorough about it. He has an idea that if there is a bottleneck for a certain skill, pseudo-firms should have to bid higher to fill such a position
without that extra pay going to these employees. He distinguishes between day-to-day spending of the pseudo-firms and investments for expansion or changes in production, these being a more serious issue that must involve some committee (was it elected or sorted, hmm I don't remember), so not really an internal decision anymore.
He is somewhat inspired by Neurath (indeed there seems hardly anybody in these debates he is not inspired by) in that he is against a one-dimensional accounts of the good. He does believe it is a lesser sin to think of costs as one-dimensional. I don't think Neurath would have followed him in that. He talks much about the pseudo-firms having hard budget constraints. He wants these budgets to work in one direction only, so there is no personal gain for staying far away from the constraint. I can kinda see where he is coming from. When you have left-over money to blow that is earmarked for only improving what you supply, you will probably get ideas how to improve things after some thinking. If it's really open-ended what you use the money for, I bet people are very eager to jump to the conclusion that the quality is as good as it can possibly be, so the extra money goes to personal consumption.
Given that in this system there is a ton of decisions to make and the system easily provides you with the data that is really suggestive for capitalism-style decisions, I think there is a constant threat of lazy decision-makers going auto-pilot and so making the results resemble capitalism. "Ahem comrades, should we really not incentivize people against wasting resources? What's wrong with a
small bonus for reducing costs? Just look at the costs in play-money, then apply a simple formula based on the size of what's left over." Next year: "People would be better incentivized to reduce waste, if we paid a bigger bonus for that…"
In his hodgepodge of ideas he also got UBI, and some free services and goods. I have to say I think making free what actually costs something to provide is usually a dumb idea, but looking at his examples I think he is thinking mostly here of providing free of charge those things with high fixed costs and low variable costs, so that's OK with me.
>>2555984it's following a persistent pattern
>someone published a proposal for "planning">look inside>exchange.txtit's also not clear how the exchange rate between Credits and Points is to be established and maintained
the Data Matrix is a good idea if we take away the "AI" nonsense. similar ideas have been floated ITT over the years
>>2556094>it's also not clear how the exchange rate between Credits and Points is to be establishedBenanav's point is that there isn't supposed to be any. There is sales data for consumer products and committees are supposed to make decisions how to allocate funds to the pseudo-firms taking that data into account as a part of a more holistic view. And even if the committees are lazy and establish some default rules about how the consumer spending to the pseudo-firm is translated into a budget for the pseudo-firm, I'd rather call that a
transformation rate or something like that because nobody can go to a bank and turn one kind of play-money into another. No matter how bottom-up and democratic decisions are made at the level of the pseudo-firm, the people there have to deal with an
already fixed split of the budget into salaries and other stuff.
>>2557169Man I wish I understood maths better.
Conceptually, this is easy to follow. The maths? Incomprehensible, may god have mercy on your soul.
>>2557077I understand that the idea is that production and final use are to be kept separate by different kinds of money. the USSR did the same. this has very little to do with planning however. in the USSR post 1965 prices were computed for MoPs and a special type of ruble was used for monetary accounting in investment and production. crucially, these prices were computed on the basis of the planning system already in place. how does Benanav propose a sane price vector is to be arrived at?
>>2557489>the USSR did the same.Yeah Benanav acknowledges that the separation into distinct system of pseudo-money also happened in the USSR.
>how does Benanav propose a sane price vector is to be arrived at?No algorithms are specified anywhere and the only role he sees for algorithms is for visualizing tradeoffs in kind to people who then go make their decisions. Committees grant budgets to the pseudo-firms. The pseudo-firms cannot set salary levels, but they set the prices for their products by fiat. The pseudo-firms bid for resources with their special play-money. I suppose some committee can also slap a green tax on this or that resource.
>>2557169He says value is only really defined for the sum of the parts of the joint product. A POV seen time and again on /leftypol/ including the cybernetics threads and even including literally the iteration you are reading right now. See:
>>2297068>The products coming out of a joint process have to justify their production cost together. That means their sum of prices must yield a certain amount together, but this can be split between these products in any way as long as the amount they have to make together is met. We can think in extremes…So the quantity of work going into one of the outputs of a joint process is to be thought of as the range from zero to all the work of the joint process; if you want to think about this at all, that is. By default, we look at the joint product as a whole.
(But note that the scope of that particular post is broader than Wright, who limits himself to the processes in their empirically given proportions as they are used, whereas that post is reckoning in counterfactuals about combinations of all known production processes to come up with upper and lower bounds for production cost.
We actually had an entire thread about joint production that would have been a better reference, but it's not archived.)
I find it a bit weird that Wright says at the end some guy figured it out in the 1970s even though Wright himself said right at the beginning that this is also basically the POV of JS Mill.
>>2557700Doesn't this throw a wrench into planning methodologies that utilize costs themselves as a price target for optimization such as Cockshott?
>>2557637mhm. so how are prices that are in line with the political goals of the system to be arrived at? by magic? or are workplaces to be allowed free pricing? if so, how are appropriate prices to be arrived at such that for example greenhouse gas emissions become negative?
>>2557842Cockshott doesn't use costs for planning I think. costs only come into play for price formation on final goods. so the problem remains, just not in production, only distribution, because Cockshott assumes Marxian values
>>2557844>Cockshott doesn't use costs for planning I think. He says the target of production ought to be that consumer prices match the production cost. If production costs (in labour time, ie value) cannot be objectively determined, and the range is between 0 and something else, how would he determine a valid target?
His whole approach already is quasi law of value ie it's just emulating capitalist distribution of labour, but with this he can't even do that as there is no way to determine the objective cost of a product, just an absurd range when taking all possibilities, or a narrower but still large range if taking the actual current distribution of production (which is another strike against a central plan, as the current state of production is not guaranteed to be in any way rational or optimal in the first place). So you can't even determine if there is over or under production like he proposes.
I don't think it is a deathknell for central planning though, as it may finally push people to realise that the whole point is that we can determine politically how much to produce and how much prices then become, within the confines of costs.
>>2557847>He says the target of production ought to be that consumer prices match the production costI get the feeling that he doesn't understand the difference between production costs and differential (marginal) costs. this shows up in his beefs with Shaikh as well
>If production costs (in labour time, ie value)value isn't production costs. that's kind of the point. it isn't even true in Marxian value theory because of ground rent. 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. it is
not the total amount of labour added to all wheat produced. such a "value" (production cost) would underprice wheat, and thus fail to regulate production away from the worst land, either by lowering the demand for wheat or improving said land
>I don't think it is a deathknell for central planning thoughit's not. you don't need prices or values to plan
>the whole point is that we can determine politically how much to produce and how much prices then become, within the confines of coststhis is kind of the point Novozhilov makes. prices/values arise out of the planning system. they are influenced by the political goals, but politics alone cannot set appropriate prices. even less so if prices are set in a "decentralized" fashion
Benanav's proposal becomes somewhat useful here, because it allows us to have two sets of prices: one set for production and one set for distribution. the latter can have constraints imposed. for example, we could subsidize food. but we should only subsidize as much food as anyone would need, so that a situation where kolkhozniks buy subsidized break to feed their pigs does not arise
>>2557891>subsidized breaksubsidized bread
>>2557891>I get the feeling that he doesn't understand the difference between production costs and differential (marginal) costs. this shows up in his beefs with Shaikh as wellHis proposed model in his works is simplistic in that sense, yes, because he tries to fit production into a linear problem, such that an optimal solution can be found. That neccecarily precludes non linear realities of production.
I am not so sure about you saying the value of a commodity is set by the marginal product, that isn't in marx' labour theory of value either. Such a marginal cost is a micro economic concept within a firm, it doesn't actually exist, because all increases in scale are spread over all commodities, so the value of a commodity is just the total labour expended divided by the amount of commodities. It makes little sense to claim that the first breadroll of the day cost more to make than the last one, since they are produced using the same machines and the same inputs. The problem of underestimating the marginal cost really is not a problem if you have sufficiently granular data. Subdividing the land in tiers to accurately model the wheat production capacity would mean the problem takes care of itself. It just turns back into the same problem as before where the value of commodities is determined by the actually currently existing production system and not by some more abstract evaluation of all possibilities. Which does accurately describe capitalism, but prohibits models like Cockshott has which requires a priori known values of commodities, combined with demand data, in order to determine the planning target. You would need to politically determine the planning target instead.
>>2557169>>2557332in 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 productiontrue, 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 eithersaid 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 commoditiesin 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 itselfMarx 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 commoditiesit'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
>>2558122oh and to add to all this, it's also possible that Marx is simply wrong about value
>>2556050That'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.
>>2557842Joint 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 rangeAs 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 fiathow 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 itemswe 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 useWhy 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 sectorKill them! I mean, just sell emissions permission slips by bidding.
>Price them by worst emittedOne 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 emittedyou 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 marginalismthat'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 profitsyou 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 resultson 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 marketI 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 strategyI'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 videopossibly. 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 problemSo 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 timeI do not see a reason why.
>you do so long as there are still vestiges of the market in placeDoes 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 fullestUnlike 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.
>>2559232it'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 causedhow 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 itselfyeah, 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 fiatI 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 straightforwardAbsolutely 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 termssure. 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 isI 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
>>2559711oh 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
>>2560083oh 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
>>2557169I 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.
>>2560677I 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.
>>2560718And 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.
>>2560727this is precisely the kinds of problems linear programming is good at
>>2560734some 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?
>>2561257value remains relevant when interacting with the market
>>2561327why? its made up.
>>2561257Is
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.
>>2561452so, will value exist post-capitalism?
if you are consistent, no.
>>2561461It'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.
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?
>>2561452I'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
>>2561631there 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
>>2562210this 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
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