/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Did 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?

>>2249957
rate 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.html
if 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

>>2249957
oh 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

There used to be a radical communist tech culture until most of the left wing tech savvy ppl died or went to the clink . How Do we re built it ?

>>2249996
Could 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?

>>2249996
I 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?

Why is learning math so hard

>>2250148
you'll have to rebuild the internet outside the big social media companies. starting by people learning to self host/diy websites

>>2250192
the 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.

>>2250229

USA gross domestic income EOY 2023 = 28.1 trillion
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDI

Net National income EOY 2023 = 27.6 trillion
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MKTGNIUSA646NWDB

USA Workforce EOY 2023 = 157 million
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS

Net 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 FUCK
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAAHWEP
I 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/CES0500000003

The 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

>>2250281
Is there there seriously that much rent extraction?
Capital costs are apparently only 2.7 trillion.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/econ/2022-aces-summary.html
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/2023_FarmExpenditures_Highlights.pdf

>>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.

>>2250296
its the "x as a service" disease

>>2250305
X as a service is just porky coping with TRPF

>>2250281
>>2250290
Probably 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_table1

Another 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

>>2250296
Even 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.

>>2250335
Actually it just doesn't make sense.
Corporate profits are only about 3 trillion dollars.

>>2249875
Shit, everyone shooting these numbers at each other like nothing i feel like the biggest ignorant ever

>>2250363
Was 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?

>>2250229
im 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.

>>2250383
old thread full
>>1942906

>>2250391
Im 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
>>2250170
Farjoun, 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
>>2250385
first 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

>>2250408
How 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 WeSizWe
No 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

>>2250432
See
>>2250715

Also, 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.

>>2250720
we 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 rockets
Not 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)

>>2250725
im 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 germany
WE WILL BUILD THE BERLIN WALL AND WEST GERMANY WILL PAY FOR IT
>Trump c. 1961

>>2250739
Well 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 pay
But 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

>>2250856
if 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?

>>2250874
well 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-profits
right that is what i said.
>super-profits are about which capitalist use the most productive MoPs, not the least productive
its 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.

It's time to dump my /cybercom/ folder

>>2251056
>>2251058
>>2251063
thanks anon

That's it, I think

>>2251012
that'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
>>2251086
based 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 first
not 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 imperialism
pick 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

>>2249875
What 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?

>>2251118
you 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.

>>2251123
myes. 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

>>2251086
I found Kantorovich's works including the russian version of BUER. I think it's better than reading that pdf since every 2nd page is a different size.

>>2251143
Utterly 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.

>>2251118
sure thats just the rate of explotation

>>2251209
>Mass of profit is incentivised by capitalist over maintaining rate of profit
this 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 rate
but 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 ones
source? 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 exploitation
this 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 prices
again, which commodities? because this is very difficult to do with "mature" commodities like wheat, steel and so on

>>2251063
>Sandleben
Not 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 Peters
Makes 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 expensive
Utterly 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 demonstrated
Cockshott 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 hand
Utter 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 thread
yes, 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-world
it would help immensely if you named just a single example
>Cockshott is imperialism apologist who demonstrates nothing but lies
are 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 workers
this 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.)

>>2251301
idk 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.

>>2251521
What 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.

>>2251591
its a response to >>2250229
if 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.

>>2251720
Also 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 example
All 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 equipment
Utterly 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 power
the 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
>>2251837
all 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 ameriKKKa
again 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 btw
the 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 proportional
this flies in the face of the evidence

>>2250363
turn out that TRPF has to with this

>>2251884
the 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.

>>2252310
I would prefer not to

>>2252310
just do custom orders then

>>2252310
Why not just have smaller firms in a planned economy?
You could even spin them up in bulk like with the Israeli Innovation Authority.

>>2252310
its 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 firms
do 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?

>>2252355
just 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 orders
Yeah, because that is not a role of state enterprises in capitalist economy. There is literally no reason why they could not do them.

>>2252310
Isn'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.

>>2252634
Nope. China lets private industries grow in the areas not covered by their SoEs (until they start selling them, that is)

>>2252364
>>2252460
Then 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

>>2251777
here 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.

>>2252861
and in this fiddle I scaled it down to a furniture store
https://jsfiddle.net/34f10sew/2/

>>2252795
Can you show me examples of custom orders in USSR?

>>2252892
if you mean custom products there werent custom products. There was only one brand. The state brand.

>>2252903
I'm sure the govt. sometimes commissioned one-of-a-kind objects for specific use cases in research and development

>>2252891
You 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.

>>2253179
Thanks.

What was the computerisation project in the USSR that Khrushchev was told was cost 5 times more than the space project again?

>>2260262
OGAS

>>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 order
thats 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

>>2260403
Experience 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/

>>2261987
> 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:

<wage labor
<capital
<value
<price
<profit
<socially necessary labor time
<labor time calculation
<subsistence
<surplus labor
<absolute surplus value
<relative surplus value
<credit
<fictitious capital
<Primitive accumulation
<privatization/nationalization
<personal property
<private property
<productive forces
<reserve army of labor
<absolute surplus population
<relative surplus population
<cycle of reproduction
<circuits of capital

Take as inspiration this video.

>>2260259
Juries 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.

>>2262118
Who is making the proposals though? What incentives are there to make them?

Paul Cockshott Defending Materialism and Scientific Socialism

(interview)

Rubin, value and forms Part 1

Paul Cockshott

Value form part 2

Paul Cockshott

>>2262415
>>2262416
i really hated these two videos
its a needless overcomplication of marx

>>2250194
Hypothetically 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.

>>2262419
It'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?

>>2264211
in 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.

>>2264217
But 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.

>>2264211
input-output is useless for actual planning. Stalin rightfully dismissed it as "a game of numbers"

>>2264340
Where 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

>>2264342
are you soliciting recipes for the future?

>>2264346
I want to understand his recipe for socialism.

>>2264348
such a thing is not possible. things always depend on material conditions

>>2264340
>input-output is useless for actual planning.
Why?
>Stalin rightfully dismissed it as "a game of numbers"
Did Stalin plan the entire Soviet economy by himself or did he actually have a team of people who knew more math than him working on the matter? Does his opinion really hold more weight than the people doing linear algebra for him just because he is a famous revolutionary hero?

>>2264370
Yes I know, socialism always moulds around the needs of the nation, but how does Cockshotts theories bring socialism to the 21st century.

>>2264342
>Where do I start with Cockshott? His videos, I mean.

This playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U4e6ALxOhk&list=PLKVcO3co5aCCbf1Af9RuTAxd9SON3EHLQ

>>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

>>2264384
Is there any further writing on the topic you could recommend?

>>2264403
Zachariah 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

>>2264384
I thought the whole point of input output wasn't to plan everything but to keep inventory of resources flowing in and out of the economy so that your other methods of planning remain realistic to that inventory. obviously choosing photovoltaics over coal isn't just a matter of input output tables but a matter of choosing a more sustainable long term source of energy over a less sustainable form of energy dependent on raw materials in the ground.

>>2264442
that sounds more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-commodity_flow_problem which can be solved with LP

>>2264211
Could 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.

>>2262412
The 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

Cockshott calls out New Testament as Roman Propaganda in this video… is he Caesar's Messiah -pilled?

>>2269640
that 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)

>>2262412
Summary 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.

Washington DC was called originally called rome for its 7 hills .revlation talks about the 7 hills of Rome obviously Italy has no power but America dore is so obviously the home of the Antichrist

>>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

>>2269734
yes, exactly. statue of liberty is literally lucifer. founding fathers were freemasons.
<novus ordo seclorum
new 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

>>2269895
explain to me in your own words how you can use IO to choose the proper mix of solar vs wind vs coal power
>>2269905
he's not a member of any ML party, despite CPBG(ML) seeming like a decent fit including the anti-trans shit

>>2269963
according to wikipedia hes' part of the CPB

>>2269973
I thought he joined some Scottish party? maybe I'm not up to date on my Cockshottism

>>2264442
Yes, as I see it the input-output view partially augments and partially replaces supply-and-demand analysis.

>>2269806
I 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

>>2270773
non-square systems are not solvable. at best you can compute a least-squares solution. or just use LP like a normal person

>>2271608
Why 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 communiste
ahistorical 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.

>>2271649
there'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 >>2269963
there 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 matrix
Please elaborate.

>>2271962
see this text by Flamant
>THE LABOR THEORY OF VALUE AND THE PROBLEM OF JOINT PRODUCTION

>>2272463
Thnx 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.

>>2273324
Cockshottist Engineering
Anything else is a waste of time and LGBT-conspiracy anyway

>>2273326
What is Cockshottist Engineering

>>2273329
the study and application of the scripture as revealed by Dr Paul Cockshott

>>2272514
they're useful for statistics, yes. he doesn't talk about planning
>>2273324
most 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

>>2273324
Rural farming

>>2273324
Cockshott 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.

>>2273324
computer 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.

>>>/leftypol/2273863

Dickblast AMA this Tuesday

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.

>>2273896
dope
>>2274085
the 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 LP
I dont know what you mean by this.

>>2274107
there are better methods in the literature

>>2274110
Remember this book was written in the 90s

>>2273324
don'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)

>>2274439
So what are the better methods?

>>2274543
I already said I am not a stemcel, you posting random pdf means nothing to me.

>>2274554
All 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.

>>2274564
By question I mean how could the math be updated to modern standards.

COCKSHOTT IS COMING TO LEFTYPOL! HAIL COCKSHOTT!

>>2273863

>>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

>>2274793
>God
Which one?

>>2274685
NTA but the original christians were basically communist

>>2274875
>>2274880
based

>>2269905
I 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 socialism
As 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.

>>2274793
God is a huge reason why we're in this mess.

>>2275057
sage is a somewhat downvoots!

>>2274793
if god was real, then we must kill him

>>2275314
Imagine if you had the same emotional power to contact Jesus or the divine at will without being tricked?

>>2273605
PLEASE SEND ME THE LINK TO THAT LECTURE

>>2274793
>you have the read the bible? what do you think the messages are?
More than I can reasonably put in a single short post since it was written by many different people at many different times (OT) and a few people at a few different times (NT).

>>2273324
I did bachelors in teaching and masters in cybernetics.

I'm a data monkey now tho

>>2274644
>>2273896
My body is ready…

>>2274644
>>2273896
>>2275918
you guys had better be on your best behavior

>>2250110
>unpaid labour to consider, such as housework and workers raising the value of their own labour power through attending school and so on
also just straight up wage theft, which is the form of unpaid labor that is actually illegal under capitalism, as opposed to surplus value which is legal.

>>2276437
all profit is wage theft

>>2269650
>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.
Got Doc Cock to answer: He rejects Dietzgen's dialectics but embraces Mao's dialectics

>>2276441
Ok, 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 theft
they'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 says
I'm relatively sure Marx brings up in Capital similar examples of capitalists trying to pay their workers even less than their nominal wage

Could someone archive the W P Cockshott AMA thread and post the link here?
Link to the thread:
>>2276372

Archived the Paul Cockshott AMA
https://archive.is/53xsw
The 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.

>>2276586
Didn't see this request but here you go: >>2276598

This was disappointing.

>>2276617
He answered my question about black markets so I'm quite content

>>2276582
maoist cockshott confirmed

>>2276635
And 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.

>>2276725
Your 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.

>>2276733
People 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?

>>2276782
probably 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 work
Half 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?

>>2281242
Also 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.

>>2277377
it's ok anon is just going to slander and make shit up

>>2281242
>hiring at the level of individual enterprises
No.
>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 overtime
Yes. 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.

>>2281242
a central system for job postings would be useful. saying much more than that would be infantile
>>2281417
train more physicians

>>2282277
>train more physicians
the 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?

>>2283206
I 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?

>>2283235
Restrictions 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 balances
actually operationalized
>input-output
juggling with figures
incidentally, Bazarov and Groman were criticized by Lenin for being Machists

wttmbd?
wtf is ooe?
is floating point even math?

>>2284723
average CISC fan vs average RISC enjoyer

>>2284723
I'm stupid, explain what she means

>>2284881
cpus are weird hacked together beasts basically, there are some terrible things possible only on certain cpus due to features being abused

>>2284884
i 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."

>>2284682
You have not explained anything.

>>2284991
see again >>2269963
just try to work a similar problem and you should see the issue. this isn't to say MBP is good
>>2284881
CISC 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

>>2284682
Look 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.

>>2286169
less posting more doing the actual math

>>2283206
he meant watch Aeon Flux
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8ivq1l

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?

>>2289062
Depends 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.

>>2289539
Really 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.

>>2289062
Depends. 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.

>>2289843
I 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.

>>2289711
RHP 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 products
Yes.
>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.

>>2291738
this sounds interesting and I think I missed that old discussion. do you mind elaborating?

>>2269981
He was (is?) in Solidarity Scotland.

>>2291747
https://archive.is/jXivP
See 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.

>>2293474
The 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.

>>2295521
What 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.

>>2296196
There 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

>>2296551
you 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.

>>2297068
this is worse than just using an LP solver. much worse
>That means their sum of prices must yield a certain amount together
why 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 Neurath
I have read several thousand pages of Neurath without encountering a single algorithm. He actually had no idea how to do planning in kind.

>>2322089
the game looked pretty jank when I played the demo but I don't really trust this guy's opinions

>>2324970
Why not reply with an actual proposal by Neurath. Or do you not know any. How could that be.

>>2289711
fermentation of cheese and wine too. hell the peppers in tabasco sauce are fermented in wood kegs for 3 years

>>2326836
The 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.”

>>2326962
yeah? the USSR amounts to such a research project

>>2327710
this 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.

>>2327249
Not 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.

>>2333305
I assume you mean this paper: https://raetekommunismus.de/Texte%20Grundprinzipien/Grundprinzipien%20Wirtschaftsrechnung%20Leichter.pdf
Firefox 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
>Tschajanow
do you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Chayanov ?

>>2334356
>I assume you mean this paper
You 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 actually
Such 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 proposal
I'm not replying to C&C or Leichter, but to anon >>2297068
I'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

new 'ock'ott
>Critique of neo Kautskyism

Victor Magariño put put a planning related video
>Socialism and Central Planning Debate with @boredk

>>2347225
Each 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.

>>2347703
Kill 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

>>2347703
TL;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.htm

We 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!

>>2348685
Wrong. Read https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch37.htm

>>2348697
Not 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.

>>2348712
Marx 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

>>2348725
Post >>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.

>>2348831
Marxism is not Karl Marx Thought

>>2348831
his 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 Thought
Post >>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 chapter
There 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.

New Big Dick Vic MAGA-RINO

>>2351815
already posted >>2347225