>>2566230yeah he probably means because everyone will be using crypto or some bullshit
>>2566586My guess is hes starting to see planned economy as a viable alternative due to advances in AI. Maybe im just projecting.
>>2566595you are, think about who he is, hes literally a Nazi, no exaggeration. he means some type of slavery with rationing. imagine how it would be for workers stuck on his mars base. that's how he wants all of the world to be. he's a white supremacist eugenicist.
>>2566230it's a pipe dream on the MEDIUM TERM, there's already backlash to AI because these retards couldnt stop salivating about slaving everyone.
>>2566230uyghas in here not reading the chapter on machinery as usual:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm>automation will kill gabbidalism dis tiem! >>2566917
>liberal describes "communism"
<it's capitalism
>liberal describes capitalism in its death throes
<it's communism
many such cases
>>2567644
I can't help but feel sympathy for maidbot. I'd probably help it do chores.
>>2568103
>all these productive forces posted unspoilered
l-lewd
but actually there's still humans involved. as with all automation, it merely moves where the labour is actually being done. instead of assembling and welding the cars themselves, workers now program and maintain the robots that do those things. we might see maintenance be automated as well eventually
Wondering if TNS and other cybercommunist works have been translated to Nepali, Korean, Russian, or Hindi. I know there's translations in Spanish and Mandarin - and people working on a Vietnamese version - but some of the largest parties on earth are in Nepal and India, and would certainly make use of it, though i'm sure they're already broadly aware of the ideas presented.
Finally finished reading the reproduction schema paper by Alex Creiner which "proves" that in Capitalism, equilibrium of supply and demand is compatible with disproportions in production growing to the point that production completely collapses.
This ugly wall of text really needs some space between the paragraphs and highlighting more words. I made a list of typos to prove I read the thing to the end:
complextion, intenstion (this one gets repeated throughout), apploet, it’s subjects, volumne, it’s increasing level, finished what he started, waiting for capital inflows being which are stuck being hoarded, Marx observes observes, We are now faced with an overemphasized wage capital goods department and an underemphasized wage goods department, cylcle, crisis of disproportionality we are dealing with is not, wage goods are the goods whose use-values lies, use-values they are producing isn’t aren’t, entirely concerned, it’s own, are seen not to produce not producing, are seen blindly investing, would also would, spiraling, can inadvertaently (end of sentence missing here), they abruptly they explode, do a good job, Indeedn, We already noted (where?) that (the author wrote "where" here, remember I'm the one using italics for my comments), it’s subjects, it’s relation, we can clearly see two things clearly, it’s subjects, that that, he could likely have anticipated, value remains, we should address is the issue, fisrt first, it’s supposed function, as. necessary, A true solution to (rest of sentence missing), equaliing, Many Marxists since the controversies about the transformation problem sought to escape them the controversies, Marx at the end of his life ended his life was convinced that, in order to (end of sentence missing)
There are also several instances of "???" appearing whenever a precise reference is missing.
The tone of the paper feels inconsistent. Is the result strong evidence of the irrationality of capitalism or are the model assumptions too unrealistic for that? The author swings from one extreme to the other.
>>2570610is this going to be published somewhere?
I've taken a gander at Creiner's work before. seems reasonable enough. he does go on for perhaps a bit too long around having discovered positive eigenvalues in capitalism
>>2570356There are translations but no one that could influence a country's economy is reading it
>>2573818BИЛЪЯM KOKШOT
is that Safranov in the middle?
>>2573818>А.В.Сафронов – историк, экономист, кандидат экономических наук, ведущий канала «Простые числа».so it seems. historian, economist, kandidat (roughly MSc I think), video (though it almost reads like Veduta's) channel prime numbers. and yeah he's on the Prime Numbers channel
>>2573828Дикбласт must become ДикВласть. Αμήν.
Continuing with my abstract non-proposal from the last thread. I was thinking about a meta-procedure that combines an auction with something else.
Quoting this critique from myself:
>The fixed prices were introduced to deal with worries about raising prices. But to deal with that, it is enough to have a price ceiling.
What are the worries about raising prices really about though? If somebody snatches a thing right before your eyes, what good does it do to know you could have paid the price? It's better to have a guarantee that you can obtain a thing. So I have come to the conclusion that the part of the proposal that isn't an auction should not be something with a fixed price, nor something with a price ceiling, but simply something without any price. And since I got no idea how to combine the parts in an elegant fashion for now, we just do first the part without any prices and then the auction stuff.
Assume a given pile of classified and quantified resources, ready to be used up in the next period. After the central authority has set the Resource Access Power (RAP) of each pseudo-firm, the pseudo-firms should not yet have to participate in the resource auctions. Instead, the central authority sets aside a part of the pile for the pseudo-firms making requests in kind. The hydraulic diagram from a 2D world describes a situation of just three pseudo-firms. On the left, the blue liquid representing the resource sits in a tank that is closed at the bottom. If we let the resource flow, it will go through the pipe into the three vessels on the right and will reach equal level (and the air will escape from the vessels through the pipes they got on top). These three vessels represent the three pseudo-firms. The width of a pseudo-firm's vessel is proportional to its RAP, so these three are equal in that. The size of a pseudo-firm's request is represented by its vessel's volume (and since the diagram is in a 2D world, area = volume). A pseudo-firm exaggerating its request will make its vessel taller, but not wider.
(Maybe it would have been better to show two pseudo-firms in the diagram, one at half the RAP of the other, but I'm too lazy to edit it. Anyway, you should be able to picture what that would look like.)
Only after this procedure is through do we start with the auction stuff.
>>2573879of all porky, musk seems one of the rare breed that are a little bit class conscious as he doesn't expect billions of homeless proles to just disappear when the automation layoffs fully hit
>>2576720class conscious porkies are the most dangerous
For a long time, I've wanted to write a piece on the potential of a social networking platform as the facilitator of voluntary collective labour coordination.
From everyday communication, to house parties, and large scale mass mobilisations, it is clear the internet has revolutionized relations. Why not extend it to organizing production?
Of course tankies prefer to fantasize about political power, but why in general do communists never actually talk about how to organize production in a communist world.
>>2577144Because the porkies have already organised production extremely efficiently and are continuing to rationalize production.
>>2577144Anon read some of the archived threads at the top there have already been a ton of proposals on this.
>>2576720all porkies are class conscious lol
>>2576294 (me)
Continuing with my boring exploration.
I know the hydraulic procedure does not have any prices, but could we do a scalar evaluation of the resources after they got assigned with this procedure, just on the basis of the assignment pattern? (You know, for the accountants.) We could simply do this: For a resource, we look at which pseudo-firm received some of it and just add all these pseudo-firms' RAP scores together. It seems to me that, ''within the constraints that we neither look at excess stocks nor at the request forms nor anything else besides the assignment pattern, this is actually the most fitting measure we can do. If this measure feels weird, it's really due to the method the measure was made for.
>>2583286anon this anlysis fails to realize that porkie doesnt care about what happens after they die. A lot of the porkie will die before collapse happens so who gives a shit about lel future
>>2583306if they can't or don't want to perpetuate class society after they die then they aren't really class conscious, they're just individualists, nihilists, and egoists. For the bourgeoisie to be conscious as a class they would have to want society to continue after they die.
But the analysis in the picture DOESEtake this into account. They hoard more wealth than they can spend in one life time. A lot of them could retire and never run out of money but they choose to continue attending board meetings and doing interviews and shit. They dress up and go places and act important and try to force regulations in their favor. They try to extend their copyrights more than a century. They try to use life extension tech. Elon Musk has a ton of kids. They really seem to think the Earth will survive their bullshit and they want their progeny to inherit their wealth,, on the one hand, but they continue to act in ways which guarantee their downfall, and/or the destruction of the earth, on the other hand. They want to live forever through life extension tech, on the one hand, but they don't create a political situation that tolerates their perpetual existence, on the other hand. They absolutely, as a class, seem to care about the future, but are very bad at understanding that they have outlived their historical usefulness as a class.
Cockshott has been posting videos less and less frequently lately. Someone should block his twitter account, he wastes too much time bickering with Zionists there.
>>2597575he's said he's run out of ideas for videos
>>2597576Here's a good idea: a series of videos on Das Kapital. Where the main ideas of each chapter are summarised and presented in a specifically cybernetic framework (that is, ignoring all the cultural and historic references etc, and going straight into the vectors and matrices).
>>2597577not a bad idea. email it to him
So, is there anything happening in the cybercom sphere? Any news?
>>2583286Unfortunately this is the exact analysis used by John Birch Society to call Eisenhower a communist. The same shit today with Alex Jones calling the WEF socialist etc. The implications are the the Fabians are correct and the billionaires are secret commies is not new analysis. It's almost bait at this point.
>>2583306didn't finish reading the png award
>>2631320that analysis is not being used to argue that billionaires are secret communists, that analysis is being used to argue that porkies are suicidal nihilists and not interested in the preservation even of their own class, let alone the earth, the species, etc.
>>2597576>>2597577>>2597575he could address the critiques of his model by hanhnel and also of the LTV by steve keen in greater detail
>>2597576>>2597577>>26315301. Maybe we should do this? Maybe the torch has been passed.
2. Man's 74. My grandparents were useless or dead by that age. Maybe he's just not cut out for this stuff anymore? Let him bicker with zionists on twitter.
The fuck is Cockshott's last video
>>2632205I would if I had 10% of Paul's knowledge.
Cockshott has no right to rest. History needs him.
>>2640560we clearly need an overseer or some sort to keep him on track with making more videos and to keep him from posting. mush Paul, mush!
>>2640572we must guide Maud'Dib to his destiny
>>2566144This doesn't actually address the division of mental and physical labor and the town-country contradiction. The anarchy of production is solved by training and hiring engineers in Africa and placing the real mental labor done in the hands of the oppressed. Luckily, the internet makes this shit far easier than before.
>>2670726>This doesn't actually address the division of mental and physical labor and the town-country contradictionwhy should it?
I just realized that my English teacher in 5th grade was talking positively about cybersyn
This is the simplest video i could find on linear regressions and this is supposed to be the simplest method
https://youtube.com/shorts/VFHjxQgz724>>2689262I also got gemini pro and it told me fir demand forecasting the best method is called gradient boosted trees. Theres also sentiment analysis with ai to know what people want(like an ai that crawls for news) however in my opinion that part could be done via referendum.
>>2689268"Sentiment analysis" is such an over-the-top name for the concept. Really old idea.
You put labels on words like "positive emotion" and "negative emotion" (or whatever sentiment categories you come up with) and then the "analyzing" part is you run texts through a computer to count the occurrences.
>>2689268it just gave me some code for potatoe demand forecast
#install these
#pip install xgboost pandas numpy scikit-learn
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import xgboost as xgb
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error
import warnings
# Suppress warnings for cleaner output
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')
# ==========================================
# 1. THE SIMULATION (The Potato Market)
# ==========================================
def generate_potato_data(days=730):
"""
Simulates 2 years of daily potato demand.
Unlike electricity (hourly), food is daily/weekly.
Factors:
- Price Elasticity (Price goes up, demand goes down)
- Weekly Cycle (People buy groceries on weekends)
- Seasonal/Holiday Spikes (Thanksgiving, Christmas)
"""
np.random.seed(42)
dates = pd.date_range(start='2023-01-01', periods=days, freq='D')
n = len(dates)
# Factor A: Market Price (Fluctuates randomly)
# Simulating a price between $0.50 and $1.50 per kg
price = 1.0 + np.random.normal(0, 0.1, n).cumsum() * 0.05
price = np.clip(price, 0.5, 2.0)
# Factor B: Seasonality (Potatoes are winter food)
# Cosine wave: High in winter, Low in summer
seasonality = 1000 * np.cos(np.linspace(0, 2 * 2 * np.pi, n))
# Factor C: The "Weekend Grocery Run"
# Demand spikes on Saturday (5) and Sunday (6)
day_of_week = dates.dayofweek
weekend_bump = np.where(day_of_week >= 5, 2000, 0)
# Factor D: The "Holiday Spike" (Thanksgiving/Christmas)
# Nov (11) and Dec (12) get a massive boost
month = dates.month
holiday_bump = np.where((month == 11) | (month == 12), 3000, 0)
# TOTAL DEMAND CALCULATION
# Base Demand (10,000 kg) - Price Sensitivity + Seasons + Weekends + Holidays + Noise
demand = (
10000
- (price * 2000) # Price Elasticity (High price = Low demand)
+ seasonality
+ weekend_bump
+ holiday_bump
+ np.random.normal(0, 500, n) # Random noise
)
df = pd.DataFrame({'date': dates, 'price': price, 'demand': demand})
df.set_index('date', inplace=True)
return df
# ==========================================
# 2. FEATURE ENGINEERING (The Cybernetic Logic)
# ==========================================
def create_features(df):
"""
Teaches the AI how to read the calendar and market history.
"""
df = df.copy()
# 1. Calendar Features
df['dayofweek'] = df.index.dayofweek
df['quarter'] = df.index.quarter
df['month'] = df.index.month
df['dayofyear'] = df.index.dayofyear
# 2. Price Feedback
# The AI needs to know the price to predict demand
df['price'] = df['price']
# 3. Lag Features (The "Memory")
# "How many potatoes did we sell this time last week?"
df['lag_7d'] = df['demand'].shift(7) # Same day last week
df['lag_30d'] = df['demand'].shift(30) # Same day last month
df['lag_365d'] = df['demand'].shift(365) # Same day last year (Critical for Holidays)
# 4. Rolling Trends
# "Is potato consumption trending up or down this month?"
df['rolling_mean_7d'] = df['demand'].rolling(window=7).mean()
# Drop NaN values created by the 365-day lag (first year is just training data)
df = df.dropna()
return df
# ==========================================
# 3. MAIN EXECUTION
# ==========================================
if __name__ == "__main__":
print("--- 1. Initializing Agricultural Simulation ---")
# We generate 2 years (730 days) to allow for year-over-year lag features
data = generate_potato_data(days=730)
print(f"Generated {len(data)} days of Market Data.")
print("\n--- 2. Processing Cybernetic Feedback Loops ---")
df_processed = create_features(data)
# Split: Train on first ~80%, Test on last ~20%
train_size = int(len(df_processed) * 0.85)
train, test = df_processed.iloc[:train_size], df_processed.iloc[train_size:]
features = ['dayofweek', 'month', 'price',
'lag_7d', 'lag_30d', 'lag_365d', 'rolling_mean_7d']
target = 'demand'
X_train, y_train = train[features], train[target]
X_test, y_test = test[features], test[target]
print("\n--- 3. Training Gradient Boosted Trees (The Planner) ---")
reg = xgb.XGBRegressor(
n_estimators=1000,
learning_rate=0.01,
max_depth=4,
early_stopping_rounds=50,
objective='reg:squarederror'
)
reg.fit(
X_train, y_train,
eval_set=[(X_train, y_train), (X_test, y_test)],
verbose=False
)
print("Training Complete.")
# ==========================================
# 4. EVALUATION & VISUALIZATION
# ==========================================
test['prediction'] = reg.predict(X_test)
rmse = np.sqrt(mean_squared_error(test['demand'], test['prediction']))
mean_demand = test['demand'].mean()
error_percentage = (rmse / mean_demand) * 100
print(f"\n--- Results ---")
print(f"RMSE (Error Margin): {rmse:.0f} kg")
print(f"Average Daily Demand: {mean_demand:.0f} kg")
print(f"Error Rate: {error_percentage:.2f}%")
print(f"Accuracy: {100 - error_percentage:.2f}%")
print("\n--- Cybernetic Analysis ---")
if error_percentage < 5:
print("Status: OPTIMAL. The plan is highly accurate. Minimal waste expected.")
elif error_percentage < 10:
print("Status: ACCEPTABLE. Minor adjustments needed in buffer stock.")
else:
print("Status: UNSTABLE. Unexpected market volatility detected.")
# Feature Importance
importance = pd.DataFrame(
data=reg.feature_importances_,
index=reg.feature_names_in_,
columns=['importance']
).sort_values('importance', ascending=False)
print("\n--- What drives Potato Demand? ---")
print(importance)
# Interpretation of top feature
top_feature = importance.index[0]
print(f"\nInsight: The most critical factor driving demand is '{top_feature}'.")
if top_feature == 'lag_365d':
print("Reason: Historical seasonal trends (holidays) are dominant.")
elif top_feature == 'price':
print("Reason: Consumers are highly sensitive to price changes.")
elif top_feature == 'dayofweek':
print("Reason: Weekly shopping habits dictate consumption.")
# Plotting
plt.figure(figsize=(15, 6))
plt.plot(test.index, test['demand'], label='Actual Sales', alpha=0.6, color='blue')
plt.plot(test.index, test['prediction'], label='AI Plan', linestyle='--', color='orange')
plt.title('Cybernetic Agriculture: Potato Demand Forecast')
plt.ylabel('Demand (kg)')
plt.xlabel('Date')
plt.legend()
plt.grid(True)
filename = 'potato_forecast_plot.png'
plt.savefig(filename)
print(f"\n[Visual] Forecast plot saved to '{filename}'") Somebody asked on 4chan the other day whether communist could prove they could do superior planning by proving they could complete a public project on time.
That got me wondering. There is talk about how cybernetic planning could forecast demand. However there is no talk about public projects.
How could the state forecast sonething like how long itd take the chipfab being built in the us for example?
does someone have the new farjoun and machover digitally? it's quite expensive as a physical copy.
>the /cockpol/ thread has more activity than this one
controlsisters, is it over?
>>2761624Wtf is this? Where did u get it from?
>>2761624most programmers work on easy problems, and problems that can be turned into easy ones. in planning, instead of finding the exact solution for a linear program, which is almost certainly NP, we can instead find an approximate solution, which is P
for an example of spooky things happening in the upper echelons of computing, look into the Busy Beaver problem. castorologists have identified Collatz-esque problems to be the big stumbling block at present, and this is for BB(6). that is, we do not know for how long the longest-running terminating 6-state Turing machine will actually run for
Wikipedia has a nice summary of why the Busy Beaver problem is mathematically relevant:
>One of the most consequential aspects of the busy beaver game is that, if it were possible to compute the functions Σ(n) and S(n) for all n, then this would resolve all mathematical conjectures which can be encoded in the form "does ⟨this Turing machine⟩ halt".[5] For example, there is a 27-state Turing machine that checks Goldbach's conjecture for each number and halts on a counterexample; if this machine did not halt after running for S(27) steps, then it must run forever, resolving the conjecture.[5][7] Many other problems, including the Riemann hypothesis (744 states) and the consistency of ZF set theory (745 states[8][9]), can be expressed in a similar form, where at most a countably infinite number of cases need to be checked.[5]this is the essence of the "32 bytes" claim in the beginning. 32*8 = 256 bits. a binary S-state Turing machine can be encoded in 2*S*log2(2*S+1) bits. all machines in BB(6) occupy a mere 45 bits, and this class of programs already contains a very hard problem (the Collatz conjecture). the 27-state Goldbach machine mentioned in the WP text would take 313 bits to encode, and it is likely not even the most difficult machine to reason about in that set
this isn't that important for cybernetics however. control theorists are concerned with practical problems
>>2789841fuck… he sounds like shit… i hope we don't lose him… he's getting so old
>>2790466If cockshott were really as smart as the people in this thread believe, he would stay away from those algorithmic brain-raping machines. That guy lacks critical thinking skills.
>>2632205>Let him bicker with zionists on twitter.yes, feed the machine! Give the machine your full attention! Algorithmic servitude is the best thing there is! Hallowed be Grok! A true cyberneticist becomes one with the machine.
>>2790484imagine if marx was around today. he'd bee cooked.
>>2790484Pro tip: If you're truly fans and supporters of Paul Cockshott, then you should specifically deplatform him from X. It would do him good, and then he'd have a clear head again to make more videos. Because currently, he's wasting his brainpower on pointless discussions with engagement bots on X.
>>2790497i think this is the updated 2020s equivalent of old people in 2010 who got hooked on fox, newsmax, GB news, where they had brainrot streamed directly into their eyeballs like a heroin shot into their skulls. people were complaining that their parents who had been 'normal' suddenly became unhinged Q-anon trump pizzagate kooks
>>2790500if twitter existed in the 19th century, marx wouldn't even finished chapter 1 of Capital
>>2761624those symbols (P, NP, etc.) are complexity classes. some refer to "time" complexity (how long it would take to compute or decide something), others to "space" complexity (how much memory it would take). the graph is a little disingenuous, research has focused on the "simple" problems because that's what can realistically be done with computers. programmers aren't "afraid" of those other symbols, they just avoid them because they want things to actually get done in a realistic amount of time and space
to give you an example related to cybernetics, all of cockshott's ideas in TANS can be implemented and run, even with very big datasets, on the same computer you're using to read this post; but most of härdin's stuff can only be run locally (on your machine) with very small datasets because they belong to slightly higher complexity classes
does anyone here know of any good course on linear programming? I remember finding lectures from some university during covid (I think it was cmu, they had a platform with all their recorded lectures open for the public) but I lost the link. I vaguely remember an exercise about optimizing paper rolls at the end of the first or second lecture
Sidequest theory
>>2761624where did you get this from? Did you just find the image online or was it part of an actual book?
>>2790481anon's point is he shouldn't be the focus anymore because he's old
>>2790567>old people are useless trash and deserve no dignitythats even worse.
>>2790659>is it true that dickblast thinks consciousness don't real? yes
>how are we supposed to have class consciousness then?you cant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjja-oNyfdI&lc=UgyUuExX9DapVDDvegF4AaABAg.9M9DRCgtIyh9MCmVc8AyBH >>2793339There is a profound irony in watching Paul Cockshott argue on Big Tech plattforms like Youtube or X. Here is a man who built his reputation as a Marxist cybernetician, an advocate for computational planning, feedback loops, and the scientific control of economic systems, reducing consciousness to the firing of olfactory receptors and the mechanical response of cone cells. In the screenshot, he insists that experience is not the “activity of consciousness” but the brute material fact of “the activity of her olfactory receptors and the olfactory bulb in her brain.” Consciousness itself, he declares, is a “vacuous statement,” a mere “stand-in word” that papers over the ignorance of philosophers who refuse to accept that primates see red simply because they have the right photoreceptors.
This is Cockshott the rigorous materialist: nothing but matter in motion, no mysterious “activity” beyond the biological hardware, no patience for the “ignorant early 19th century speculators” who wondered how the brain represents the world. And yet, this same Cockshott is the most perfect example of a mind captured by a cybernetic system he does not control.
X is a cybernetic apparatus par excellence. It senses behavior (clicks, dwell time, rage-replies), processes information through opaque ranking algorithms, and acts upon the user by modulating visibility and dopaminergic reward. The system is designed to steer its objects - its users - toward predictable, profitable outputs: engagement, addiction, and emotional arousal. Cockshott, the expert in control systems and information loops, should recognize this architecture instantly. Instead, he has become its control object.
He believes he is the subject steering discourse, deploying his materialist polemics against idealists and bourgeois reifications. But the platform treats him exactly as he treats consciousness: as a material process to be regulated. His nervous system, his anger, his compulsion to reply, these are not expressions of an autonomous “knowing subject.” They are the regulated outputs of an external cybernetic loop. Every time he logs on to dismiss consciousness as a “bourgeois legal category,” he demonstrates the very thing he denies: a human behavior so thoroughly modulated by algorithmic feedback that the “activity of consciousness” has been replaced by the reflex of engagement. He is not posting; he is being processed.
This is what makes him an X junkie. The man who wrote "How the World Works" cannot see how THIS system works on HIM. He mocks idealists for reifying “the subject,” accusing them of importing bourgeois legal fantasies into philosophy. But on X or Youtube, he himself is reified, not as a legal person, but as a data node. His reduction of the mind to cone cells and neurons is mirrored by the platform’s reduction of him to a user ID, an engagement metric, a retention statistic. The materialist who insists that “it is not consciousness that enables experience” has found the one environment where that is literally true: an algorithmic feed where consciousness is irrelevant and only the mechanical reflex of interaction matters.
Cockshott the cybernetician became Cockshott the controlled variable. He imagined cybernetics as a tool for human emancipation through planning, yet he spends his days as the planned object of a system designed to extract value from his attention. The brain he describes so reductively, merely olfactory bulbs and photoreceptors is precisely what X exploits. And he keeps coming back for more, one reply at a time, proving that even the most hardened materialist can miss the one material system that has colonized his own mind.
OK, TANS has a big input-output matrix and individual choice in consumption items via personal budgets, but aside from that, what freedom will individual people actually have, I mean at their places of work?
There will never be a consensus on what proper working conditions really ought to be. There will not be a consensus on what really is a reasonable weekly work time. At best, there will be an overwhelming majority behind this or that regulation. So what about minority opinions? For the question of work time, we can surely arrange things so that individual people can also work a couple hours more or less, and get higher or lower remuneration. We can likewise have some performance-based adjustment. Both these ideas are already in TANS.
I figure we can do the same thing with many other aspects of work. For example, you may want to be able to come a couple minutes later than usual and just leave a bit later to make up for it without getting into any trouble. You may want to be able to quit on very short notice. You may not want to change your sleep pattern every two weeks because of working a night shift. Think of these job aspects as features you "pay" for through a lower salary, a lower salary that is not set that way as a punishment, but based on estimates on how these features negatively affect productivity.
Let's think of the configuration of jobs available not a something that entirely results from targets about what is to be produced, but as something that is also constructed around the job features in high demand by the workers.
>>2794976as far as I know he never really addresses the contradiction between consumers wanting more things more cheaply and workers not wanting to labor
>>2794976you can't plan with input-output. you need LP
>>2795025that contradiction is easy to resolve: develop the MoPs
>>2795355
we can simply decide what the length of the working week is, and everything follows from that. this doesn't prevent people from doing things as a hobby
>>2795040>aithe point of cybernetics is that planning can be done with discrete algorithms, not AI
>>2796590>the point of cybernetics is that planning can be done with discrete algorithms, not AIyes
>>2795040
>Where is the schizo creating the planned economy bot. You would think there would be one Terry Davis MF working on an AI for that exact purpose>>not enough Data>Use as much data that is already available. Better sooner than lateroec.world has a lot of data, from several nations, but that's just trade flow. idk how you convert trade flows into plans. and who cares about making planning software if there's nobody in power to actually implement those plans? The world is still divided into nations doing destructive "geopolitics" that race to the bottom and dedicate trillions in resources to strategically outmaneuvering each other. Countries will destroy trillions of dollars to secure billions of dollars. It is an irrational and suicidal system: Capitalism.
>>2795981>we can simply decide what the length of the working week is, and everything follows from that. anon that's not how planning works because different commodities are produced and consumed at different rates, and services also have variable demand. In a war you need surgeons who remove bullets and shrapnel working around the clock for example.
>>2796641uhuh. and in that case we will notice whether we hit the surgeon constraint and we will have to decide whether to relax the labor constraint, to train more surgeons or to simply let people die
>>2795040>Where is the schizo creating the planned economy bot.I got you a schizo, alas, the stuff is rather bottom up. Eh, it's not like Communization Theory is any better, so…
https://milahu.github.io/alchi/src/whoaremyfriends/whoaremyfriends.htmlI already
read skimmed the whole thing. This guy proposes that everything should be organized through a network of people classified by his personality scheme: male or female, young or old, in combination with 1 of 4 psycho types = 16 personalities in total. So that people who would be enemies interact through intermediaries they find tolerable.
Right at the beginning he shows the diagram "
Pallas key" and speaks of you having 4 friends, represented as the ends of a cross; and 4
common friends represented by the diagonal. In case you wonder where you are on that diagram, you count actually as one of your own friends and also one your common friends. Do a ctrl-f for
Me and my six friends to see this more clearly. The M and F mean male or female, S and L stand for young and old because why not, and the number is the Jung-ish psycho stuff.
<Each village has 144 people (Dunbar's Number) = 9 x 16 people. Each village is at a distance from its neighboring villages (otherwise it would be a part of a city). Each village has self-sufficiency and self-defense, a mix of eco-village and Shaolin monastery, permaculture and martial arts, farmers and soldiers (symbiosis).Self-crit:
<The big weak-spot is: I must correctly estimate personality types.<The small weak-spot is: I must measure relation quality.A few more quotes I pick by a method that is opaque to myself:
<Children are allowed to choose their educators.<I am looking for the one percent of people who are smart enough to understand me, and strong enough to realize my ideas.<So we are somewhere in the middle of the life cycle of the human species, and now the only question that remains is: How do we want to die?<In my world, children should do both at the same time: learning and working.<I know what is beautiful myself. (Autonomous) Because I don't give a shit about your grammar.<The empire is fundamentally against everything that comes from below, so against direct democracy, against referendums, against folk heroes, against selforganization, against selfsufficiency, against small states.<Perhaps in the future, there will be no humans in Western Europe, only jungle and wild animals, like in "Asterix and Obelix", and in the summer, tourists will come to hunt bison and wild boar.Enjoy reading this and don't forget to click on the
details triangles for more text (sometimes in German). By the way, there is a
GIGATON of misanthropy and conspiracy stuff in it. Last third is his fav sayings and rap lyrics.
>>2796774>or to simply let people dieok then you haven't really abolished social murder through economic planning
>>2799494we live in a world of Actual Machines, anon
>>2795025In my estimation, the solution is automation. The robot will never complain about working 24/7, and its existence means a human doesnt even have to do that job.
Many jobs you can't legally just do because you feel like it, you need to have credentials in the form of certificates that cost a lot of money. I asked myself: What would be the anarchocommunist version of that?
I figure a very rudimentary social network could replace at least some of that credentialing business, just a public database full of statements of the form:
<I, [name], say [person] is better at doing [activity] than me.
No freeform writing with LLM analysis, just fixed activity descriptions no longer than three words.
People could follow chains, like Alice saying Bob is better at cooking than herself, Bob saying he is not as good at cooking as Carl, and so on. Of course, there could be such "better than me" endorsement chains between people going in both directions or in a circle. In that case, the system could highlight the shorter chain.
>>2799933automation just creates new jobs, like overseeing, cleaning, repairing machinery. It can decrease hours worked, or it can get workers fired, it can create a crisis of overproduction, but it never gets rid of human labor completely. If it did get rid of human labor completely it wouldn't get rid of class struggle, it would force bourgeoisie to either subsidize the proles subsistence with UBI, so that they could live without a job, or they would try to kill off the proles and make the entire automated economy run for them and them alone… which doesn't make much sense when you consider that our productive capacity is already capable of feeding, clothing, and housing everyone, but the bourgeoisie force artificial scarcity by destroying commodities during a crisis of overproduction, instead of just giving them away.
>>2803572>>2803454If ai did permanently replace human labor it would basically turn 90% of the population redundant and the new class division will be rentiers vs lumpens in a cyberpunk post capitalist tech Neo feudal society
FAFA voting - a proposal for how to elect a regional soviet from local districts.Some common problems with election systems, existing ones as well as proposed ones, in no particular order:
- Dominated districts.
Some districts are so dominated by a particular group that this stifles motivation to get informed and involved (true for both those inside and outside the dominating group).
- Wasted vote for loser.
People worry about wasting their vote on a loser instead of supporting a lesser evil.
- Wasted vote for winner.
In some proportional systems, people worry about wasting their vote on a winner who does not need that support instead of being pivotal for a candidate on the edge of winning.
- Parties baked in.
In some election systems, the existence of parties is necessary because you vote for a list.
- Complexity cost.
For some proposed systems, the burden of a) understanding the gist of the method or b) filling out a valid ballot or c) counting… can be far too much.
Keep these points in mind while reading this (or when trying to come up with something better):
The elections are done separately for each district. So we will just look at one district in the following. Initially, a sample is drawn of three people from the district (as in the other districts). People in the district then vote with approval ballots, approving either all three or none or any number between. The marks on the ballots are counted in two ways, full way and fractional way.
For the resulting ranking of the three people, we count the marks
fully, meaning one mark on a ballot is worth one point, no matter how many marks are on that ballot. (Ties are resolved in favor of older people.) All three become delegates, no matter what. What does the ranked result mean, then? Well, the delegate ranked first will also be a delegate
next time, the delegate ranked last will NOT be a delegate next time, and the delegate in the middle will only also be a delegate next time if approved now on over half the ballots. So next time we will have to resort again to sampling for either one person or two.
The delegates will have variable voting power in the regional soviet. For determining a delegate's voting power, we count the received marks
fractionally (so on a ballot with two marks, one mark is worth half a point). Some people in the district will vote, some will abstain. Imagine two districts with exactly the same number of people with voting rights, but in one district far more people bother voting, meaning they can increase the voting power of their delegates relative to the delegates of the other district.
If you understand the above you should be able to explain the difference between you voting for all your local delegates, submitting a blank ballot, and abstaining.
FAFA stands for:
Full
And
Ffractional
Aapproval
If you feel this is a silly method, think about the the criteria listed at the beginning. If you are honest, you have to admit these are sensible criteria. The method does well by these criteria. So if you want to argue this is a silly method, don't just say it feels weird (I already agree with you on that). You need to formulate at least one more sensible criterion to make the case against FAFA.
>>2807124 (me)
In case anybody wonders: I do know how to count to five. The board software fucked up my numbered list.
>>2807124>voting>>2807031>If ai did permanently replace human labor it would basically turn 90% of the population redundantread:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm >>2807153
Cybernetics is the science of steering, which is something workers' councils do :P
>>2807276this post seems to be made in jest, but it actually makes a great point. the word "government" has the same root as "cybernetics" after all. the appropriate level of delegation of responsibilities (center vs local) has been and will be a point of struggle in a DotP. thanks to cybernetics we also know certain things that such councils need, such as accurate data and a continuously updated model of the systems under their control
>>2807031did you read what anon said before replying. they basically said what you said but with more detail and considering more factors
>>2809373
>things will be exactly like this because Cockshott (pbuh) says so
I find sortition interesting but nothing at all says that things will/must be precisely like Paul proposes. this kind of utopian whining makes me more sympathetic to the aristocratic nature of MLism
>>2809373>recall of representativesWhat TANS actually says about recall:
<The fact that the vote is restricted to workers does not stop elections being an aristocratic system in the classical sense. Politics becomes a matter for the politicos. Like all aristocracies, it degenerates into a self-serving oligarchy, and is eventually replaced by an ‘honest’ bourgeois plutocracy. The idea that a right of recall would be an effective constraint on this process is laughable. The right of recall is written into the state constitution of Arizona, and was in Stalin’s Soviet Constitution without noticeable effect. It takes the collection of tens or hundreds of thousands of signatures to secure the recall of an official. It is bound to be a rare event compared to regular elections, but if elections do not keep officials in line why should recall?This could be addressed by having randomly drawn juries decide regularly on whether to do recalls, but let's be clear, this is not what Cockshott proposes. If you combine sortition with a recall procedure, you end up with a sortition-voting hybrid. The FAFA thing in
>>2807124 is of course also such a hybrid.
>>2809888
demcent != vanguardism. demcent is a far more general concept. the institution of globe spanning planning is an aspect of demcent. it doesn't take much thought to realize why this must be so. the need to enforce a global CO2 constraint is enough to realize this
>>2810306
That movie fucks
>>2810306
I did read the book. sortition is a very interesting tool to uphold democratic centralism
>>2809888
>What is the title of that section?
Irrelevant.
>you slimy little rat. Here's the part Mr.Epstein censored
Take your meds.
>Yes recall with unrepresentative elections is rightly rejected, but the right to recall randomly selected representatives is still progressive and legitimate.
"Progressive and legitimate". You just played the internet tough guy and two seconds later this vague shitlib talk. Recall and election are both meritocratic selection.
>>The first and most characteristic feature of demokratia was the rule by the majority vote of all citizens… As Burnheim argues, the principle should be that all those who have a legitimate interest in the matter should have a chance to participate in its management.
>That means recalling selected citizens.
It is certainly not explicitly said there and I also don't see how that follows. If it follows for you, can you make an argument as to why voting for a person does not follow as well. You certainly haven't made a logical argument here. (You sound to me like somebody who believes that range voting with scores zero to minus nine is an innovative and fundamentally distinct method from range voting with non-negative values.)
>>2810306
Again, recall was not in the book.
>>2810733>Recall under demcent is different from recall under Democracy.Are you having a stroke? If you meant to write "under
bourgeois democracy": The right to recall in the USSR was practically meaningless as the bureaucratic hurdles were to high, as Cockshott & Cottrell had pointed out in TANS (relevant section already quoted in
>>2809682).
>>2811897
how to stop The People (tm) from collectively deciding to dissolve random selection and recall out of spite and laziness?
>>2789841I have trouble following the Manhattan thing he talks about. Anyone have some insight into this?
The "logic" of the last couple posts:
<Hey guys, what if we first draft two people by lottery and then select one of them?">Bourgeois, reactionary, you are basically Epstein for thinking this.<Hey guys, what if we first draft two people by lottery and then deselect one of them?">Based, revolutionary, you are the dialectical Einstein.>>2811934Look at a square grid on paper. Think of the lines as streets. Mark a point at one crossing roughly in the middle of the paper. Go a couple blocks North, a couple blocks East, and mark another crossing. Let's pretend the world is flat, then: Euclidean distance = air distance = the shortest line connecting the two points. Manhattan distance means following the streets.
If we move 3 units
North, 4 units
East, then the
Length of the trip is…
…for a bird: N² + E² = L²
3² + 4² = 25
L = 5
…on foot: N + E = L
3 + 4 = 7
L = 7
Think of using
all of a given budget for obtaining various quantities of two commodities, X and Y. You can graph all the possibilities on paper. A bundle gets a point with an x-coordinate representing the amount of commodity X in that bundle and the y-coordinate representing the amount of commodity Y in that bundle. One extreme would be spending all on X, the other extreme would be spending all on Y. All the other possible spending-all-the-money bundles lie on the straight line connecting the two points.
Look at the origin of the graph (where x and y are = 0). The bundles we are thinking about are equal in money terms, but have different air distance from the origin. So this equality is not captured by Euclidean geometry.
>>2812796
>Election is an aristocratic function and recall is a democratic function.
The quoted snippets merely say that recall does not fix elections and do not praise recall to high heavens. Elections and recall are both methods of sorting people into the deserving and undeserving. Recall is a type of election.
My actual position is that the qualities of election methods are dependent on scale in such an extreme way that it feels kinda fraudulent to even use the same names. One may write two texts to describe two election methods, one to be used by eleven people to choose one among them and another to be used by eleven million people, and one may choose to make these texts identical except for a few numbers. One may then use the same name for the methods (that's what everybody is doing and isn't that intuitive?), but the two very different scales will work out in very different ways.
At a small scale, elections work out okay-ish or better (there are some interesting alternative voting methods); at big scale elections are horrendous. With sortition it's the opposite. Imagine filling a single position instead of a committee… And this is why you are jumping at the opportunity to add some electastic sauce to sortition, doing this in the form of a recall mechanism. Understandable, but you seem to have a taboo or weird mental block against saying the sauce is what it is.
>>2812790
>You can ask AI about these things, it's pretty good when it comes to explaining mathematical concepts and why they work to predict outcomes.
I've done that before but I always get scared I'm tricking myself into thinking I understand but really I'm just making myself even dumber and more confident at the same time
what do people in here think about liquid democracy?
>you can give/retract your endorsement of a representative at any time>endorsing someone essentially gives them your voting power>you can retract your voting power on any issue and vote on only that issue directlyhere's one implementation:
https://liquidfeedback.com/en/ one trait of this particular implementation is that there is no voting secrecy. personally I see this as a positive. secret ballots are liberal cowardice
>>2813055
>voting freely without reprisals
no. stand for your fucking opinions
>>2813032LD is a good system but it needs a pretty heavyweight bit of accountability behind it otherwise it'd be very prone to corruptions and scandal.
What LD needs is a serious online interface so you can actually manage where you're delegating when and where, I do not want to have the same guy managing my vote on tech subjects as the guy I would delegate to on alcohol law and i want to vote myself on gun control.
>>2813032also i dont think abolishing voting or delegation secrecy is a good idea. There's been plenty of open-source software examples of why seeing names on github etc. can cause problems
>>2813349
Interesting PDF, thanks!
>>2813388in that case you'll have to ditch any kind of computerized remote system, because there's no way to guarantee voting secrecy that way
>>2813032Already discussed in the older /cybercom/ threads:
https://archive.is/xBFYYhttps://archive.ph/Afx5actrl-f
liquid >>2813799
if you have a system connected to the network, it's an inherent security risk
I think some of the sortition fans in here place too much stock in Paul Cockshott Thought. democracy can only be won after the population has been appropriately indoctrinated. to institute "democracy" in the USA for example, where a sizeable part of the population are MAGA, would be disastrous. I do not want to give MAGA people any kind of power. we must reeducated the people first. only then can we possibly speak of democracy. to think freely is great. to think correctly is greater
>>2814034The video is realistic, given the absolute state of current tech, yet i feel not all of the pessimism is entirely warranted. If bitcoin can digitize currency, so would a sufficiently clever voting scheme be able to work. Here's my crack at it:
- Voters get issued two keys over a secure channel or from their local seat of government.
- The first key is used to symmetrically encrypt and sign a message containing the vote.
- The second key is an access token to a public gateway server, that anonymously forwards the message to a secured counting server and expires the token in case of success.
- The counting server then identifies and decrypts the message.
The necessary infrastructure could be spread out over multiple counties. This does not assuage fears about infected end users, but it does makes intrusion harder, provided the gateways are well cared for. It would also enable the creation of large-scale digital marketplaces for votes…
>>2814106anon people much smarter than you have already thought about this problem very hard and concluded that nothing beats pencil and paper if secrecy is a concern. 1) and 2) in your scheme ensures the state knows exactly who voted for what. it also doesn't guarantee votes are actually counted correctly since the actual counting is inscrutable
a lot of these issues go away by abolishing secret votes. that doesn't mean we might not want to use secret votes for some things. but importantly, it is practically impossible to do correctly with computers
>>2814274>anon people much smarter than you have already thought about this problem very hard and concluded that nothing beats pencil and paper if secrecy is a concern.Probably, but thinking about it is fun regardless.
>1) and 2) in your scheme ensures the state knows exactly who voted for what.The anonymity aspect hinges on the fact, that only the department issuing the keys to a specific voter, ideally exactly one person, who prepared then sealed the documents, has ever seen both at the same time. Neither of the keys would later be associated with an identity, since the only information left over is the number of keys in circulation and the number of received votes less than or equal to it.
>it also doesn't guarantee votes are actually counted correctly since the actual counting is inscrutableWhat the scheme leaves behind after votes have been issued, is a set of cryptographically verifiable messages. Handling this data would be more complex than ensuring the physical security of ballots, but you still have tons of options involving secure checksums, redundancy and cryptographic ledgers.
This is more or less how i would picture it working:
- A central goverment authority prepares a list of keys based on the total number of registered voters.
- Your local government securely receives its alloted number of keys and is responsible for giving them out to the voters.
- The voters connect to a gateway run by the local government, which forwards its messages over a secure government netwok, until reaching the central government authority. If you want to leave a paper trail, hook up a line printer to every server along the way, which records a secure checksum of every message.
- The program at the end of all this isn't very complex and should thus be easily audible: Get a list of keys and encrypted messages to decode, then sum the votes from the individual messages.
To commit forgery of a vote, an attacker would need have a vote encryption key and either an access key or the ability to inject votes without anyone noticing. Deanonymizing voters would take a large-scale effort to infiltrate local government, record key identities and look them up from the internal voting record, which i think is in the same scope as someone bribing the postal service to deanonymize mail voting.
>>2813032You can have ballot secrecy but only for non-delegated votes. Delegatees have a higher responsibility and sacrifice their privacy. If you want privacy you can take it back at any moment through an individual vote.
>>2814605yes a hybrid system could work. but there's another important factor: cost. how often could we feasibly hold secret votes on things? once per year? one per month?
How to deal with gluts and shortages? The obvious way is via price adjustments (also my fav because I'm a bore), but some people propose enacting per-head limits or a combination of mechanisms. Each mechanism is also a measurement of sorts. When just one mechanism is used, how intensely the mechanism is used is also a general measure for the size of this or that glut or shortage, so one can make comparisons across the economy and this helps with prioritizing. But how to estimate excess demand for two products while for one product the price is raised and for the other a per-person limit is applied?
It is possible to use a combination of mechanisms to deal with supply-demand mismatches and still have a measure of the intensity of these mismatches for the whole economy if and only if these mechanisms are arranged into a rigid hierarchy. For an example of how this can be done, take a look at the following monstrosity.
This requires that people do not use cash, but a system of electronic accounts tied to the individual which makes possible to have individualized rewards and punishments. People living together can opt into linking their accounts to a simple algorithm that automatically gives them the result they would get when coordinating perfectly their purchase behavior to maximize the rewards and minimize the punishments and swapping items between them. (This is not the same as a shared budget account as the individual budgets remain firmly in the hands of the individuals.)
The hierarchy distinguishes between 11 cases, these being 5 levels of glut + 5 levels of shortage + the normal case with the normal price.
GLUT LEVEL 1: The price is still the normal price, but payment of ½ the price is deferred to 30 days later without interest charge.
GLUT LEVEL 2: Same as level 1, but there is also a rebate offer for one extra unit per person bought within 3 days of the first unit of just paying ½ the normal price without having to pay the second half later. (This is also applied retroactively.)
GLUT LEVEL 3: Now the price is set to ½ the normal price in general and not just as a rebate. (The rebate effect is not stacked on top of that. Deferred debt from the product obtained at glut level 1 is deleted.)
GLUT LEVEL 4: Price set to 0.
GLUT LEVEL 5: Price set to negative.
And now to the shortage levels.
SHORTAGE LEVEL 1: The normal price still exists, but individuals who buy a second unit within 3 days have to pay 2× the normal price.
SHORTAGE LEVEL 2: The price is set to 2× the normal price for everyone.
SHORTAGE LEVEL 3: Keeping the price at 2× the normal price and there is a limit per head within a 30-day period.
SHORTAGE LEVEL 4: Taking all the crap from level 3 and adding a waiting list or lottery.
SHORTAGE LEVEL 5: Production canceled.
Any idea what we should name this? I feel pretty meh about it, so I would like a name that reflects that. Don't overthink the details in the above, a lot of these choices are arbitrary. The point is, if you want a measure and you mix mechanisms, then you need to have a hierarchy.
>>2814920>SHORTAGE LEVEL 5: Production canceled.wut, shouldn't you increase production instead? by say investing in MoPs
>>2815223
yeah but why would you stop production when demand is non-zero?
>>2815300How would you then define a situation of being in a persistent maximal shortage of something then? If "it's not produced anymore" is not part of that description, then adding these words makes the description sound more extreme, no? So without these words, the situation is not at the most extreme.
This is supposed to classify gluts and shortages. The levels are not a set of instructions what to do. ("When we are at level _, you will do
__.") Note what is not described: buffer stocks, inflows and outflows, even though that would make a lot of sense. So this is classification by actions. ("When we are doing __, this means we are at level _.")
>>2817188 (me)
Ahem, FUCK AUTOFORMATTING.
>>2817188>it's not produced anymoreif something isn't produced then there is nothing to do. I'm not sure I understand how this is even a problem. people could put in investment proposals for MoPs to produce that thing. but perhaps it is a thing that is not to be produced, like say nuclear waste?
>>2817207>but perhaps it is a thing that is not to be produced, like say nuclear waste?It's a classification scheme for shortages of goods and shortage level 5 means shortage of the most extreme type. And you ask this. Do you buy nuclear waste at the store.
>>2817210>Do you buy nuclear waste at the store.I can buy smoke detectors which contain a form of nuclear waste
Vivek Chibber is one of the most influential nominally socialist writers in the US. He is one of the founders of Catalyst, a theory journal of Jacobin. Here is an interview (or "interview", as the other person sounds more sycophantic than ChatGPT and just agrees with everything) where Chibber argues against central planning, doing the usual sleight of hand of equating decentralized with market mechanisms:
https://jacobin.com/2026/05/central-planning-soviet-union-socialismActual quote by him from that:
<Normally in capitalism, what do managers do? They want to make profits. The way to make a profit is by trying to sell, at the lowest price possible, the best-quality good that you can.This is false. The goal in capitalism is to maximize profits, which is very different from trying to maximize output while breaking even.
<That planner has to get everybody else to follow his directions because it only works if they listen to what he is saying.He talks of "the central planner" as if that were a single person.
<When you start with saying, “We need so much steel,” in order to make that steel, you have to know everything that goes into making steel. And it’s all integrated. In order to have all those things go into the steel, you have to ask, “Well, how many blast furnaces do we need?” For the blast furnaces, you have to ask, “How much coal do we need?” For the steel to be made, you have to ask, “Okay, once all that steel is made, where’s it going to go? Who’s going to use it?” Trains, automobiles, and so on.
<In economics, these are called complementarities or linkages. Everything is linked. If you screw up one of those links, it radiates all across the economy. So you have to be able to handle complexity at a level that just boggles the mind.In economics, complementary goods are goods that go well together with other goods, the opposite case of competition. E. g. If you are got a stand selling pretzels and Coke and you make the pretzel cheaper, demand for your Coke goes up. Anyway, the connections that Chibber speaks of are very much visible in the input-output tables of a planned economy. This is a
strength of the planned economy.
<As it happens in the Soviet Union, everything went wrong all the time.🙄
<Because of the uncertainty and the possibility of breakdown in the provision of inputs, manpower, things like that, managers have an incentive to lie when they give the information to the planners.The same issue exists between departments of all but the very smallest companies.
<In a planned system, when the needed inputs, raw materials that every enterprise needs are not forthcoming, planners cannot be shielded from the responsibility of that enterprise or workplace not delivering and coming through. That means planners are in a difficult situation where they can’t come and say, “I’m going to let you fail.” Because now in that region, every worker, and every worker in connected enterprises who will suffer from yours being shut down is going to turn around and get really angry at that planner, at the planning bodies, and so on. You could have a constant civil war going on.
<So for the planner, it’s easier to say, “Look, just do better next time. I’m not going to let you go under.” This is called a soft budget constraint.it seems to not occur to Chibber that it is possible to punish a specific manager without taking apart the factory he managed.
He argues for market socialism because:
<Centrally planned economies were built not to have slack.But are the concepts of
central planning and
having no slack actually connected by logical necessity, one leading to the other? The answer is no. This
felt connection is a very important "argument" for him, he drones on and on about it.
Chibber finishes with this:
<If we’re actually serious about changing the world, people on the Left, Marxist or non-Marxist, but people who are actually trying to fight for socialism, should be the most remorseless and the most merciless when it comes to facts. Unfortunately, we’re a long way from that right now.I fully agree with that at least.
…
Cockshott just made a response video to Chibber, gonna watch it now.
>>2819557>09:44 If the market system was more rational in its use of resources, if its information transmission was more effective as the Austrian school - Hayek, Mises and now Chibber - claim, then the market economies would have raced ahead of the USSR. But actually the opposite is the case!oh snap
what is to be done about degrowthers? more than a few times I've had run-ins with people online who seem incapable of understanding that planning means that all technologies are on the table, including whatever tech is their personal pet peeve, be it nuclear or SRM or whatever
<INDEP online Talk with Leone – On Defining and Measuring Human Needs with Democratic Planning>This is a recording of our online event with Leone on Defining and Measuring Human Needs with Democratic Planning, which was held on June 9th 2026.>You can find the description below:>Meeting social needs with democratic planning requires that we learn how to see and define those needs, and that we institutionalize such learning processes in postcapitalist governance. In this presentation, Leone explores some meditations on the politics of measurements and their role in planning processes in a postcapitalist world, with a focus on democratic investment planning. The essay upon which this presentation is based seeks to articulate some of the core political problems around measurements which we must design real-world interventions to solve. He invites scrutiny and feedback on his current essay draft, which can be found on the discord server of the Econophysics community: https://fbi.gov/invite/9jZYkRYYWA>INDEP - The International Network for Democratic Economic Planningour website:
https://www.indep.network/>We are an international network of workers, students, researchers, and activists, who share the common goal of advancing a post-capitalist economic system based on democratic economic planning.>You can join INDEP as a member (as individual or as organization), subscribe to our newsletter, share news and events from the world of democratic economic planning. If you are interested in organizing an event with INDEP yourself or want to get involved otherwise feel free to reach out to us via [email protected]. >>2839910>wordfilter changed discord link to fbi.govlel
>>283991039 minutes in, Leone Castar says he looks for collaborators do develop a chapter
how a postcapitalist judiciary would work. Well, I don’t use Discord or Zoom and I prefer to remain anonymous, so I will just drop my answer in this thread.
JURY SYSTEMTo get inspiration, we start with a brief look at a
very simple analytical model: There is a group of people trying to answer some question about reality by voting between two options, one true and one false. Each person in the group got more intelligence than zero, so their chance of picking the right option from the two is a bit better than 50 %. Assume the same percentage for each person, with no particular correlation between people. That’s the model. What follows from this? Three things:
- The banal thing: The best approach to finding the truth here is to just go with the option that gets more votes, not requiring a super-majority or people voting for representatives who then vote.
- The beautiful thing: We can get arbitrarily close to being correct 100 % of the time if the group is big enough. These two conclusions are known as Condorcet’s Jury theorem.
- A tricky detail: If you have a group size that is odd and you just add one person, the probability that the group gets the right decision just stays where it is. So the group size should be odd.
When it comes to punishment, I’m thinking of something a bit more complicated than just two options. I think the topic fits into a
one-dimensional spatial model. I think such a model fits because we can think of prison time as a quantity shown on a line, and everybody agrees what more or less means here. This agreement is necessary, but not sufficient for a really good fit. It is also necessary that people see themselves as standing on a point on that line. A counter-example: A parliament discusses different proposals for military spending and there might be consensus on how to order these plans from small to big, but the politicians may not all see themselves as standing on one point on that line, but rather with each foot on one end. On that issue, one may be of the opinion: “Go big or go home.”
The punishment in a criminal case is to be decided not by a judge, but by the interplay of a
sortition-selected jury and laws from a
sortition-selected legislature.
Each jury member expresses where they individually stand on the line. For the aggregated jury voice we take not the arithmetic mean, but the
median. That is, we order the ballots on a line from smallest to biggest stated punishment, and then we walk over the ballots. When we have just walked over half the ballots, we stop, and we have the answer at our feet. A jury majority wants no bigger punishment and a jury majority wants no smaller punishment.
(By the way, there have been some estimation contests, like guessing the weight of an ox or the amount of marbles in a jar, and the median has usually been the more accurate estimate than the arithmetic mean. Francis Galton wrote about this.)
Picture yourself as a jury member who believes to know better than the others what the proper size of punishment should be. If the arithmetic mean were taken as the aggregated jury voice, you would have an incentive to estimate the votes of the others and then to
strategically exaggerate your difference on your ballot to get a result closer to your ideal. Not so with the median. (Aside: If the number of voters were even, there would be the need for an extra rule to deal the two middle votes in order to avoid exaggeration incentive, like flipping a coin or always taking the lower one.)
When the legislature designs a law describing some kind of wrongdoing, the people in the legislature vote with two ballots, one for the
recommended minimum sentencing and one for the
possible maximum sentencing. We don’t want that the legislature can easily turn the juries into a powerless appendix, so we use
super-majorities here. We saw with Condorcet’s Jury theorem that the majority has a special meaning. Requirements for super-majorities usually seem rather arbitrary, but here we use something meaningful. We order the ballots for the minimum recommendation, and walk from the end with the biggest stated value towards the other end, stopping once we have passed over ¾ of the votes. Likewise the other way around: We order ballots for the possible maximum sentencing and walk from the smallest stated value towards the other end, stopping once we have passed over ¾. These super-majorities of over ¾ have their basis in protecting an “ordinary” majority: Doing the two counts this way, over half the people voting will see both their voted values included within the two aggregated values.
For either act of voting in the legislature a voter not stating a value that is equal to the aggregate answer will either land on the lower-value or the higher-value side; and when we counter-factually assume a scenario of that voter voting with a ballot exaggerating the difference to the aggregate result, we can easily see that such behavior would not have changed the aggregate result, just like with the jury’s median aggregate.
What punishment does the defendant receive in the end: The jury cannot make a harsher sentence real than the possible maximum set by the legislature, but the jury can always make real something below the minimum recommendation of the legislature, even
zero punishment.
The issue of the received punishment is not quite identical to what the jury can express: The jury can always express a wish for a harsher sentence than the maximum set by the legislature, even though the actual punishment gets capped at that maximum. This is valuable feedback for the legislature to re-evaluate things. If the jury’s aggregate voice going out of bounds happens often enough with a particular type of wrongdoing, the update of the recommended minimum and possible maximum could even be automatic. (But an increased maximum cap for a particular type of wrongdoing should not be used to
retroactively increase sentencing.)
Is the question of punishment really always about an amount of an obvious “punishment substance” expressed as cardinal data though? Why is it that a one-dimensional and highly abstract approach to punishment was so obvious to me in the beginning of writing this? Perhaps it is because I am living in capitalist society where almost anything is measured in a one-dimensional abstract way. Perhaps a new society with more focus on concrete use-values will also react to the many different ways of wrongdoing with many different concrete approaches, and more focus on what offenders should do for their victims. An intriguing thought.
The voting procedures that use scales
can actually handle combinations of different types of punishment if these are expressed as a
ranking of punishment bundles, with a bigger bundle compared to a smaller bundle always containing it as a strict subset. But people on a jury might come up with rather diverse ideas that don’t fit into an obvious ranking.
How about this: In addition to using the scale procedure described in this essay, a jury dealing with a concrete case can also discuss alternative ways and vote with an
approval ballot for these. Any alternative proposal that gains approval by a majority of jury members is then submitted to the defendant together with the scale procedure’s result. The defendant chooses.
And with that addition we will also have more feedback data and a really self-critical system.
>>2845941you should email your thoughts to him, since I don't think he's aware of the threads
I thought "wall of text"-anon was Leone since it's kind of his posting style but your post directly contradicts this >>2566230oh nonononono ultras won…
How the fuck is the latest video generating zero discourse ITT?
Have I missed the exodus?? Where'd y'all go?!?
>>2865251I'm not part of this club per se since this thread moves too slowly but I popped in because Google fed me that video.
The answer to your question has nothing to do with the video. Frankly I think cybercommunism is too hopeful for /leftypol/because technology may be on the cusp of enabling it to actually happen. It's easier to just ignore it and doompost about how everything will only get worse and why bother trying. This place is full of grumbling, seething Cold Warriors who refuse to move on.
>>2865251kinda feels like nothing is happening in the sphere
>>2865688as opposed to… where? what are you even saying? did you even see the damn video?
>>2867597>9:34uh oh does Dickblast have a loicense for expressing support for Palestine Action?
also that facial expression
someone ITT with a yt acc
for the love of labor link it to him:
>>2869663>>2869669>>2867124<Socialist Planning in the Era of Climate Change<David Zachariah and Tomas HärdinTwo questions which may look a bit self-contradictory:
Page 12:
<For final orders, the shadow price per GWh of electrical power supply is the additional amount of worker-hours required to increase the order by one unit.What's a unit? When not talking about an object like a bicycle, how a unit is set can be quite arbitrary. Best examples for this arbitrariness are water and electricity… which are exactly the examples the authors use! Wouldn't it make more sense to set the unit in a way related to what we are trying to do, like 1 % of the plan-target quantity of the thing in question?
Page 13
<…the resource constraints for the final demand are rebalanced, such that the sum of percentage deviations from the goals (10 GWh, 30 kilotonnes, and so on) is minimized.What about goal
similarity? Shouldn't similar goals be grouped together and treated together as potentially compensating for each other's shortcomings to a stronger degree than with dissimilar goals?
And another thing, page 15
<…when there is only a single cement or insulin producer. If left unchecked, such an enterprise could squander labor and hoard resources. It is therefore advisable to assign the sectoral investment boards the task of investing in parallel capacities for cement or insulin productionVery unimaginative to propose dealing with the social issue of concentration of power with the technical approach of building up parallel capacities. As if that wasn't squandering labor when there are regulation tools available. Let's analytically separate people and machinery of an enterprise: If the issue is that a group of people gains power through being tiny, look for ways to reduce that power. If we can significantly expand the group of people skilled for these tasks without building up facilities elsewhere, we can just do that. The group already working there doesn't have the monopoly on who else gets hired there, I would hope. We can set higher transparency standards. More inspections. And also: Look into MAP (Market Anti-Inflation Plan) by David Colander and Abba Lerner, a proposal to treat price-raising as pollution and to implement trading pollution permits for that.
(Nitpick: I think it's a mistake to engage at all, however critically, with Ackerman, Grünberg, Sunkara. These are all very stupid people. I also have no use for Hickel and his bizarre quasi-physical metrics to "measure" third-world exploitation.) Every economy is already solving the distribution problem without needing a big red computer
The problem has always been political organization and class struggle, not calculation
Theredore cybernetics is pointless and is nothing but a tech-fetish.
QED
>>2870401every modern economical apparatus use computers what is this ragebait
>>2566230If he really believes in it then he can start giving away his money for charity and stuff like that.
No? Oh, mmkay.
>>2870122>What's a unit?it says GWh right there. it probably doesn't matter what units are used. 1000 hours per GWh = 1 hour per MWh
>>2869702I tried replying but it's not showing up when I refresh
>>2870410Yeah, it means there's no cybernetics "problem", it's just excel. Nobody needs " cyberneticists" or "implementing cybernetics"
Economic planning is a solved problem and the task of socialism is not to simulate the law of value on a computer
>>2870401>Every economy is already solving the distribution problemWhat planet are you from fellow leftychud?
>>2870969Every economy is already planned top down, this isn't the gilded age
It's funny how people will bring this up as an argument for the viability of central planning not realizing it means that "cybernetics" as a field is already pointless.
It's just a fantasy of delegating politics and class struggle to computers
>>2870945>Economic planning is a solved problem and the task of socialism is not to simulate the law of value on a computerhave you ready any actual theory? because if you did you'd know the law of values becomes
more important after the seizure of power, not less. you cannot value aufheben without grasping it firmly first. you may believe it is possible, but that you have only grasped the issue loosely, and not firmly
>>2870991you can't "delegate" things to computers. computers are not political subjects
>>2870544>it says GWh right there.⋮
That post wasn't asking what's
the unit:
>What's a unit? When not talking about an object like a bicycle, how a unit is set can be quite arbitrary. Best examples for this arbitrariness are water and electricity… which are exactly the examples the authors use! Wouldn't it make more sense to set the unit in a way related to what we are trying to do, like 1 % of the plan-target quantity of the thing in question?>>2870945>Economic planning is a solved problemI would imagine most CS students have heard of the Traveling-Salesman problem and the Knapsack problem. I know of no solution guarantees for bigger instances of these because of combinatorial explosion, only heuristics. These problems are of course only two of the sub-problems of logistics. So if you want to show how you do precise planning you actually have to solve a network of combinatorial explosions linked to other combinatorial explosions, and each link is a multiplier. Do you want to show us how you do that?
Research on approximate solutions is ongoing.
>>2871619can you express what you mean in terms of a linear program?
in LP, shadow prices are always in terms of small changes in the constraints. if you want to make a large change, which 1% is, then you need to re-solve the program
>>2871633I'm not reading all that shit. but I did a quick search on "plann" and surprise surprise it repeats Cold War lies about planning
>>2871619There exist efficient fast heuristic algos for the traveling salesman
Already employed in all relevant fields
If you mean solving an np hard problem mathematically, then quit larping, you won't be overcominh the foundations of modern math and computation lil bro
>>2871659every single mention of planning
>>2871769A majority of them are talking about fucking capitalist corporations retard so you dont know what you are fucking talking about
This thread is pointless because in a few years AI will get good enough to just run society in general, and from there it's not far to AGI
>>2871619>I know of no solution guarantees for bigger instances of these because of combinatorial explosion, only heuristics.>Research on approximate solutions is ongoing.>>2871661>There exist efficient fast heuristic algos>If you mean solving an np hard problem mathematically, then quit larpingWhy are half the comments here by people who can't read (or is it all the same guy)?
>>2873946Do you think the problem with all hitherto economies, including socialist ones, was that there were not even fasterer traveling salesman algorithms?
>>2867864he said a few threads ago he got some kind of surgery that affected his ability to speak. dude is getting old. it is not fun to be that age. basically your mind starts going and life is one long doctors appointment
>>2870401"Cybernetics is the science of effective organization " Stafford Beer
Childhood is beliving in planning, adulthood is embracing the market.
What I meant by market is a market socialist one, not capitalistic one.
>>2878380When you get older, kid, you will realize that planning is (and was) a failure, and the market (although imperfect) is far better for society.
Since Cockshott thinks that Althusser's ideas have become mystified in the anglosphere due to poor translations, are there any modern, better translations of him? I know Cock does not think highly of Althusser but given that he has felt the need to single him out, it makes me think that maybe there is something to it. He seems to have had an influence on Cockshott's conception of HistMat atleast.
Also whats the relation of Guattari and Deleuze to cybernetics? Is there anything worthwhile to be gained from reading them?
>>2882173>I know Cock does not think highly of AlthusserHow so? I thought he agreed with him on the whole epistemological break thing.
>>2882173cockshott actually is pretty pro althusser especially the late althusser
Is Cockshott still working on a book on stochastic materialism or have I missed something?
>>2897688>2024Whoops. Is it any good?
>>2898897I have just started reading it and I would say it’s somewhat academic, cockshotts main co author is a Macedonian who knows Ancient Greek pretty well.
This is a book on academic philosophy and ontology somewhat just be prepared for it not to be a page turner
>>2904051Here is how to pronounce "Initiative demokratische Arbeitszeitrechnung":
Eeneetsya
teeeewah
Daymo
craaaahtisha
Arrrbytes
TSYTE!reshnoong
>>2906098thanks germanon. I think you can remove the s between Arrrbyte and TSYTE. having it there is a bit like pronouncing the t in hot potato
>>2878630Such words being thrown around…
Failure…
Far better for society…
Admit you got tired resisting and just accepted porky ideology.
I donate this article to the public domain.
THE MEANING OF UTILITY AND USE-VALUE FOR SOCIALISM
Modern Utility Concepts VS Classical Use-Value
In 20th century economics, utility of something is conceived of in terms of degrees (or ranks) of happiness evaluations by individuals, with these evaluations usually assumed to be very different from individual to individual and a secret to anyone else until revealed through bids in the market. Usually it is assumed that additional units of a product going to the same individual give decreasing amounts of additional happiness (marginally decreasing utility). It is acknowledged that estimating the utility of a product basket for a particular person is a very complicated issue with some products being substitutes, others being complementary.
It is a daunting task for you, alien even, to express how much utility you would gain from this or that product basket. How much harder then must it be to make these estimates on behalf of another person? How much harder still must it be to make these estimates for millions of other people?
In classical economics and Marx, the use-value of something is what it is useful for due to its known aspects. Known by whom? - Most adult people living in society. Even though this knowledge changes over time (Marx gives the example of magnets), for a given time and place this knowledge is taken to be something fixed and objective. How to measure use-value: The quantity of a use-value of, for example, a particular coat, is simply measured in how many units of that particular coat exist. The use-value of something not in use is only a potential, the thing's use-value becomes real through use.
That use-value is not a matter of individually different perspectives is lost on many modern readers, who usually have already encountered 20th century economics before engaging with Marx. In the writing of Marx, one can read that something is not a use-value to its seller while it is a use-value to its buyer. The reader with a perception colored by 20th century economics is likely to have associations with individual differences in taste and needs resulting in different utility grades that different people implicitly give to the same thing. But what's in the text is just the binary distinction of using or not using. Marx is not referring to different happiness evaluations existing in this or that head, he is just saying the seller has no intent of using the thing. Hence its use-value does not become real in the hands of the seller. Marx assumes both the seller and the buyer to know what that use-value is.
Can a crude binary concept of use-value help us think about how to organize a socialist economy? - Yes. Real wealth is use-values and use-values only become real through use. There are physical limits to what a person can do. You cannot simultaneously sit on a train and on a plane. There are people in this world who own many things that in total they cannot possibly use due to the physical limits of time and space. To take a thing from you that you cannot possibly use does not make you poorer in a meaningful sense. For this sort of expropriation we don't need complex utility models, as our conception of wealth tells us that shifting a thing from a non-user to a user increases somebody's wealth without decreasing the wealth of another.
Property Privilege VS Use Privilege
You having property privilege in something means you having a legal title granting you power to restrict access to that thing.
Some people claim having property means first of all having "the power to use that thing" or they claim that to be a one-sided description neither better nor worse than "having the power to restrict access" and that putting both together makes for a more complete and balanced description. These people are mistaken. You can be the owner of something without being capable of using it. Example: A person without arms and legs can be the owner of a bicycle. The capacity to use things was not invented by law. Things can be used without being covered by the scope of property laws. Understandably it matters to you a lot that you usually can use the things you own; but there is no need to spell out this fact, since this fact directly flows from your ability to restrict or allow access. You just allow yourself to use these things. The addition of "the power to use something" to the definition of property privilege is redundant.
You having use privilege in something means you having a legal title granting you power to use that thing.
A society with a law system structured mainly around use privileges with niches of ownership will be very different from capitalism, one can hardly overstate how much. Such a society will not have patents. A person cannot be in two places at the same time, nor in two places far away from each other within a short time span, and based on this fact society can set ways to limit hoarding of tickets for events and the hoarding of living space. The use privilege automatically amounts to a privilege of restricting access for others only insofar as that restriction is the unavoidable consequence of you having the use privilege. There can be some privileges of restricting access that are not simply a logically unavoidable consequence of use privilege, if use privilege without that is deemed to be not convenient enough; but these exceptions have to be carefully defined by rules that are added, checked, updated, deleted by sortition-selected juries of the general public, rules that automatically expire after a while if not checked.
One may believe that, for practical reasons, in the case of many things like food there cannot be a difference between use privilege and property privilege. But this view is mistaken. From a few basic facts about expiration dates and calories we can conclude that it is possible to set limits to individuals taking food, which are only limits to absurd requests, but practically no limit for anyone who only makes requests concerned with directly satisfying their own individual needs and wants.
However, that somebody has hoarded a huge pile of things that the hoarder logically cannot possibly all use does not amount to a proof regarding a particular thing in the pile. The logic applies to the pile as a whole (and to subsets big enough), but from this follows no strong justification to take this or that thing from the hoarder. As you point at a thing in the pile, the hoarder can say: "I just wanted to use this!" Usually you cannot disprove this. Someone with a huge collection of bicycles may be physically capable to ride any single one of these you happen to point at. Suppose there is a new regulation stating an individual now can own only up to three bicycles. If society leaves it to the hoarder to select the three to keep, the utility loss of the hoarder is minimal without society needing a clever psychological model of the individual's mind.
The new society sets limits in terms of use-values, individuals can choose how to comply with these limitations with an eye towards utility for themselves.
>>2915426>additional happiness (marginally decreasing utility)I would rather term it "diminishing marginal utility". As total "happiness" increases, marginal "happiness" decreases. Hence, if it takes 30 spoonfuls to eat a bowl of soup, we are pleasured with each one, but we are still less pleasured at the same rate of each one. As hunger declines, so does marginal utility. On this point too, this is mainly applicable to constant consumption rather than variable consumption, hence if we add bread and butter to the soup, we increase total happiness at the same rate, by also increasing each margin of pleasure. So, utility is multiplied with each commodity added. In marginal theories of production, this is applied by the factors of labour, capital and land, which are multiplied.
>estimating the utility of a productYes, especially when you don't have money as a means. A useful trick by Carl Menger is a comparison of various goods, making value (e.g. utility) entirely relative, never absolute (this is also stressed by Gossen, the founder of marginal utility theory). For example, if I have two goods, my immediate choice between them expresses the greater utility it brings me, and so goods which have the same level of "indifference" (t. Jevons) of choice have the same value to us. If we could either take or leave a choice between chocolate and vanilla, they have the same value. An issue however is that while Gossen and Menger both make this point, they also use the sum of Intensity and Duration as absolute metrics, the same as Jevons. Here, utility is caught between its relative case and absolute case. More rigorous Austrian theorists will then say that since life is a constant series of choices, we are always preferring one thing over another, making value entirely relative. So, we come into a strange case where the value of a thing is measured against the value of another thing, but value in itself is not established. It should also be said that value can be configured very basically to simply be a supply and demand equation in Menger's writings, which is then the very basis of price.
>To Marx, the use-value is knownHere I would disagree. To Marx, use-value is entirely contingent to circumstance, including history. If one makes a thing which is supposed to be useful, but isn't, by lack of sale, then it has no use-value. At most, it has a potential use-value; but if it's unrealised, it doesn't count.
>shifting a thing from a non-user to a user increases somebody's wealth without decreasing the wealth of another.This is affirmed by Jevons; that transferring a private item into the public realm multiplies its total utility (1882):
<The main raison d'être of Free Public Libraries, as indeed of public museums, art-galleries, parks, halls, public clocks, and many other kinds of public works, is the enormous increase of utility which is thereby acquired for the community at a trifling cost. If a beautiful picture be hung in the dining-room of a private house, it may perhaps be gazed at by a few guests a score or two of times in the year. Its real utility is too often that of ministering to the selfish pride of its owner. If it be hung in the National Gallery, it will be enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of persons, whose glances, it need hardly be said, do not tend to wear out the canvas. The same principle applies to books in common ownership. If a man possesses a library of a few thousand volumes, by far the greater part of them must lie for years untouched upon the shelves; he cannot possibly use more than a fraction of the whole in any one year. But a library of five or ten thousand volumes opened free to the population of a town may be used a thousand times as much. It is a striking case of what I propose to call the principle of the multiplication of utility, a principle which lies at the base of some of the most important processes of political economy, including the division of labour.https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/jevons-methods-of-social-reform-and-other-papers#lf0236_head_005Too, Gossen (1854) says that since each thing loses its value with constant addition, that the hoarder of money is irrational.
>You can be the owner of something without being capable of using it.To Locke (Second Treatise of Government, Chapter 5), property is established by the rights of labour over the appropriation of a thing. This is later termed the Liberal "homestead principle" which establishes the privation of a thing from common use, or private dereliction, by the acquirement of it by cultivation. For example, if a house is abandoned, and people live in it, they gain a right to it - so, property is qualified by this direct utility. This is also continuous of Proudhon's own thoughts on possession. Further, I would concur that the right of exclusion is the more primary right, since rape, for example, is trespass against the property of another, and is unlawful. More than being able to "use" my body is my right for my body to not be used by others without consent. Thus, the mad utilitarian might justify rape against the right of property.
>Such a society will not have patentsDid you know that the Soviet Union had patents?
Ayn Rand also attempted to justify patents by citing that intellectual labour granted her the right to intellectual property.
>set ways to limit hoardingIs this not simply taxation?
>>2915426>Usually it is assumed that additional units of a product going to the same individual give decreasing amounts of additional happiness (marginally decreasing utility).>>2915463>>additional happiness (marginally decreasing utility)>I would rather term it "diminishing marginal utility". As total "happiness" increases, marginal "happiness" decreases. Hence, if it takes 30 spoonfuls to eat a bowl of soup, we are pleasured with each one, but we are still less pleasured at the same rate of each one. As hunger declines, so does marginal utility.Why reply in such a fashion to a grammar mistake? It is clear from context that decreasing marginal utility was meant, all the necessary context being in
the first half of the sentence you quote from while omitting that first half.
Then you seem to quote a word string that is not actually in the original, but I suppose it was in response to this section:
>In classical economics and Marx, the use-value of something is what it is useful for due to its known aspects. Known by whom? - Most adult people living in society. Even though this knowledge changes over time (Marx gives the example of magnets), for a given time and place this knowledge is taken to be something fixed and objective. How to measure use-value: The quantity of a use-value of, for example, a particular coat, is simply measured in how many units of that particular coat exist. The use-value of something not in use is only a potential, the thing's use-value becomes real through use.I invite anyone to compare the reply below to what was said in above section and to decide for themselves whether the reply adds anything:
>>To Marx, the use-value is known>Here I would disagree. To Marx, use-value is entirely contingent to circumstance, including history. If one makes a thing which is supposed to be useful, but isn't, by lack of sale, then it has no use-value. At most, it has a potential use-value; but if it's unrealised, it doesn't count. >>2915718>Why reply in such a fashion to a grammar mistake?"Utility" in general is not marginal utility.
It's theoretical necessary to separate them, otherwise you have the Paradox of Value. Jevons comments on this problem here (1871):
<We must now carefully discriminate between the total utility arising from any commodity and the utility attaching to any particular portion of it.https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/jevons-the-theory-of-political-economy#lf0237_head_021<Smith evidently means by value in use, the total utility of a substance of which the degree of utility has sunk very low, because the want of such substance has been well nigh satisfied. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/jevons-the-theory-of-political-economy#lf0237_head_033The "contradiction" of use-value and exchange-value is thus explained thencewise. Wicksteed revises Marx upon the same issue (1884):
<Marx is therefore wrong in saying that when we pass from that in which the exchangeable wares differ (value in use) to that in which they are identical (value in exchange), we must put their utility out of consideration, leaving only jellies of abstract labour. What we really have to do is to put out of consideration the concrete and specific qualitative utilities in which they differ, leaving only the abstract and general quantitative utility in which they are identical.https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/today/1884/10/wicksteed-capital.htmThis abstract utility is given by the principle of indifference.
>quote a word string that is not actually in the originalIt's paraphrase.
Your argument rests on the assumption of utility being a type of social knowledge which then has determination to the ends of application. This is part of the Classical prejudice of Say's Law, which I see as challenged by Marx, in part - and moreso by the Austrians, who write upon the "knowledge problem" of markets, leading to an inherent imperfection; this realism is then carried into Keynesian economics.
>>2915718 (me)
And one more thing about that poster's way of talking:
>>set ways to limit hoarding>Is this not simply taxation?For expropriations, yes, if we use "simply" to mark freaky edge cases that are not meant 99.9 % of the time. What is called a tax is almost always set in money terms. Which is why a tax in kind is explicitly labeled a "tax in kind". Taxes are indeed so often set in money terms that some definitions of tax claim that money must be paid. Following that poster, Lenin should have called his article "The Tax in Kind" instead "Simply the Tax" and since the topic is so simple and oh-so-obvious, the body of the text following could have been omitted. Given that the concept of a limit per person can already be applied
before the decision is made whether something should be distributed to a particular person, one may wonder if even a qualifier like "tax in kind" is enough for distinguishing the concept from a normal tax. Maybe that poster thinks we should call that "
very simply the tax".
Lurkers in this thread can ask themselves why somebody would enter a conversation trying to convince people to not use distinct terms for very different situations.
The essay explicitly distinguishes between use-value in Marx and classical economics and utility in modern economics. The essay opens the distinction by starting with the definition of the first term in the very first sentence:
>In 20th century economics, utility of something is conceived of in terms of degrees (or ranks) of happiness evaluations by individuals, with these evaluations usually assumed to be very different from individual to individual…It continues with the definition of the other term to make a contrast:
>In classical economics and Marx, the use-value of something is what it is useful for due to its known aspects. Known by whom? - Most adult people living in society.The essay continues making the explicit distinction all the way to the last sentence:
>The new society sets limits in terms of use-values, individuals can choose how to comply with these limitations with an eye towards utility for themselves.The critic comments:
>>2915805>Your argument rests on the assumption of utility being a type of social knowledge which then has determination to the ends of application.Again, I invite the lurkers to try to figure out what he is trying to achieve with his presence in this thread.
>>2915831>try to figure out what he is trying to achieve with his presence in this thread.You sound paranoid.
>essayReally..?
>>2915837When Smith Anon gets assblasted so much he is having a near-death experience, he posts these really short texts in defense of himself in the hope that people can't tell from style that it's him. Love it.
>>2920231Oskar Lange, Viktor Novozhilov. Yeah nothing new here. David Zachariah makes the point that by allocating labor time explicitly as such to the enterprise, the center reduces incentives at the enterprise level to exaggerate what they require. An allocation of maximally abstract budget goop that can be sliced and diced in a trillion ways (AKA money) can be easily abused for self-enrichment. It is well worth dwelling on that point.
People often talk about incentives to shill for market-like processes. Their rhetoric tends to be very simplistic. When they talk about incentives, they usually disregard any interest individuals might have in the well-being of others. Assuming a hyper-selfish person, the claim is that without
direct rewards there is a lack of incentives for doing good. But a situation without these direct individual material incentives for a selfish person is not the worst situation in the world. In a situation without direct rewards and punishments, you are also
not punished for doing good. And introducing an incentive system with differential individual rewards usually also creates situations where you get punished for doing good.
An absence of incentives also means an absence of perverse incentives.
>>2920842I don't think he's talking about personal incentives, but incentives on a firm level
>>2920923Yeah but I don't see that making a practical difference here.
>>2920842How would you get workers into an industry that is short on hands without incentives? The Soviet Union had better pay and conditions for people willing to work in the Arctic regions, would this kind of thing not be necessary to ensure proper distribution of workers sectorally and geographically?
>>2920842>When Smith Anon gets assblasted so much he is having a near-death experienceThere is literally nothing of note in the criticism to my post.
The replies are complaints of style, not substance.
>the hope that people can't tell from style that it's himWhy would I disguise myself?
I am one of the few prudent and literate posters on this forum.
As for your own post:
>you are also not punished for doing goodI believe that in any personal relationship, this is considered abuse:
<Look, I didn't hit you today! Aren't you glad?<Dig the hole… or else.Else what, in the Communist utopia? What are the "punishments"?
This all says a lot about your psychology.
By the way, I have written on the Soviet economy (1921–28) and the Soviets offered incentives and rewards for different divisions of labour, like how miners only worked 6-7 hours, while others worked 8 hours, leading to higher marginal produce, and thus greater hourly wages. This was far beyond the standards of the West, of course.
You can read my review here:
>>2857646 >>2920948You don't get it.
Anon thinks the only way for a slave to work better is to whip them.
>>2920970>You can read my review here: good post. have you ever read RW Davies? his epic tomes of soviet economy got dumped here:
>>>/edu/24318>>>/edu/24319>>>/edu/24320>>>/edu/24321 >>2920970>I am one of the few prudent and literate posters on this forum.I am sure your girlfriend ChatGPT tells you that every day, but your "critique" of post
>>2915426 is "Your argument rests on the assumption of utility being a type of social knowledge", which means your reading comprehension failed you already at the title of the article, which explicitly distinguishes modern utility and classical use-value concepts, as does the entire rest of the article, whereas you conflate.
If you don't want to disguise yourself, use a name.
>>2920948>How would you get workers into an industry that is short on hands without incentives? The Soviet Union had better pay and conditions for people willing to work in the Arctic regionsStrictly speaking, there is no need for that, because people can be
drafted to work at this or that activity in this or that place. IIRC Trotsky was a big fan of that, though I am not. (A drafting procedure could still take into account what the drafted people actually want to to, e. g. people fill out forms ranking activities from more liked to less liked and then the forms are processed in random order or by some order of merit like school grades.) There can be remuneration standards for that, I just wouldn't want them decided at the enterprise level.
Suppose the administration of an enterprise is not all its workers. These administrations communicate with the center. The center makes decisions about allocating resources to the enterprises. If the center gives money to the administration of an enterprise, that's a very flexible resource for the administration,
too flexible'. If the center gives management that sort of freedom, they will likely just do the short-term thing and enrich themselves. With an electronic accounting network that the check clocks are linked up with, the center can compartmentalize a local administration's budget or even use completely distinct circuits of play-money for things like remuneration. Aaron Benanav speaks of that.
The less universal and abstract, the more compartmentalized and specific, the requests from the enterprise administrations to the center are, the less room an enterprise has for bullshitting, but it also gets kinda tedious.
>>2920930it depends on how often we can re-plan things. if it can happen instantly then there is no issue. but if there's a three-month delay to re-plan for you to get a necessary spare part, then it makes sense to have a monetary budget with which to order parts until the plan catches up. that way you keep "spontaneous" spending in check. without a budget you run into issues associated with soft budget constraints
>>2920975I'll check it out; thanks.
>>2920992>drafted to workLiterally slavery.
What happens if a worker exiles his commander? Court Marshalling?
>>2920985>A type of social knowledgeRead:
>>2915426<In classical economics and Marx, the use-value of something is what it is useful for due to its known aspects. Known by whom? - Most adult people living in society. Even though this knowledge changes over time (Marx gives the example of magnets), for a given time and place this knowledge is taken to be something fixed and objective. I have interpreted anon's meaning perfectly.
I thus critique this naivety by adding how to Marx, use-value was still contingent, even in the presumption of social knowledge. It is true that in the general classical view, supply created its own demand, but Marx permits error on the part of suppliers; especially in the larger thread of crises of overproduction. If use-value was a known factor, all markets would achieve equilibrium. We see Malthus as early as 1800 comment on the "glut" of markets, which in Smithian terms, exceed effectual supply, and so become waste-products. Another Malthusian, Senior, also sees that there is overproduction, which can only be solved by redistribution. Rodbertus finally saw that overproduction is coincidental of underconsumption, although Marx was earlier in the Manifesto, diagnosing this issue. If we take even the earliest classical economists like Boisguilbert in France, we see how the contradiction of value-formation impresses itself on the value of wages; e.g. where food is "overproduced", this cheapens labour, and so the excess food becomes wasted, unless it is traded abroad, which was Boisguilbert's free trade solution, which nonetheless distracted from a commercial confrontation of the limits of capitalist production. So, use-value as a type of social knowledge has always been limited, especially as it concerns the "paradox of value", described as early as in Aristotle's time.
>use a nameWhy would I be a namefag?
This is [8chan], not plebbit.
>>2920975>>2921323I'm through 2 chapters of the second volume, and the word "tome" is apt. I will not be continuing, since it's not befitting of a novice to be so acquainted with this dry economic history. Here is my own summary:
Chapter 1 deals in the general situation of the kolkhozy, or the collective farm, which began to develop in 1925, in smaller form (Ch. 1C), but which by 1930 had grown in size to encompass dozens of households. By 1930, there were 113,000 kolkhozy in the USSR - jumping from only 57,000 in 1929 (Ch. 2), expropriating hundreds of thousands of kulaks (Ch. 1A); a struggle notoriously culminating in the Holodomor (1932-3), and so the class struggle between peasant and state ended. The drive for collectivisation was simultaneous of the application of "laws of industry" to all sectors (Ch. 1A), necessarily meaning centralising authority in line with investment (e.g. mechanisation). It was suggested in November 1929 that the kolkhozy be managed in the style of the state-owned sovkhozy, or "grain factory" (Ch. 1A), but this was too costly. Along with the kolkhozy was their union in the kolkhozsoyuzy, which was sought to be joined with the agricultural cooperatives, or the koopsoyuzy, further centralising authority. Enthusiasm for the kolkhozy displaced the traditional power centres of mir and skhod, and even overshadowed the soviets - along with intrusive plenipotentiaries. Major features of the kolkhoz system established in 1929-30 endured until Stalin's death, and for some time after it (Ch. 1C). So, the basis of collectivisation was firmly planted in this era.
Chapter 2 deals with Machine-Tractor Stations (MTS). In terms of ownership, by Spring 1929, the sovkhozy only possessed 100 tractors, while large 147 kolkhoz owned 800 tractors, and 57,000 small kolkhoz owned majority of the 20,000 available tractors. By October 1929, no tractors remained in personal possession. Technology for agriculture was suggested to be joined in a "unified organisational centre" to provide investments to places most requiring it, and so on. Markevich rejected a policy resuscitated by Khrushchev 30 years later, that each kolkhoz-village should possess its own tractors, and so insisted upon MTS monopoly. For this, representatives of the MTS would supervise production performed from the hire of machines; the peasants would then pay out a charge per hectare - an example is from Shevchenko, where a village would pay up to 1/3 of its harvest to the MTS, which thus induced incentives for more produce. Markevich sought to separate tractors from kolkhozy by exclusive state monopoly, which was criticised by many, seeing how independent contracts were already given from people. After a lot of intense detail, we see that from January to July 1930, kolkhozy no longer simply collectivised harvests, but all "commodity branches of agriculture" including draught animals and implements. With this too, all MTS were divorced from cooperative control, and instead deferred to the state and kolkhozy - which also acted as a rival to local and soviet powers, implicitly on behalf of state interests. By September 1930, the Traktorotsentr took over all cooperative MTS.
From what I gather in this process of collectivisation, the cooperatives were an obstacle which was defeated, and as Davies adds, there were common grievances by inefficiencies of the MTS system, such as 40% of all labour being repair of tractors. As I put it in my review, collectivisation has its dekulakisation during 1932-3, momentous of these earlier steps in the five year plan. The very short preface also gives a good picture of it:
<The collective farmers were remunerated for their work on the collective lands-in principle, though not yet in practice-in 'labour days'; these were proportionate to the quantity and quality of work, though they were paid only after the harvest, by sharing out what remained after state and collective needs were satisfied. In this compromise between state and peasant interests, the state predominated, by its power and its material advantages. The collective product was firmly con-trolled by state collection agencies, and, after a lengthy controversy, available tractors and other modern machinery were transferred to state-owned Machine-Tractor Stations, each of which served and controlled a number of kolkhozy.Here, we see a class struggle at work, between bureau and peasant.
2026sep28
>>2921323>I have interpreted anon's meaning perfectly.Can you give a summary of
>>2915426 in your own words.
>>2921698 (me)
Yes, I do put my text entries like that in one gigantic .txt file before I post them here. (If you instead post first and then copy-paste you introduce the possibility of the forum software crapping itself and also lose formatting.)
>>2921699oh hey it's .txt autism anon. how's life been treating you?
>>2921698Summary:
From the 20th century onwards, utility is understood as something singular to individuals, and very difficult to estimate. In the Classical and Marxist view, however, use-value is something known by most adults living in a particular society. This is implicit in exchange, since to have the confidence to sell something means to have a foreknowledge of possible utility for others. Since use-value differs in terms of potential and actuality, those who possess much in potential may never realise them. Since wealth is a realisation of use-values, expropriating potential use-values from those who possess them is not a subtraction of wealth (e.g. taxation subtracts at a margin of income which may be better economised for greater ends). So, then, redistributing potential wealth increases actual wealth, in effect.
Property privilege is not merely direct ownership by appropriation, but is statutory, and so a product of law. For this sake, one may have a claim to property without being able to use it. A contrary "use privilege" would be different, since ownership would be contracted upon useful appropriation (e.g. Locke's Homestead Principle). Such things as monopolised estates or intellectual property would cease to exist under this system of law; establishing a "new society" (e.g. Classical Liberalism).
>>2915426>>2921954>From the 20th century onwards, utility is understood as something singular to individuals, and very difficult to estimate. In the Classical and Marxist view, however, use-value is something known by most adults living in a particular society.Yes.
>This is implicit in exchange, since to have the confidence to sell something means to have a foreknowledge of possible utility for others.Use-value is far more specific than estimating something is probably useful to someone. The shoe seller does not just merely know that shoes are useful to people, the shoe seller knows what shoes
are. Even a person born without legs very likely also knows.
>Since use-value differs in terms of potential and actuality, those who possess much in potential may never realise them.May? Use-value only becomes real through actual usage, actual consumption. Those who don't make use of a use-value
by definition don't realize it. "Realizing" here does not refer to something happening in the head ("I realized Kevin from HR is an asshole"), it means "making it a reality" (the calories in the pudding in my fridge will add to my body only if I eat the pudding, before that they are a mere potential). Usage can be observed.
>A contrary "use privilege" would be different, since ownership would be contracted upon useful appropriationThis is very confused phrasing. The article describes ownership as it exists in law ("property privilege") and does not propose a development of that concept, but a reduction of its application to niche cases, and proposes a
different concept with its own label: "use privilege".
>(e.g. Locke's Homestead Principle)Totally different concept. That one is about nature becoming yours because you are mixing your labor with nature. (Aside: Modern readers of Locke virtually all take that to mean the labor of the lone individual, but did Locke actually mean that? People had servants.) Look at the example given in the article: Nature didn't make bicycles by itself. To what extent people relate to bicycles as makers doesn't even come up in the article, because it is irrelevant to the concept it presents.
>>2921954>C4SSancap garbage
>>2876480that made me sad. I didn't know he had a nonverbal autistic son. :(
>>2922342>the shoe seller knows what shoes areSo a thing in itself is a use-value? This is confused.
A use-value is only relative to what may be useful to people.
That's why even if we know what rubbish is, its still waste.
>Usage can be observed.You aren't quite grasping the nature of potential. The post provides the distinction: "The use-value of something not in use is only a potential, the thing's use-value becomes real through use." This is what I wrote.
>does not propose a development of that conceptYes it does; "having use privilege in something means you having a legal title granting you power to use that thing." Thus, ownership is transferred from the property holder to the useful expropriator. The "niche" has a very wide brush; "somebody has hoarded a huge pile of things that the hoarder logically cannot possibly all use […] suppose there is a new regulation stating an individual now can own only up to three bicycles." From a "huge pile" to "three" is a big difference, and this is all based upon the homestead principle; of excluding property from a common stock by useful appropriation. The argument against the hoarder is that he cannot effectively mix his labour with all he has.
>did Locke actually mean that?Locke's personal feelings are irrelevant to the principle itself.
We may respect a man's ideas while seeing the man as a hypocrite.
>To what extent people relate to bicycles as makers doesn't even come up in the articleFair enough, but where a thing has become wasted, we say that it has become part of the commons, and property by Lockean principles is established by privation from the commons. Thus, a thing comes into ownership where it has been claimed apart from a state of nature. The complaint of hoarding is that a thing exits society, and so loses its contractual basis. This is why I emphasise taxation. The most just tax policy redistributes wasted money for useful ends, and so society claims its right of appropriation of this produce.
Cockshott got a new book out titled
VECTOR: Programming as Geometry. I suppose having a grounding in that will make input-output matrix math more easy to approach.
>>2922693>"The use-value of something not in use is only a potential, the thing's use-value becomes real through use." This is what I wrote.Smith Anon going full schizo 😭
>>2922716input-output is useless for planning. move immediately to LP
>>2924157some thoughts:
the biggest problem I see with the piece is Moody's anticommunism. here are some relevant quotes:
>While the Soviet Union promoted itself as socialist and in the transition to a classless society, it was anything but. It was, in fact, a highly stratified and bureaucratized society.>[The USSR] was, in a real sense, a totalitarian society.there's even more Trot nonsense like this, including outright Trotsky quotes. like look at this:
>Stalin, apparently, was not averse to new capitalist technologyno shit Stalin wasn't averse to new tech. only a moron would think otherwise
the text is correct in pointing out a ruptural break is necessary, and rightfully criticizes Chibber's revisionism. bringing up the Meidner Plan is a good move, as it is probably the most based thing any social democrat has ever come up with. despite that, Palme ultimately didn't believe in it and the plan floundered as a result
>>2922718>input-output is useless for planning. move immediately to LPBullshit. They are both useful.
>>2924340explain one (1) case where IO is more useful than LP
>>2924485I didn't say one was useful than the other, I said they were both useful. You get technical coefficients from IO tables and plug them into an LP matrix.
>>2924486>You get technical coefficients from IO tables and plug them into an LP matrixno you don't. this is completely backwards. IO tables are part of national accounts. they are highly aggregated and useless for planning. Stalin rightfully criticized IO as "juggling with figures"
>>2924486How does this work when LP is by definition a hypervolume in a substitutable space and IO gives you factorio style non substitutable stuff
>>2924486to add to what
>>2925424 is saying, a central issue is the choice of production methods. in national accounts electricity production is just one column. in reality we have a whole plethora of electricity production methods. so you are faced with questions like how much gas to burn and when. or whether to schedule production around the weather. or whether to invest in PVs or nuclear. questions like these cannot be solved with IO
>>2924351Collectivization may be more economically inefficient and there is some data supporting the notion that private agriculture produces higher yields with less workers, but there is something to be said for how collectivization creates a support bloc that helps stabilize communist governments and inculcates a pro-state attitude in the peasantry that you wouldn't find in a fully privatized agricultural sector.
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2026/10/04/on-my-expulsion-from-the-communist-party-of-britain/>ON MY EXPULSION FROM THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF BRITAIN>[…]>Support for the American Communist Party.imagine being expelled for supporting Haz' LARP org
>I did not make an audio or video recording; I produced a transcript.Paul seriously thinks he can language lawyer himself out of taking notes during meetings of an organization that ultimately seeks to overthrow the Crown
>Rule 15(c): Members should improve their political knowledge and understanding of Marxism-Leninism, participate in discussion and formation of Party policy, win support for Party aims and policy, and recruit new members.this one is extremely funny, I'll give Paul that. the idea that a published author and dedicated Marxist academic has failed to study Marxism-Leninism is very silly
>The investigation also alleged that I had breached Rule 2(c), which requires members to: “work for the removal of all unfair discrimination based on race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, age, disability, marriage, civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief.”Paul proceeds to language lawyer again, not realizing that perhaps the big fat GENDER section on his blog and its contents might perhaps be construed as violating this rule
>>2926050so they expelled the most important marxist economist alive (laibman is a hack) over gender shit
>>2926181Paul seems to think it's over the "antisemitism" stuff. there's no way to tell
>>2926184it's not just what he thinks, they listed that as a reason, that he supported "antisemitic conspiracy theories" because he doesn't buy the official explanation for the Nth israeli false flag attack
then there is the gender thing
imo the strongest point they have against him is the acp shit: he apparently liked and retweeted some of their stuff. on the other hand, he has made more than one video condemning and disproving acp nonsense, like his iconic video explaining that baristas are, in fact,
NOT bourgeois:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEsuQyyv5hche clearly doesn't agree with them on anything, old man just saw the word "communist party" and smashed the like and retweet button. it's insane that they would expel someone over any of this, let alone someone of his caliber. this feels like some clique inside had a grudge against him and just decided to throw shit at the wall and see if it sticks
like, all the other british marxist authors from the last ~30 years are, at best, verso-books fodder
>>2926050Heinrichchads winning
>>2926273>the fucking anti-vaxx stuff near the endam I missing something here? is he implying that Fauci was underestimating the amount of time (two weeks) it would take to get the pandemic under control?
>>2926199>like, all the other british marxist authors from the last ~30 years are, at best, verso-books fodderit could just be that the CPB has been infiltrated by glowies
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