/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

die pedo

>>2833867
Stalin was a pedo

>>2833869
People in unelected positions with authority over other people who have little or no say in their lives tend to be pedos.

Hope the Mahkno flag isn’t too off-putting to the tankies, I just think anarchists have the best slogans.

>In defense of the free market
Stopped reading here. Fuck off.

free market is fine when it's me buying treats or getting rid of stuff i dont want but buying and selling labor power is inherently exploitative and you can go stuff it if you think im support that btw im not reading all that

>>2842558
cringe and also op should kill himself

Free for whom ?
To sell what ?

>These are systems of metabolizing the labor of everyone in society and then proportioning goods accordingly.
No it's not. That's socialism. Funny thing is, I remember Marx addressed why you can't have labor money under capitalism, but it was incoherent to me, I'd have to check my notes to find the exact quote. But capitalists won't give a better answer either, they'll start talking about risk or animal spirits or something.

>>2842769
No that’s actually just any economic system

>>2842769
>I remember Marx addressed why you can't have labor money under capitalism
money exists in the first place to hide alienation during production, if labor time = wages then you couldn't hide exploitation

>>2842776 (me)
>if labor time = wages then you couldn't hide exploitation
I think the avg. rate of exploitation in industrial societies is 1:1 so half your working day is your own and half is your boss's
So if money = labor time you'd pretty quickly ask yourself if you worked 8 hours how come your wage is 4 hours

Socialism and Communism are the same thing retard. Read Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx and State and Revolution by Lenin.

>>2842769
>>2842776
Here's the Marx quote I was thinking about, I think.

<The question — Why does not money directly represent labour-time, so that a piece of paper may represent, for instance, x hours’ labour, is at bottom the same as the question why, given the production of commodities, must products take the form of commodities? This is evident, since their taking the form of commodities implies their differentiation into commodities and money. Or, why cannot private labour — labour for the account of private individuals — be treated as its opposite, immediate social labour? I have elsewhere examined thoroughly the Utopian idea of “labour-money” in a society founded on the production of commodities (l. c., p. 61, seq.). On this point I will only say further, that Owen’s “labour-money,” for instance, is no more “money” than a ticket for the theatre. Owen pre-supposes directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent with the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption. But it never enters into Owen’s head to pre-suppose the production of commodities, and at the same time, by juggling with money, to try to evade the necessary conditions of that production.

Capital Vol. 1 - Chapter Three, Section I
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm#S1

>>2842790
Ok agian I’m no theory buff, but I’m pretty sure Marx did not view socialism and communism as the same thing.

>>2843204
The difference between Socialism and Communism can be first seen in Engels' work "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific." In this work, Engels refers to Socialism as the pre-Materialist communist movement, e.g. Robert Owen and the many co-ops he founded. Engels' main critique against the Utopians was that they were situated into one single area, the location of the co-op. This lead to the co-ops fumbling and being choked out by the forces of capital, i.e. they slowly reverted to capitalist social relations. This is in contrast to Communism, thought up by Engels and Marx, which uses historical materialism to determine that the workers need to lead the revolution and spread communism all over the world in order to not revert back to the bourgeois world order.

Of course, the terms socialism and communism have been used before them and often interchangeably, even by Marx and Engels. In fact, I saw a supposed quote from Marx who called the pre-Materialist workers movement as communist and his style of the workers movement as socialism, though I haven't found the source of said quote.

The clear distinction between communism and socialism came from Lenin, in which he used socialism to define lower-phase communism (labor-vouchers still exist while the state and class society is gone) and communism to define higher-phase communism (no state, money, class and finally no labor-vouchers; from each according to his ability to each according to his need). This is in contrast to the definition of socialism as "the dictatorship of the proletariat" by some communists today, and as the "democratic socialists" mentioned in "The Communist Manifesto" and "The Principles of Communism."

Here's a video from Jonas Čeika which explains in more detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRXvQuE9xO4

But please read both "Critique of the Gotha Programme" and "State and Revolution," especially the former since it clarifies many of the false definitions people have regarding communism, even by communists themselves.

>>2843220
it's insidious how much the word socialism and communism have been distorted to just mean "some government regulations in the economy" and "a lot of government control in the economy"

>>2843229
That's how all words work, definitions get made by how the word is used in practice, not by who coined the term/a clique of intellectuals trying to enforce it

>>2843220
>Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of
the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products;
just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the
value of these products, as an objective quality possessed by them, since
now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in
an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labor.
The phrase “proceeds of labor,” objectionable also today on account of its
ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it
has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it
emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, econom-
ically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of
the old society from whose womb it emerges.

>Accordingly, the individ-
ual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been
made—exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his indi-
vidual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists
of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of
the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed
by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has
furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor
for the common funds), and with this certificate he draws from the social
stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor
costs. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one
form he receives back in another.
Here obviously the same principle prevails as that which regulates
the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values.
Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances
no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass into the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption. But, as far as the distribution of the latter
among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails
as in the exchange of commodity-equivalents: a given amount of labor
in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

> Vulgar socialism (and from
it in turn a section of the democracy) has taken over from the bourgeois
economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as indepen-
dent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism
as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long
been made clear, why retrogress again?

I feel like we agree on the definitions but disagree on the path that’s most effective.

>>2843247
Rip formatting, should learn my lesson when I copy/paste

>>2843243
let's work to redefine capitalism as "economy controlled by pedophiles" as that's how it works in practice ;)

half joking but in all seriousness redefining words like that causes lots of opportunism to seep in

>>2833859

First, the USSR in the early 50s was number 1 in europe and number 2 in the world for the percentage of employment paid in piece rate wages.

As others in the thread have mentioned, communist renumeration would be on a labour time basis, and in my view, likely adjusted into a piece rate format (eg. standard working day norm of 8 hours has a production norm tested & set at 800 pies, then every pie you produce is worth 1/100th of an hour, with probably a cap up to 840 or so pies (105%)). After this, some taxes are deducted for social/communal expenses.

Second, you should read the original neoliberals. If memory serves, in road to serfdom, Hayek actually argues in favour of state welfare in health & pensions in order to stabilize the free market by not unduly punishing those who lose in the competition.

Believe it or not, neoliberalism is hybrid of libertarianism, social liberalism & ordo-liberalism, and the vast majority of debate in economics over the last 550-70 years took place in that paradigm, with a few minor keynesian sideshows.

>>2843318

*50-70

>>2843318
I honestly think the USSR is preferable to the us in a lot of metrics. Their economic revitalization was remarkable after going through the revolution and two world wars. I remember reading the road to serfdom and I was really surprised at just how liberal he was, endorsing a universal healthcare system.

>>2843318
>the video
Btw, Spitsyn is not even a historian, and even more so, he's not a historian of the soviet economy

>>2843524

First, ad hominem. The claims advanced by Spitsyn are not invalidated by whether he has credentials or not.

Second, Spitsyn is a historian. He graduated from the faculty of history of Moscow Pedagogical University in 1991.

Third, its true that he is not an economic historian, but he does not claim original research. He just is repeating research from other sources, and doesn't claim to be doing anything but that.

There may be other problems with Spitsyn as a person and history writer/compiler, but they are not relevant here.

>>2843318
>First, the USSR in the early 50s was number 1 in europe and number 2 in the world for the percentage of employment paid in piece rate wages.
Yeah we know capitalism is progresive coming from feudalism.

>>2844190
>Second, Spitsyn is a historian
He's a school teacher of history. You know the difference between a fucking teacher and an academic, don't you?
It's like a school teacher of biology said that there's only two genders, you know. This question is out of their competence.

Academic consensus and the mainstream about the Stalin economy, as I know, are that it was relatively okay for the war, but disastrous as a civic economy, especially for the soviet people.

>>2833859
>In a world without currency, you would either have to rigidly control distribution or provide a civilization so materially liberal
This is a very common argument, but it is false that there are only these choices. An example for something else: We ask people to submit rankings of items they are interested in, and then we run the most simple algorithm to assign the stuff, which is going in a circle from person to person, handing out one item after another. People can also ad add skipping rules to their rankings: "If I already have X amount of items from category such-and-such, skip over other items from that category in my ranking." "If I have already enough items to cover X amount of calories, skip over other items from the category food and drink."

I would find that tedious and very much prefer having a personal budget, but I would not claim logical necessity for this preference.

>>2844692 (me)
The use-value categories should be organized in a tree, so that you can choose between adding extremely specific skipping rules (near the leaves of the tree) or very broad ones (near the root).

>>2844524

1. A graduate of a faculty of historical sciences is a historian by definition. You have confused the term "historian" & "active professional researcher in the field of history".
   
   
2. The category pf teacher & historian are not mutually.
   
   
3. Thank you for demonstrating you incredible ignorance: No, even western liberal mainstream academic history is very clear on this point: The war was devastating to the Soviet economy & society. Hundreds of billions worth of destroyed property in american dollars of that time, and 20+ million excess deaths.
   
   

By contrast, if you take the figures from maddison, which are the absolute lowest estimates I have come across, real ppp dsp per capita more than doubles from 1928 to 1953 (from about 1400 to 3050; Its higher if you extend the Stalin economy to 57-58 before Khrushchev admin changes it, and about the same quite high growth rate of 3.17% compounded annually in real ppp per capita; Figure jumps to 3.8% if you exclude the 4 war years. This despite a downturn in the world economy in the 30s and the ussr having very limited foreign debt capacity)

>>2844692
Maybe there’s a future where the digital infrastructure is accessible, elastic, and secure enough to run an entire system like this. I think this is kind of what I meant by a society being liberal with its goods. You either create open markets where goods and services are freely indulged in, or you’re existing in a hypothetical. I think this is absolutely the first type of economic experiment I would run in a socialist society, to see exactly what can be structured to respond to the people. Until then I’m hoping we can at least unite against the racist far-right.

>>2842588
Why is it exploitative in a world where UBI or other transfer payments mean nobody's coerced into it by physical necessity?
(assume for argument's sake this applies globally. the question is about the nature of exploitation, not about practicalities.)

>>2844692
What about items people don't know they want yet? This system works in a static world but not one where preferences change. If everyone says they want faster horses, they may actually want a car. If people say they want better directory inquiry services on their telephone, or a better railway system so they can get to the post office faster, they may actually want the internet, and so on. These relationships may not be obvious either - e.g. empirically ATMs did very little to employment of actual bank tellers (who still had to handle deposits and other inquiries), but the smartphone has made them all but redundant (because you can now do most complex operations on your phone), so a planner who invested in better banking technology would actually miss the optimal solution, which was a fringe benefit of a computing/communications device.

>>2843318
tbh I think the tragedy of neoliberalism is that it wound up sacrificing markets for tax cuts in real world practice (Look at Thatcher's "privatisations", except for airlines they were basically all into a highly regulated LARP market where the state regulators set prices) and because politics fundamentally selects for disposition rather than real outcomes, selfish assholes idolise her for being one of them when they should really hate her the way communists hate socdems for bastardising their ideas at every turn.

>>2844843
>What about items people don't know they want yet?
It is virtually certain that there are some things out there I don't know about that I would enjoy very much. These things don't appear in my head as part of a ranking and neither do they appear coupled with a price that I would feel acceptable to pay. They don't appear in my head, full stop. So why would that be an argument for getting consumer items via a system of personal budgets and prices instead of the rank thing?

>>2844881
basically because it lets you (and firms) price gambles. how much resources should planners throw at inventing the iPhone versus improving existing phone technology? when do planners go "right, this isn't going to work" and when do they go "sure, the newton flopped, windows CE flopped, windows tablets flopped, but that's because they didn't get it right and this time it's going to work"?
a price system put a number on it: $150 million. apple forewent $150 million of everything else it could possibly buy in the correct assumption it had a good product, while they lost up to $500 million (in 90s dollars) on the newton because the technology wasn't there yet.

as much as it sticks in my caw: hayek was right that prices convey huge amounts of information about scarcity in a highly efficient way. not a perfect way (pollution etc), but a very efficient one. a ranking tells us how much you want a newton, but it cannot tell you how much of a pain in the neck it is for manufacturers to produce one and invite you to make other trade-offs instead. (e.g. if all you want is a novel handheld toy, you should really get a gameboy. if you're just writing up your christmas list with a catalog it may not be apparent to you that there's any difference between the two, but "it's $699 for a newton and $89 for a gameboy" in a price system tells you that immediately. then you can decide whether you'd like to gamble on being an early adopter or not, and the number of people who make that expensive choice can feed back to the manufacturer - apple made money when people paid $499 for the iPhone 1, a useful product, and lost money when asking $699 for the Newton 1, which was more of a novelty.)

>>2844843
>larp markets
hey, this is the guy advocating for le free markets on leftypol. embarrassing. dude got destroyed in the other threads he created and yet he keeps returning. dead board tbh

>>2845186
>hayek was right that prices convey huge amounts of information about scarcity in a highly efficient way. not a perfect way (pollution etc), but a very efficient one. a ranking tells us how much you want a newton, but it cannot tell you how much of a pain in the neck it is for manufacturers to produce one and invite you to make other trade-offs instead. (e.g. if all you want is a novel handheld toy, you should really get a gameboy. if you're just writing up your christmas list with a catalog it may not be apparent to you that there's any difference between the two, but "it's $699 for a newton and $89 for a gameboy" in a price system tells you that immediately. then you can decide whether you'd like to gamble on being an early adopter or not, and the number of people who make that expensive choice can feed back to the manufacturer - apple made money when people paid $499 for the iPhone 1, a useful product, and lost money when asking $699 for the Newton 1, which was more of a novelty.)
<le iphone was an innovation
it was not
<le price as information carrier
its scarcity, quality, quantity etc reduced to one number, so no
that markets are "blind" to agents that have no income or capital has been known since antiquity which is why some form of welfare state or some other form of surplus value redistribution needs to exist. which is why "free markets" have never existed as such, only approximations and those have to be enforced by the state. thing is, everytime it had to be enforced, it was terrible (see 90s russia), that also explains why austrians have to cope constantly about it being "not real capitalism" since their version of markets without the state do not exist and never will. austrians can in this regard be called neoliberals in denial.

>>2845186
>hayek was right that prices convey huge amounts of information
<10-20 bits is a "huge amount of information"
lmao

>those capable of doing work should still be made to.
Compulsory labour is called slavery.
>The difference between capitalism and socialism is that capitalism doesn’t just have a free market
Capitalism doesn't even have a free market, but is a de facto oligarchy of monopolies which control market forces; that's why it's illegal to produce and sell drugs in most countries, for example.

>>2844843

Is you capacity to think further really this blunted?

Risking resources on new products is by definition a risk, and therefore in both a centrally planned economy & a market based one has the same solutions: State subsidies for research, prototyping, experimentation & a trial period for use.

By the way, in most versions of central planning there still exists residual markets in th retail of final consumer goods & services (though not necessarily for every consumer good/service). This is mainly for avoiding surpluses & shortages by clearing temporary imbalances; It doesn't really help with adjusting production long term since a high price relative to cost doesn't tell you much you are short for example: You need to track the rate of inventory changes over time to get an idea of that.

What is abolished is financial, labour & factor markets. Society operates as if one big corporation.

>>2845186
I can't follow your argument. It seems that you are starting an argument about risk taking, but then you pivot to talking about score data being richer than rank data. What's the necessary connection? To create score data does not require risk taking. And you go back and forth between the individual and society as a whole, as if there needs to be a correspondence. That is, you seem to assume that to obtain score data for society, there needs to be score data on the individual level. And for score data on the individual level you assume the necessity of budgets and prices. But assuming links of logical necessity here is false on every level. People can vote with ratings to generate scores, so budgets and prices are not the only way for individuals to submit score data. And score data on the individual level is not necessary to generate score data for the aggregate level since there are voting methods that generate scores from rankings. Even with just approval voting you get score data.

if I've missed anything you'd really like an answer to, let me know, this is a fairly "sketch-y" reply.
>>2845239
the iPhone was an innovation. all the technology was trite but the combination of it into a desirable package is itself innovative. you could analogously think of it as the "last mile" problem in transportation. (why does the airport taxi cost more than the flight?)

reducing scarcity, quality, quantity etc to a single value is desirable. simplicity is a supreme virtue. ( >>2845306 ) if you like, I misspoke in saying it conveys a lot of information: it means you no longer have to directly consider this information in most cases. I don't have to care why the newton is more expensive than the gameboy to use that information in differentiating them as a consumer.

i agree that true free markets have never existed and would not be desirable. my position is in fact that neoliberals misstepped and failed to recognise that the logical end of their pro market thinking is high cash welfare transfers and relatively unfettered markets, they got side tracked into advocating for tax cuts for businesses that are often built around exploiting regulatory inefficiencies etc.
(which ironically is perfectly in keeping with neoliberal public choice theory. a coca cola bottling plant order can buy politicians to cut his taxes and keep his regulatory protections, they hypothetical more efficient competitor or consumers of cheaper coca cola can't lobby in the same way because they don't exist yet.)

>>2845485
the problem is this: it is theoretically trivial to have an organisation produce the newton. it is then trivial for everyone to tell planners "I want a newton" when they don't really have to give up anything to get it. it is then easy to get the wrong idea that this is a good use of social resources, when in reality actually wants one when confronted with the actual resources needed to produce one.

>>2845553
I confess to being occasionally disordered in my thinking (one honest sign, I hope, that I am sincere in saying I'm a communist making the case for markets rather than a marketeer faking a sympathy for communists) but i would summarise that the missing element from how you describe things is giving score data from the aggregate to individuals, so that in expressing their preferences they can be aware of roughly what they're trading off against. (e.g. every newton is worth about 7 gameboys)

the risk taking thing is arguably half finished and would need some extra digression on the evolutionary nature of firms in a market. the newton flopping didn't kill apple, but the possibility of everyone losing their shirt put a cap on how many good resources they could throw after a bad product. a state run R&D agency doesn't have this issue.
(obviously within this, we can imagine all kinds of half measures and variants. You could have the state doing much more R&D on basic technologies and then a free market in end user goods for example - to come back to the iPhone, for example, a chunk of the basic technology was state designed or subsidised but it was a private firm that assembled it into a functioning product - and a form that'd previously gambled on a very similar dud.)

>>2845579

>the problem is this: it is theoretically trivial to have an organisation produce the newton. it is then trivial for everyone to tell planners "I want a newton" when they don't really have to give up anything to get it. it is then easy to get the wrong idea that this is a good use of social resources, when in reality actually wants one when confronted with the actual resources needed to produce one

I see now: You are confusing central planning with an economy where consumer goods have a price of zero to purchasers.

In a fully centrally planned economy costs are still tracked with standard accounting. In most versions, people are pay in labour time tokens & consumers goods are sold at cost (barring any shortages or natural scarcity which would command a rent that the state would collect in lieu of taxes).

There is no need for generalized markets in such a scenario: Production units do not trade with each other and instead intermediate inputs & capital equipment are transferred with netting accounts on both sides.

>>2845917
>You are confusing central planning with an economy where consumer goods have a price of zero to purchasers.
While the latter does indeed not follow from the former, it is not really necessary to have prices in order to have limits on consumer behavior and limits on what factories do. I conjecture that doing entirely without prices would suck, but it would be dishonest to claim it literally impossible.

>>2844715
>By contrast, if you take the figures from maddison
Where's the notorious ML's historical materialism? Is GDP growth really worth a few famines, a lack of civic liberties, enslavement of the peasantry (kolkhozhniks had no internal passports, which was basically the document people couldn't live without in the USSR). Why's Pinochet bad then lol? Are you fucking brain damaged or something?
An 'okay' economy is that one which doesn't violate essential human liberties and still prospers. The USSR's economy doesn't match even at this point. It would be meaningless to argue whether the Soviet economy is good or not if it's already known that it's not even normal. It's worse.

>3
The Stalin's economy is not only the war. It started eating the god damn people way before it. Since the collectivization basically. The nep and especially war communism were fucking diabolical too.

>1
Lmao, he rly has a major in history. It changes nothing, anyways. The thing he was saying is bullshit.

>>2845946
That's an impressive amount of of anti-communist bullshit in one post. Please die.

>>2845947
Holodomor deniers ≈ Holocaust deniers

Mods this is a leftist board for leftists. Nobody comes here to "argue" with anti-communists against their lies and worst bullshit. If thats what you want you can do that anywhere on the whole fucking internet and in the real world, because it is all full of utter scumbags like
>>2845946
>>2845948

>>2845948
double genocide theory is a form of holocaust denialism

>>2845917
not necessarily a cost of zero (which just flows from the idea of just submitting a list of things you want to planners): if you set prices wrongly you'll wind up with a similarly distortionary effect. (e.g. a newton at $89 will be much more competitive with a gameboy, but represent throwing ~$600 of resources down the drain).
i am not sold on there being any particular benefit to planning around selling everything at-cost instead of with some scope for profit. there are of course cases where that works better, but in the gameboy/newton example you get useful incentives: the most obvious one being that profits tell nintendo (and other console makers) that there's demand for the gameboy and losses tell apple that there's no demand for the newton. if nintendo's really raking it in (say like IBM with the early IBM PC) then competitors have a good reason to enter the market, which makes them money in the short run but drives down prices as their competitors respond. as competition drives down prices, each producer has a strong reason to invest in cost reduction so they can actually make money on their PC clone, and so on until you're in the current situation of prices generally being below inflation.
then there's lots of different ways to approach what your actual costs are or what your model for making a commodity useful to people is, and i suspect planning requires being a bit prescriptive e.g. a PS2 cost $400 at launch but was sold at $299 because Sony knew in the long-run this would be supported by game and accessory sales, economies of scale, revisions to reduce costs, etc. A world where the PS2 is priced at $400 and then production costs drop more slowly because they're motivated only by a general instruction to be efficient might be a world with a less optimal adoption curve than reality. Though you could get subjective here, maybe $400 would've saved the Dreamcast… moreover, if Sony had been wrong about their capacity to cut production costs or scope for adoption (as in the Dreamcast case), their losses would be a useful disincentive to continuing to sell the product below cost. (though the Dreamcast is arguably an example of a perfectly okay commodity kneecapped because its producer blew all their money and reputation on previous flops and so couldn't subsidise it enough. we can second guess market outcomes! my case is only that they perform acceptably on the whole)

that's before you get into anything really crazy like the economics of the airline industry where we can grant prices are too low in light of pollution, but where selling tickets at the cost of operating the planes would be quite unpleasant because airlines currently function more like mileage scheme banks, which sounds profoundly irrational but from an alternative perspective is very clever and very good if you just want to travel from A to B. it seems very implausible indeed planners would come up with a scheme like this where the entire public-facing industry is basically a decoy for their real business model. (i suspect this example will be unconvincing: it struck me as profoundly irrational and quite annoying for a while, it is only of late that i've opened to the possibility it is actually beautiful in an insane sort of way.)

a true free marketeer would of course call me out here: i am all for distorting the price of labour (through high and perhaps universal cash transfers), but not of commodities or of services. i am fairly indifferent to this challenge, being only relatively market enthusiastic. i could also be accused of abandoning socialism, but i'm not sure of that either: i can vaguely imagine a very dull utopia where you combine high cash welfare, 1980s Swedish style employee funds seen through to completion (handling worker ownership of the MOP and perhaps funding part of those cash transfers…), and free market competition in most areas. naturally, this appeals to nobody as a fantasy and borders on unimplementable as a result, but it strikes me as being both a minimal-change form socialism (as opposed to, but anodyne enough to appear as, social democracy) and the only workable form of neoliberalism. an interesting idea with too few enthusiasts, at the very least.

>>2845948
>Holodomor deniers = Holocaust deniers
Ah yes, somehow the famine where Stalin sent food aid to Ukraine was LITERALLY A GENOCIDE on par with Hitler throwing people into gas chambers, truly Ukrainians have the best grasp upon history ever known to man.

>>2845988
>if you set prices wrongly you'll wind up with a similarly distortionary effect. (e.g. a newton at $89 will be much more competitive with a gameboy, but represent throwing ~$600 of resources down the drain).
i am not sold on there being any particular benefit to planning around selling everything at-cost instead of with some scope for profit
But profit-modified prices are in conflict with the idea that prices should express effort or effort plus resources.

>>2845990
No, he's right. Doing double-genocide nonsense deserves a ban.
You don't have the rules on your side, what you do have though is an apathetic janniteriate.

>>2845981
Then add on the Great Leap Forward deniers and it’ll be triple genocide theory.

In all seriousness though obviously the holocaust had the worst abuses, I don’t mean to compare the atrocities themselves, but I think denying the betrayal of Ukrainian anarchists and their subsequent, intentional killing is a level of political dissonance akin to the cults of Hitler and ᴉuᴉlossnW.

>>2846014
Pales in comparison to the amount the Soviet military seized from them. Tauger himself admits the yield that year was north of 50 million tons, 80,000 being returned is pity.

>>2846142
>Great Leap Forward
>genocide
watering down the word "genocide" is another favorite tactic of Holocaust denier
>the betrayal of Ukrainian anarchists
people who work against the proletarian state get their shit pushed in. simple as. get with the fucking program

>>2845946
>>2845579
iphone was not innovation, not even by definition. smartphones exist because the technology to produce them exists, in other words, no iphone would mean some other smartphone would have taken the spot as the most sold. capitalism inherently is incapable of avantgarde technology, it can revolutionize production methods, which in turn can make existing "products" more durable (or less durable depending on profit rate) "safer" etc… but it is incapable of making "new" things. only a communist mode of production would be able to. if you say "well it does not matter for me because we have smartphones and internet and also electronic screens with ads plastered everywhere ahhh" sure but a car is still a horse cart with an engine instead of a horse. thats not trivial. the other point about price: no, its not, it even sucks outright i should say. it doesnt say shit. its the reason why food products have to have labels telling us where the meat for example comes from, why you can scam people by hiding most of your stock, why companies have to constantly overproduce and the only way to counteract is this by constant inflation, destruction of own stock etc… the other anon is simply wrong, under Stalin the ussr had some of the biggest stable population growth, life expectancy increases etc same with mao.

>>2846142
>but I think denying the betrayal of Ukrainian anarchists and their subsequent, intentional killing is a level of political dissonance akin to the cults of Hitler and ᴉuᴉlossnW.
What are you talking about? That's not what the Holodomor was. These things are not related.
As an aside, do you think if there was anarchist victory we would not have barbara pit'd the types of people who cling to double-genocide denial? Severely delusional.

You know what you're doing. Double Genocide only serves to play down the holocaust. No serious holocaust academic agrees with this shit ultranationalist narrative.
>Go back to /pol/.

>>2846105
>>2845988
almost forgot to reply to that one
thats the samefag replying to himself. its also insane how clear it is that you are just talking out of your ass, why did you even make a thread? if you want to debate with yourself, thats fine but leave us out. a discussion cannot take place if your own position is still shifting every week.

>>2846142
>the betrayal of Ukrainian anarchists and their subsequent
Makhno is one of the very few anarchists i actually respect because he wasn't a liberal larp but proper leftist and he got shit done. He was allied with the Red Army aka "tankies" against liberals and bourgeois until he lost a power struggle against Trotsksi for whatever stupid and unnecessary reason. Anyways, Makhno would have had shot this >>2845946 bourgeois pos for insufferable propaganda in this thread and you alongside him for supporting reactoid/nazi glowbots.
"Peasants" aka Kulaks withheld grain from distribution and burned the crop to deliberately cause a famine and anti-communist unrest btw. Any Ukrainian who may have died due to hunger back then wasn't a victim of Stalin, who sent food to UA, but of anti-communist kulaks.

>>2846196
I struggle to follow your reasoning. What inventions, if any, do you consider to actually have been innovative? Or are you taking the position that literally nothing innovative has ever happened / has happened since the start of the capitalist MOP?

>>2845946

Moralism, no counter arguments. You have next to nothing. Just appeals to emotion. They don't work at all on someone who doesn't share your values or conceptual framework.

Liberty is a degenerate value that wouldn't even occur to me at all if I never was forced into encounter it.

Additionally, none of your appeals work on those of those of us who know the brutality of reality: That famines recurred ever decade in historic Russia that hunger was rampant, etc. Indeed Europe itself only began to escape this fate minimally due to the loot that colonialism & imperialism afforded.

I actually respect Pinochet a lot more then you. He didn't play these fanciful moralizing games. He massacred Allende and in so doing recalled the truth: Political power grows out of a barrel of gun.

>>2845988

Your response indicates you didn't read & understand what I said correctly: Adjustments can be made to final prices if there shortages or surpluses. You also completely ignored the planned economy deals with intermediate inputs & producer goods; You further also ignored that prices are not enough to estimate shortages or surpluses. You need to track the rate of change in inventories as well.

Look its obvious to all of us here that you are just someone who (at best) took a handful of neoclassical undergraduate econ. classes but doesn't like the current level economic inequality in society. You have never touched linear programming, logistics or even worked any type of industrial scale work. I think worst of all is that you clearly haven't even read the Marxist canon at all, and come here shitty things up with your proclamations.

That said your suspicion is correct: You are indeed not a socialist or communist. You are market liberal who simply wants have large state welfare & worker coop. legal ownership. The mode of production however would remain fully capitalist otherwise: Competition between entities for relative individual profit & market share of the whole economy & asset base would dominate economic logic.

>>2846206
only one of those replies is me.

>>2846557
your assumptions are mostly unwarranted and incorrect. on the contrary, my basic approach is as someone who read the marxist canon first and then eclectically picked up bits of neoclassical econ and became more sympathetic mostly as a result of looking at the repeated failure of most western communists to organize anything like a competent political party. one cannot look at this failure without picking up some sympathies for decentralisation and for allowing organisations to fail. (the worst thing about many microparties is not that they fail, but that they do not cease to exist upon failing.) far from being a lib who is squeamish about inequality, i am a communist who is squeamish about having one big failure instead of a decentralized mix of success and failure.

i am not OP (an assumption you and maybe some others appear to have made errantly) and do not get too hung up on labels. what i "am" is unknowable to you, and in any case is more usefully defined by what i do than by what i believe. your sudden assumption of bad faith is unbecoming.

continuing with economics: the casual assumption that there is a clean distinction between intermediate/producer goods and consumer goods appears to me to be errant, and you appear to ignore (though i admit i will have probably made it only passingly) the point that prices help make questions of shortages/surpluses much less relevant: if the price rises above the level at which you're willing to pay, you'll substitute even if supplies remain available. (and if you desperately need it, you'll pay any price…)

>government operation of businesses should not be the rule but the exception.

Fuck off.

>>2846614

It certainly is possible that you are one among many that are posting similar lines of thought in this thread and we have confused you all together. Your arguments are similar enough.

In your new reply, the first point you make is a complete red herring: The failure or success of western communist parties has no significant bearing on the functioning of a planned economy. In fact I struggle to see any relevance: Political party organization or activity in general (not just communist, not just western) does not imply anything about organizing a centrally planned economy, since their fundamental tasks are completely different.

I also have no ideal where you are drawing this one big failure versus mix of success & failure from. Doesn't seem related to Western communist parties, since not a single one managed to achieve socialism: They are failures in that sense. If you are disordered thought anon I certainly see it.

Further, I assume you are free market advocate as you yourself have claimed. Ergo, its not assumption of bad faith, but rather that you are simply an enemy first and foremost. Not a communist at all (and you are trolling us by calling yourself one; I am going to guess some variant of libertarian? Regardless you don't fool many of us). Second, its very clear that you have not read & understood marxist canon. Or pray tell, why do marxists (and Marx hinself) advocate for central planning? What is it about a generalized market economy that marxists are against?

Finally, intermediate products are costed in a centrally planned economy. I don't know where you get this idea that aren't. There just isn't intermediate product & investment markets under a fully centrally planned economy.

There are of course important distinction between intermediate inputs & final consumer goods. I won't say why its important that under a planned economy there aren't intermediate markets, cause that would give away the answer to my prior question. That said, the distinction is quite so sharp: Not all consumer goods & services have to be sold in retail markets under a planned economy(education & health for instance wouldn't be).

>>2846206
>thats the samefag replying to himself.
I forgot the quote arrow for the second sentence.
>a discussion cannot take place if your own position is still shifting every week.
Gee why is "his" opinion shifting so much, whaddayathink? And he is so productive, making so many posts!

I'm of the position that a price system is not absolutely necessary to run an economy; and that if you use prices, there is something to be said for using prices not modified because of discrepancies between supply and demand or using these unmodified prices for longer planning horizons alongside modified prices for the short term. (That's not to say that these unmodified prices stay fixed forever: They can change when production technique changes.) Either approach requires a powerful center that makes some very big decisions unilaterally. So take a guess whether I'm a shill for capitalism.

>>2846649
the failure and success of western communist parties has quite a lot to do with central planning: central planning requires a center by definition. if you pick any of these random failures and have them fluke their way into power, you will have an incompetent center. more generally, central planning puts a lot of weight on having a competent center. the primary appeal of a market economy, looking at so much uncorrected failure, is that it has mechanisms for clearing out failure. when seers CEO gets some bizarre notions about how to run a firm, seers goes bankrupt and dies and other more competent retail outlets eat their lunch. (even if those firms are also incompetent, they just have to be less incompetent!)

more generally, the fundamental problem i see in the world today is institutional incompetence. the british government can't build railways, the US government can't build HSR, and yet you envision a world where we can shake our magic wand once for revolution and twice for total overhaul of the economy, get some linear programmers in, and just like that all will be fixed. pray, mr. babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures…?

i am not an advocate in the free market in the sense of being a deep enthusiast for it with an intuitive love of it. i am an advocate in the sense of a devil's advocate, in the sense that i think the standard marxist arguments do not hold up well to conditions on the ground and are not in any case well understood by the average marxist (who instead intuits, in a woolly sense, that Marx's bible must agree with him and that a cleverer person will sort it all out), i am of the view that at the very least we've got to reach the same conclusion as china, that productive forces are insufficiently developed to allow a leap to communism and therefore we're stuck with markets in the short run. if ideal central planning can outperform the market, sub-ideal central planning can easily underperform it. (we can point here to the soviet example. even if you want to go "ah, actually, it was beating the market in 1930!", the very fact one bumbling idiot could come in and have the entire economy cannibalise itself by 1989 speaks to the enormous risks of an incompetent center)

you will be quite correct to say i've dodged your questions, and i will be quite honest in explaining why: the accusation of bad faith has stung and the questions do not interest me. the practical benefit to me of explaining my position is to get it clear in my own head (for example, i can see i've clearly underplayed the "evolutionary" logic of firms in a market and got no engagement on the weird little platypus the airline industry has become), while i stand to gain little by extending the discussion into an analysis of why western marxists have a planning fetish (like many socdems, incidentally, though of course they cite Japan and France) or to gloat that whatever planning the Chinese make use of, they've still clearly skewed closer to my outlook than towards that of TANS, or to really press on the point that planning won't alleviate most of the undesirable parts of living in a modern economy. you will, after all, still have to go to work. hunting, fishing, rearing cattle and criticising will all have to wait until you've met your quota…
were i acting in bad faith, i would eschew economic questions all together and just bully you on the point of "and how will you implement this planning system?", picking on the incredibly easy target of nobody being prepared for reform, let alone revolution, or the wishful thinking of spamming pdfs at .gov.cn e-mail addresses.

>>2846824
>tldr: my intuition said so, so i have to make a thread about it
no you didn't lol. this is also some of the funniest shit i read:
>the failure and success of western communist parties has quite a lot to do with central planning: central planning requires a center by definition. if you pick any of these random failures and have them fluke their way into power, you will have an incompetent center. more generally, central planning puts a lot of weight on having a competent center. the primary appeal of a market economy, looking at so much uncorrected failure, is that it has mechanisms for clearing out failure. when seers CEO gets some bizarre notions about how to run a firm, seers goes bankrupt and dies and other more competent retail outlets eat their lunch. (even if those firms are also incompetent, they just have to be less incompetent!)
<central planning is called central planning because center duh
do you have an phd in bullshitenomics? the term you are looking for is called creative destruction and as a matter of fact: all these things you talk about have already been said by someone smarter than you, literally NONE of your ideas are original. you are debating with yourself lol

>>2847096
Why have you included some stupid bullshit about famines in reply to someone who has stuck exclusively and monotonously to economic questions?

>>2847096

1. i did not make this thread
   
2. i am not looking for creative destruction, although that is one facet of the evolutionary nature of markets. the airline industry in the us, for example, has been quite resistant to creative destruction (most carriers die via mergers rather than ceasing to exist, and most legacy airlines today have gone bankrupt several times but chapter-11'd their way back instead of being "creatively destroyed") yet they still evolved this fascinating business model.
   
3. i make no claims to originality.
   
   

>image
image 2 is completely irrelevant and based on the assumption i'm someone i'm not (were this a thread about soviet or chinese famines, i'd be on the "and how many famines afterwards?" side of the argument.
as for image 1: it seems quite confused. the 1930s have almost nothing to teach us, the 1970s just have lol-wrong numbers. (us real gdp growth 1970 > 1979 averaged 3%, more than the 2.5% it could supposedly "only dream about" in that decade.) "how many brazillians have been to space?" is an odd rhetorical question when the answer isn't "zero", as it is for most countries.

i will engage mainly with the question of the asian tigers, because (aside from the obvious point that their planning was far less expansive than that of the USSR) one obvious part is missing in the defence of planning: as export oriented economies they were still exposed to market discipline. general park mandated that companies export cars, but crucially, to avoid losing money they had to learn to export good cars cheaply, because park could not mandate that american consumers buy korean cars. this is in contrast to other cases like india where getting the central planners to designate you a car manufacturer was a licence to print money because you had a captive domestic market that you could force to buy third-rate british designs from 1950 in the year 1980 because they had no other choice.

more generally: planning in a poor country is a good way to administer things while breaking up old social bonds that form a barrier to setting up a modern society. this is a big reason that china is rich and india isn't - mao successfully abolished the "idiocy of rural life" and created a populace ideally suited to working in modern conditions, while india's bourgeois democracy made it easy for old reactionary elements to stay in place and so for people to find themselves with ties and obligations that form a barrier to moving halfway across the country to work in a factory. (this sort of thing is why i will go to bat for mao any day of the week.)