/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2834416
There was a lot of mafia being sent to Italy and east Germany

>>2834428 (me)
West Germany*

Catalonia was kind of a more radical version of that

>>2834445
Thats retarded

>How did Yugoslavia’s economic model work?
Imagine China but with laws ensuring that the private sector was almost entirely made of co-ops. Iirc any firm over a certain size had to be worker owned.
>this seems to be closer to Marx and Engels’ vision of what a socialist state would look like
It isn't. Marx and Engels spoke very clearly about all industry being centralized and operated according to a national plan.
>and it certainly seems to have worked better than the old Soviet model
That's highly debatable. It had its merits to be sure, such as direct worker management of the workplace and better consumer goods. But it also had a lot of problems that weren't present in the Soviet-style system like mass unemployment. There was also the infamous debt crisis of course, but there were Warsaw Pact countries like Romania that had similar problems so I'm not sure whether Yugoslavia's market socialist model is to blame for that.

>>2834478
>It isn't. Marx and Engels spoke very clearly about all industry being centralized and operated according to a national plan.

Going to need a proper citation on this Ultra.

>>2834504
<What will this new social order have to be like?
Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.
<It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.
<Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.
<In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

>>2834613
Communism is a mode of production, I don't know if you know that already but incase you didn't there you go. Communism is achieved by advancing through stages of history that upwardly escalate into liberation. Communists seek to accelerate this change by implementing policies that help to achieve communism in a more practical sense than the natural development of liberal capitalist political systems. What you are describing is not advocating for planned economy but instead is Marx's understanding of how communism as an existing set of conditions can be pragmatically achieved through revolution. Stop pushing your retarded narrative that it is supporting "planned economy" as we understand it through the soviet tradition.

>>2834646
>Communism is a mode of production
A mode of production characterized by what relations of production?
>What you are describing is not advocating for planned economy
I guess that interpretation makes sense if you just ignore what the text says.
>can be pragmatically achieved through revolution
Hmmm, and what does this revolution actually do? Maybe Marx and Engels can tell us.
<We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class; to win the battle of democracy.
<The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31193/31193-h/31193-h.htm
<This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonizing with the socialized character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control, except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But, with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilized by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.
<But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants. The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning in the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working in the service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual.
<Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
It literally couldn't be more explicit, but I'm sure you have some brilliant reason why the text doesn't actually mean what it says.

>>2834416
>How did Yugoslavia’s economic model work?
Companies were all co-ops but were ran as private for-profit businesses, with the Party having strategic ownership of the financial heights of the country

>this seems to be closer to Marx and Engels’ vision of what a socialist state would look like
Yes and no. The problem of the yugoslavian economic model is that it essentially pushed for the co-ops to be for-profit ventures. As such, the actually collective ownership of the structures was limited in practice given that the collective simply could not voice itself as the ownership status was essentially left to the employees.
By this, I mean that a city for instance could not decide upon how the co-ops should be ran, on what they should invest etc. Meaning that you saw a lot of small-scale enterprise pop up without any kind of collective decision over them.
That said, they were probably closer in spirit to Marx's vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat in its earliest stages, when the means of production are seized. It just happened however that it got stuck at that stage and never set about collective ownership beyond co-op structure. The Commune, that Engels described as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, did have a similar system, but the DoTP is a transitional state that Yugoslavia never moved on from.
This is what Marx had to say about co-ops in volume III of the Capital :
<"The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system."

>and it certainly seems to have worked better than the old Soviet model
It didn't work better. If your standard is accesibility to goods, then sure it did provide better and more adequate goods than the eastern block. However, if your criteria is employment or work guarantee, then no the Soviet model worked better as there were persistent work shortages, especially in the southern republics.
Slovenia iirc was the most succesful republic of Yugoslavia and its development never reached East Germany standards despite being industrialized early and having access to both eastern and western markets

>>2834478
>Marx and Engels spoke very clearly about all industry being centralized and operated according to a national plan
No they weren't. There's probably only around 20-30 pages of communist policies set out by Marx that are kept intentionally vague to avoid being blamed by future failures.
Marx did talk about common ownership by the people of the means of production alongside coordination of said-means, but he never specified a precise model for that.
There's no way to know if he intended on having something closer to Yugoslavian model but with macro-economic planning through democratized investments, or whether he sought the micro-management of the firm under the USSR where the Gosplan and the Gosnab allocated and determined where every bit of labor where to be used.

>>2834938
>but he never specified a precise model for that
I already posted several passages from the works of Marx and Engels specifically citing state ownership as the model they were envisioning.
>There's no way to know if he intended on having something closer to Yugoslavian model
Yes there is, since the Yugoslavian model didn't even do away with private property, the abolition of which Engels describes as "the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution." It's true that Marx and Engels left many things up to future generations of revolutionaries to figure out, and it's true that their whole method of analysis inherently precludes creating overly rigid models that should be treated as gospel or blueprints. The left open many questions such as precise models of management, remuneration schemes, how the transition to socialism would be executed, the precise means by which an economy would be planned, etc. However at the same time they are very clear about what the basic socialist relations of prodiction would need to look like in order to address the problems caused by capitalism. These are the elimination of private property, anarchy of production, wage slavery, and generalized commodity production, and their replacement with the ownership and operation of all means of production by society as a whole, specifically through a proletarian state. Yugoslavia's economy retained three out of four of the capitalist features I described. Only wage slavery was done away with. I'm not trying to shit on the SFRY too much. They did a lot of good things and I think their market socialist model could be a valid tool in socialist construction, but in and of itself it falls far short of Marxist socialism. The Soviet model was objectively closer to what Marx and Engels had in mind.

>>2834478
best answer itt. i do think its true that marx/engels were much more open to cooperative enterprise as a transitionary phase than theyre normally credited with, as indicated by commentary on paris commune and a few others texts, but ultimately i dont think it makes sense to assign them any definitive position on the details of economic arrangement taken up by a dictatorship of the proletariat, since the entire reason they avoided making "utopians" claims about future socialism is because that would have to be worked out by a dictatorship of the proletariat under its own circumstances with an unpredictable range of variables

in either case tho that means its futile to say x or y was more or less of what marx/engels proposed, because they didnt propose much specifically in this regard. the only thing that is abundantly clear is they thought the vast majority of political power needed to belong to the proletariat, who exercises that political power to reorient production towards need and away from exchange.

so if we want to do this kind of argument over 20th century socialism fidelity to the expectations of marx/engels, its probably more worthwhile to look at the extent to which the proletariat as a class was invested with and able to assert political influence

>>2834938
also a good answer, didnt see this one

>>2834948
>state ownership as the model they were envisioning
State-ownership doesn't really mean anything in-and-of itself. Should a SOE work like it did under a bourgeois state ? Should it be ran like a co-op albeit with nominal state-ownership to interfere if needed ? Should it be communal like anarchists propose ?
There's not definite way to interpret what they meant because as you say yourself Marx and Engels left no definite policy brief on how the means of production should be ran

>These are the elimination of private property, anarchy of production, wage slavery, and generalized commodity production
Yugoslavia didn't have private property. Its co-ops were nominally "social enterprise" where neither the worker or the state had formal ownership in the capitalist sense of the enterprise. The workers could not "sell" their membership, and the state could not impose the workers to produce XYZ. The property structure was akin to councils.
Similarly, Yugoslavia maintained a form of indicative planning throughout its existence. The state had control over the financial heights of the economy and tried to steer the economy in a general direction. To this end, there was a "plan" that was elaborated on each level by having delegates mobilized to seek out which priorities should be handled first and foremost through investments and fiscal policies. These delegates would then report to a municipal level, and then on a regional level etc.

Now, you can argue that this does not constitute an effective form of planning, nor that the "social enterprise" was actually a council-property system. However, any claim in doing so will result in an attempt from your end to interpret Marx's word with a preexisting image of how an enterprise should be ran.