grr, I knew I forgot something:
Computational and Statistical Political Economy Research (CASPER)A forum for open discussion about political economy, including cybernetics
https://casperforum.org/community/I don't follow Neurath's hyper-skeptical take about reducing multiple dimension to one. He notes that when different action scenarios are scored by multiple aspects and the aspect scores are put together in some overall score, different weightings of the aspects result in different rankings of the situations you compare, and he is unsure about how you would weight the aspects. He wants to have the relief (meaning the non-aggregated aspect scores) when comparing action scenarios. He loves to see it when one relief covers another, showing that one scenario is unambiguously superior to another – not worse in any aspect, better in at least one aspect, in modern parlance known as Pareto dominance.
But this has to be said: Just because different aspect weightings make the scenario rankings change doesn't mean anything can happen to the rankings. Whenever you have Pareto dominance, this will also show up as the unambiguously better scenario having a better rank than the unambiguously worse scenario, no matter how you weight the aspects (as long as the weights are all positive). Neurath also cringes at statisticians using rank information as if it were richer (interval or cardinal), making some arbitrary transformations. Again it has to be said: Whatever weird arbitrary transformation rules you may choose, Pareto dominance never gets destroyed by that.
I do concede though that choosing weightings will never be without controversy, so Pareto dominance should be made explicit by deleting Pareto-dominated alternatives from the ranking of the scenarios as they get whittled down to produce a winner at some point. This idea could be generalized further by allowing different people in a planning group to use their own weightings and then delete any scenario X that is dominated by scenario Y across all the different weighting patterns the group uses.
>>569597 (me)
This can be generalized even more yet: People could provide not only their own individual aspect weightings, but also their own aspect ratings. Moreover, instead of providing precise numbers they cold provide ranges for upper and lower boundaries, both for the weightings and the ratings.
And this could be aggregated by a very simple AI that tells them where they need to crank up the precision in order to delete many scenarios. (Of course being very precise about everything is how you quickly get there. But precise thinking is mentally taxing and forcing people into making precise statements will just make it likely that they say something arbitrary just to get over with it. So the program would look for where a small amount of more precise thinking has a big effect on filtering out stuff.)
>>569601 >>569602One of the main ideas of socialism is a relative shift from ex post stuff to ex ante. There is still trial and error, but we also try to figure out things in advance as much as possible. As you know also in capitalism many prototypes are made and judged and discarded as clearly worse than some other prototypes before they reach the mass-production phase. I'd rather have more of that than less, since it saves you a lot trouble down the line.
Don't just think about consumer products. With toasters there is demand feedback from the mass market. But there are also expensive tools that are not used by any hobbyists, only in production. These won't be privately owned. So the feedback here is surveys similar to those in the prototyping phase.
>>569605>Economic cybernetics by Nikolay Vedutaan English translation of this is being written as we speak, by a comrade in Ukraine
>Economics in kind, Total socialisation and A system of socialisation by Otto NeurathI expect sci-hub does but I can take a closer look when I get back
>>569608Neurath wrote in German, English, French, and also a little bit here and there in Dutch and even Swedish. But the economics is mostly in early Neurath and early Neurath published in German. Another problem is that the stuff that interests philosophers is the stuff he wrote about doing science and his comments on other philosophers, the least interest they have is in the stuff touching on socialism. Here is book from 1983 with Neurath stuff in English, and while it's not bad, the stuff that they put in it really can't do anything for this thread,
except the handy list of Neurath texts in English starting on page 259 where the reader of that essay collection gets surprised by the sudden appearance of economics among the topics.
>>569597 was referring to sections 14 and 15 of Neurath's big essay
Foundations of the Social Sciences, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 2, No. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Also available in German as:
Grundlagen der Sozialwissenschaften.
>>569610The article
Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen by Mises (
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth) was published in 1920, so it cannot be inspired by anything written later by Neurath. In the article Mises explicitly refers to Neurath's 1919 publication of essays
Durch die Kriegswirtschaft zur Naturalwirtschaft (this does appear in the pdf's list of English Neurath texts as
Through War Economy to Economy in Kind).
The article by Mises became part of a longer work later,
Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus (in English:
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis), but there are no references to other writings by Neurath to be found in it.
The following is a translation of a German translation of an article originally published in the Russian magazine Problems of Philosophy. The German version ran in Ost Probleme in 1963. Retrieved from
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44927433.
https://comraderene.wordpress.com/2021/01/18/the-dialectical-conception-of-cybernetics-translation/>>569612This is just some tedious (no doubt made even more tedious by translation) fart-huffer obsessed with labelling people (you see this here is very Hegel, that there is very positivist blahblahblah) and got nothing on socialist economic planning.
Leave.
>>569614what
>>569615 said. the cybersoc thread is where planning is discussed in detail
It look like a more has become available on sites for free ebooks and PDFs since the last time I checked.
Otto Neurath Economic Writings Selections 1904–1945 looks more on-topic.
>>569614If you want to passionately argue a point about an article you haven't read, the least you could do is a quick ctrl-f check.
>>569631lol
post the vid in the OC thread
personally I'm more in the camp of calling it "machine fitting" or similar, but ML is good for the lulz and confusion
also I hope you're voting in ms. /co/
>>569633>I'm not on /co/for shame
>plus4?
>>569640depends. are you planning on graduate school? If you are not going to grad school then still major in CS to have a job.
If you are, id double major in math because honestly all graduate work in CS and even econ requires a decent amount of math. Econ uses calculus and real analysis and differential equations and linear algebra and probability/stats (as do all sciences including physics and CS).
Honestly at everything but an elite college an undergraduate degree in econ is considered a joke. At most you should minor in it. Here's a quote from a graduate program in econ:
>Prior degrees in economics at the B.A. or M.A. level are not required. There are mathematics requirements. Applicants for admission to the M.A. program must complete a one-semester course in calculus at the University level prior to entry. A second course in calculus is highly recommended. Applicants for admission to the Ph.D. program need additional mathematics. We will consider applicants who have completed the equivalent of two three-credit semester courses in calculus prior to entry in the fall semester. However, we strongly recommend the completion of two additional courses prior to entry in any of the following subjects: advanced calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, real analysis or related areas. There are also economics and statistics requirements. All entrants in the M.A. program must have completed three one-semester courses prior to entry in the fall semester: introductory statistics, intermediate microeconomics, and intermediate macroeconomics. Some applicants, at the time they submit their application forms, will not have completed the above requirements. They may be working toward their completion prior to entry in the fall semester. Such applicants may be admitted conditionally. All conditional requirements must be completed prior to starting the M.A. or Ph.D. programs.If you are going to grad school then do math/cs and maybe take the minimum of econ classes to get into grad school for econ (which will probably be covered under geneds anyway). unless you're going to grad school for CS in which case the econ classes are optional.
Cibcom just published this short clip on their YT channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj_mgGuT944which is a translation of an excerpt from this:
https://www.designing-history.world/en/theory/response-to-an-ultra-leftist-critique-of-cybersocialism/Dapprich should also go in the OP I think
thoughts on this? written by one of the cibcom guys
>Sketching a proposal for a complete and reflexive Conscious Social Self-Determination (CSSD)https://ogas1917.wordpress.com/2022/09/21/the-algorithm-cssd-ii/it's a "part 2" to this post:
>Tracing up the common essence of the three main left-wing historical movementshttps://ogas1917.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/communism-anarchism-and-democracy-from-an-informational-perspective-cssd-i/>>569648Pretty vague.
>What if the algorithm itself contains the necessary procedures that allow society in general to modify it?Ok? If you squint, you might say law is kinda like code, and there are laws for modifying laws… So what's the big difference? Will we all work on the code? Can code be more readable than law texts? The texts slips into outright poetry in places (not a fan of that):
>The Algorithm combines thus perfectly with a decentralized base military power, i.e. guerilla tactics and popular milita, erasing the need to have permanent centralized armies which most commonly constitute the stronghold of reaction.Maybe I will have a proper comment after another article or two, at this point I struggle to see where the author is going with this.
>>569651https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/a-belated-response-to-rv-or-why-the-law-of-value-must-hold/ >>569648 (me)
>>569652>Pretty vague.yeah, that's the feel I get as well
>>569666it says digital "money", but that might just be EU Times butchering things
it very much depends on how it's arranged. if it's literally just currency with an expiration date then that doesn't change much. if on the other hand it's the first step toward a planned sector where this "money" can be used to requisition goods then it's a different thing
>>569668what
>>569669 said
expiring currency does nothing to prevent accooomolating capital
>>569670you can't get rid of currency by writ. if you try then you will fail. whatever replaces it must be superior so that people prefer using it over money
>>569671>you can't get rid of currency by writ.Of course you can, if you have the force to back the decision.
>whatever replaces it must be superior so that people prefer using itPeople who use a particularly inflationary currency rarely do that because they estimate its future value as high relative to other currently less inflationary currencies, they do it because they have to.
The state declares a date when the old currency will become invalid and some rules about an exchange rate (the rate is what it is because the state says so, nothing to do with supply and demand) which gets applied to all book-keeping and contracts using the old currency. Citizens can exchange their old currency in state-run institutions. (Various different regulations possible here: They may only do that up to a point, anything above is suspect and requires several checks, another higher threshold may mark what is verboten; also citizens may get some for free.) This has happened several times in the history of Germany and those in power never bothered to get permission from the larger public.
(I also vaguely recall a story by I think NPR which among other things covered currency reform in the DPRK. The gov used the rule that you could only exchange so much of your old currency. This was reported in a very sad tone, since the piece was about some femspiring fempowered femtrepreneur making lot of money in the black market by literally stealing stuff.)
>>569669>and then sell that gold for fresher money later to take money out of a savingsyou can't do that though, state just wont let you stockpile and sell back gold, buying gold in the first place would attract its attention, and then you can't even sell the gold, you can't take personal vouchers for it, you'd have to barter it, and then ppl would prolly be like… "but I have acquired these with my vouchers because I intend to use them ? why would I want your fucking gold which cant buy shit ?"
your ""loophole"" only work with the idea that the system is dumb af and nobody try to fix people trying to recreate a capitalist accumulation or just finding exploits in it (and isnt even really viable even if that was true)
>>569671Expiring currency will have some effect on the middle strata of society to keep them from gaining the capacity to start using their monetary accumulation as leverage over others and going through the trouble of converting it to precious metal stores would be effort that a large number of people are honestly not going to go through with.
>>569674People are going to recognize the value in precious metal value stores and china's domestic market is not gonna be small. Don't assume everyone's going to be on the same page, either in rejecting or accepting this concept, to various degrees.
>>569675>Expiring currency will have some effect on the middle strata of society didn't finish this
the upper echelons of society basically won't be meaningfully effected. It'll increase the velocity at which money moves, solidify, and encourage foreign capital stocks. But obviously, tackling big bourgies requires tools developed specifically for that task, you cannot simply implement wide-ranging laws on them, they need to be hunted down personally.
>>569673Do you think Germany is a fictional country or didn't you read the whole post before replying?
>>569674That same poster qualified the statement and probably agrees with you, no need to be so hostile. IIRC when the Nixon administration ended the gold-exchange guarantee of the dollar they also made it a pain in the ass to obtain gold.
>>569641im doing 2 years at CC, 2 years at public uni. The uni I want to transfer to offers political economy as a minor, i'm wondering if I should take that?
It feels like to be able to work on planning stuff I should major in math and go to grad school, but i'm probably not smart enough to get a grad-school acceptable GPA in math while also working full time, and I want to be able to not be super poor as a math major (only good jobs are finance and national security related)
>>569674>state just wont let you stockpile and sell back gold, buying gold in the first place would attract its attentionthen another commodity will take the place of gold
every petty porky will be able to get around this by just buying and selling shit from each other. currency that expires doesn't interrupt M-C-M' circulation. it's like you fuckers don't understand what financial tools are
>>569682>without having them Venezuela-style inflationmhmm, but if that had happened you can be sure as shit that people would have resorted to some more stable currency
>hoarding goldthat's not the point anon. the point is M-C-M' works just as well with money that "expires" within a year or ten
listening to Stafford Beer's "The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear" again because it's september (
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-designing-freedom-1.2946819) and just making myself feel deeply miserable knowing none of the problems he raises got solved and all this poor nerd's friends got killed for nothing.
>>569683Work from observable reality to theory, not from what is "common sense" among theorists. People don't flock to the strongest currency. If most of the economy is nationalized and there is still cash, the cash is used in black markets. New capitalists are generated in these black markets. Currency reforms like in North Korea throw a wrench into this process.
What you seem to do is assuming that people
only want to change the financial system (which of course can't work). This assumption is not a plausible inference about the position of anybody ITT.
>>569685>The fundamental thing is that there's not much fundamental difference between making money inherently expire and having a negative interest rate at a bank that charges you for the account.It amounts to the same if cash is banned. If cash is not banned the difference is that with expiration people can't decide to hoard the cash to avoid the negative interest rate.
>>569686>all this poor nerd's friends got killedFalse.
So i recently learned several things from marxism-cockshottism:
Capitalists take only half of your work results as surplus value, so:
- if you recieve a wage twice as average, then you are not exploited
- if your wage is even higher than you are actually exploiting others together with capitalists
- actually it's not even wage, it's wage per head in the family, so if two people work same job for same hours recieving same wage, but one of them has two children and a wife who doesn't work, and another is bachelor, then bachelor isn't exploited.
- therefore gays without kids are not exploited
- people in poor countries receiving lower wages is due to their lower productivity only, since capitalists would never take more than half as surplus value
- middle class exists apparentely and non-exploited gay and bachelors belong to it
- Marx never said that class is defined by relationship to the means of production (picrel)
So, the questions is this - was Cockshott always this retarde and i just didn't notice it, or is this the age thing?
>>569692If you want to talk about LGBT stuff, there is the general on >>>/siberia/305161 and there's also a current thread in the /leftypol/ catalog because of the referendum in Cuba that you might have heard about.
If you want to talk about economical analysis, you can do that here.
>Capitalists take only half of your work results as surplus valueYes on average and it's an interesting finding, but so far it is "only" empirical. That is Cockshott and company don't claim to have a reason why it must be that way and I doubt that they think it must be that by some economic law. It's a standard assumption of Marxism that neither the size of the surplus nor the share of it that goes to the capitalist class are automatically derived from market mechanisms. The workers can grab a bigger share by organizing. (Cockshott doesn't follow Marx everywhere, but where he disagrees, he is explicit about it.)
>if you recieve a wage twice as average, then you are not exploitedDoes not follow globally as it is jumping from aggregates to particulars. It would follow if everyone had the same productivity. (Besides, it would be only about the quantitative side of exploitation.) It's a smaller jump in the argument when talking within the context of a nation, but it's still iffy talking about individuals that way. By going again to aggregates within the country the jump in the argument again becomes smaller.
>people in poor countries receiving lower wages is due to their lower productivity only, since capitalists would never take more than half as surplus valueNobody is saying that, but lower productivity certainly plays a big role in lower wages. You don't need racial essentialism to explain that, you can just look at the effects of malnutrition, lack of schooling, etc.
>relationship to the means of productionCockshott is right that you can't reduce class to that question, otherwise slaves and the working class would not just have some parallels, they would be the same class. Of course one can say that slave owner is roughly to slave as capitalist is to worker, but Marx doesn't talk about "the slave/worker class" and makes a distinction.
>>569694>Yes on average and it's an interesting finding, but so far it is "only" empirical. I have seen zero evidence for this, in fact Cockshott threw a misquote from Marx to me when i asked.
>Nobody is saying thatCockshott literally did say this to me personally and to some other guys in the comments under his video.
>Cockshott is right that you can't reduce class to that questionYou pretty much can. Slaves don't own any means of production, that is in itself is a form of relationship, and they are themself a property of someone who owns means of production.
>>569695Cockshott's althusserian influence is coming through here, Althusserians like Wolff for example don't define class as being determined by relation to the means of production but as a process instead and related it to the production and distribution of surplus value rather than merely a relation.
>Class, for Marx, refers to how, in production, a surplus gets produced. All human societies produce such surpluses. However, societies differ in how they organize the production and distribution of this surplus. In Marx’s view, there have always been subsets of populations in communities (from families through villages to whole nations) that have performed labor in the production of goods and services. Those subsets have always produced more output than they themselves consumed: the “surplus” output or simply the surplus. That surplus has then been distributed to other persons inside or outside the community. The class structure of a community or society is then its distinct organization of the production and distribution of surplus.that being said Cockshott seems weirdly ideologically motivated to claim all LGBTs (except lesbian maybe) are petit booj or PMC. He even threw out the idea of "LGBT serves imperialism" even though he himself already rejected leninist theories of imperialism but hes turning inconsistent with his own work just to dunk on the LGBTs
>>569694>>569697 (me)
moreover, a slave can be better off than a prole, can retain more of the value they produce in certain situations
>>569696Yeah, he basically did a switcheroo with the arguments, starting with exploitation but measuring wages per family member instead just to claim that gays are not exploited. This is…not very honest to say the least.
>rejected leninist theories of imperialism Goddammit…
I already remember feeling iffy about his takes on materialism, now all that..
>>569703His materialism takes leave me sometimes intrigued and impressed and other times feeling like he's a bit of a sperg trying to force things to fit where they don't really make sense.
I still have no idea what the fuck it means to have "idealist supercomputer hardware architecture"
>>569697Labor power is not capital as far as I am aware, until it alienated from the worker.
>>569700This is literally the appropriate thread, our discourse is primarily based on TANS so critiques of TANS foundation in Marxism(or lack thereof) is on-topic.
>>569707price representation is always arbitrary, this is not a problem unique to labor vouchers or economic planning
this is angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff
>>569708How is that possible to forecast?
I am not aware of any firm or government agency that can accurately forecast R&D costs, which is one reason why the subject is often tax deductible in the private sector.
If you made a bureau of R&D you could possibly take the average of hundreds of projects, it's going to be impossible to forecast the deployment costs of the new tech before it is developed, so there is a time lag problem.
>>569711by nature this is something you can't have a pat answer for that you can explain on an internet forum, it'd be like trying to explain energy demand curves or something. the salient difference is that a planned economy could constitute those costs as prices by means of the planning body deciding on a different price representation, and a market economy cannot do anything like that because it's always ultimately profit driven
it's a categorical difference, and guessing at the best way to represent environmental costs is irrelevant to the fact that one system could have the potential to deal with them in some respects and the other categorically does not
>>569707>How can labor vouchers price in environmental externality?there are no externalities in planning once it's properly established. but until say atmospheric CO2 is brought into regulation you could have a rationing system
>One theory is to base the price on the labor cost of rectifying the externalityyou add relevant constraints, thus making these "externalities" internal
>how many classes of externality need to be constrained to continue life on earth?this is a question environmental scientists can answer
>>569708research is a multi armed bandit, a problem that will never be solved
>>569706>critiques of TANSWhat the other poster talked about is not in TANS. Leaving aside how wrong and misleading it is, all of it is in reaction to stuff researched and published later than TANS. That stuff had no influence on TANS and is irrelevant to socialist planning algorithms.
>>569707>we might have labor vouchers, a monthly energy voucher, a land use or problematic commodity voucherThe more voucher types we use to allocate a given pile of items, the lower the consumer freedom (and what's highly likely: the lower the utility).
Toy example: 10 different product types, every item costs one budget point, no consumer wants more than one unit of the same item, we assume that the items are made to order and no shortages. Alice has 4 consumer points. If she uses up her budget, there are 10 × 9 × 8 × 7 = 5040 combinations to choose from.
If the 10 different products are divided in two sets with the same number of different items and there are two voucher types for each set and likewise the points of Alice are equally divided into these voucher types, and again she uses up all her points, how many combinations are there? (5 × 4)² = 400 (and these combinations were all also available in the single-voucher system).
Hard physical limits can be put into the planning algorithm without having a direct representation in the personal budget system.
>>569715 (me)
Sorry, I forgot something in the calculation. The above treats the same item collections as different if they are acquired in a different order. So I have to divide the results by the number of ways they can be ordered on a line. 4 items can be ordered in 24 ways, so in the scenario with one voucher type, Alice has 210 combinations to choose from. And in the scenario with two voucher types, there are 10² = 100 combinations.
>>569716 (me)
I chose very low numbers for items and budget points due to laziness and that ruined the point I was trying to communicate. The example makes it appear as if your freedom got cut roughly in proportion to the number of vouchers. If you choose bigger numbers you will see that it makes a dramatic difference.
>>569717I just said what's a problem with multiple vouchers and made no claims of originality. Whether that criticism is old is not an argument against its strength. I don't know why you would call it "remuneration problem" which sounds like being strictly about the size of salary differences. The problem described manifests irrespective of what size income differences are or whether they exist at all.
There is a potential
additional problem with income differences in a multi-voucher system in that mutual income envy can go over 50 %, but that can be simply avoided by only having differences of voucher income in the form of sets and subsets, so that the different incomes despite being heterogeneous can be ordered at least in ordinal fashion.
>>569718yes, having a rationing system besides labour vouchers does indeed further constrain demand and can cause discontent
I'm curious why and where you think there would be income differentials. we can certainly imagine a situation where fuel vouchers are unevenly distributed based on need. that is a political issue
>>569718 (me)
100 different items and 12 consumption points, other assumptions are as above (nobody wants the same item twice, budget gets exhausted).
(100! ÷ (100 − 12)!) ÷ 12!
(100 × 99 × 98 × 97 × 96 × 95 × 94 × 93 × 92 × 91 × 90 × 89) ÷ 479001600 = 1.050421051×10¹⁵
50 different items and 6 consumption points of voucher type one; 50 different items and 6 consumption points of voucher type two. So for one type there are…
(50! ÷ (50 − 6)!) ÷ 6! = 15890700 different configurations. For both types together we have 15890700 × 15890700 = 2.525143465×10¹⁴
Comparing the single-voucher system with the dual-voucher system we get (1.050421051×10¹⁵) ÷ (2.525143465×10¹⁴) = 4.159847017. The single-voucher system gives you more than 4× the combinations to choose from here (and contains all the combinations of the two-voucher system). Someone tell me if I screwed up the math.
>>569719Unequal distribution is the default assumption (see Critique of the Gotha Programme). Equal distribution does not follow from the position
to each according to their deeds (bonus income is possible where physical output where that can be measured, for working more time, for availability on short notice, for dangerous work, and based on voting by your colleagues). Equal distribution does not follow from the position
to each according to their needs (for example legal guardians of children). Equal distribution does not follow from a compromise between these two positions.
>>569725Well first of all, you would have to give me a good reason for doing that. I don't find the idea of a rationing book attractive, putting it on a smartphone doesn't make it much better.
Continuing with the simple model, another scenario: Let's split the 100 different items into 4 groups of 25 with their own distinct points, give the consumer 3 points in each group. Giving instead the consumer a single system with 12 points allows for over 37 times as many combinations (which of course includes all the combinations from the other scenario).
Having separate point systems screws with analyzing demand data since you only compare demand for stuff in the same consumption-point category. If my rationing book allows me to get more units of something in category A I don't care for and fewer units of something in category B than I would like, I may make use of my allowance to get more from category A in order to receive more from category B through barter. Since barter is tedious this is an inefficient use of my time compared to just having one system. And again this screws with the analysis of demand data.
These avoidable problems people can already figure out just by thinking about it
and humanity already has a history of running into these problems over and over and over. Where is your justification for doing it again?
>>569726Why is it even proposed to be done? Because we have extreme differences in wealth and income and the ruling class wants to hold on to these differences. If incomes were not spread as much the issue would not arise. So there should be no reason to advocate for anything like that as a more long-term thing under socialism. Besides, putting one or two commodities into a rationing system is still much more simple than the ration book from war time.
>>569729>As already stated, physical limits are part of the planning processyeah that's what I said
I guess we're mostly in agreement
>>569705That wasn't what he said though.
He said he clocked the ALICE supercomputer as being not significantly faster than other supercomputers because it was built with a heavy emphasis on the processing while the data bus wasn't fast enough to properly take advantage of what it could hypothetically do on
certain tasks.
It was an argument that left me very confused because high capacity for processing doesn't always need high data throughput rates and it's entirely possible that it required alternative data layouts than what he was running through it.
>>569743
>honestly you don't even need the degree, there's a huge number of software jobs that will accept a bootcamp or online cert as traininghard disagree. This isn't 2013. The fact is most jobs in software (esp. corporate 9-5's) require that piece of paper. There's a glut of entry level CS grads who can code and an even bigger one of those who can't.
All these stories of the guy who did a bootcamp then got hired at google for $200,000+ a year with "no degree" turn out to be total bullshit most of the time. I remember watching a documentary about IBM hiring people without degrees for "software engineering" positions, some feelgood piece about diversifying hires by not requiring college. A guy who was titled as a "software engineer" in the story? Looked up his linkedin and he's actually a technical support engineer at IBM, literally glorified helpdesk.
Thats the thing about these stories, they always turn out to be BS. Yes in the early 2010s when tech was blowing up maybe someone could do a bootcamp and get a job but nowdays that shit is over.
The story of the guy who got the 200k job from a bootcamp, it always turns out that no, they did not have "no degree", they did have a degree just not in computer science, maybe in math, or some other type of engineering. And it turns out that no, they did not get hired as a "software engineer" but some sort of low level IT ops role.
If you don't believe me browse any job board looking for developer positions and you will clearly see the vast majority either require or prefer degrees. If you go the self taught or bootcamp route you will immediately preclude 70%+ of all potential jobs. This isn't fair but it is what it is and the bootcamp meme needs to die esp. when some bootcamps are charging as much as a 4 year degree now (at least if you only could tuition) for a vastly inferior product.
>>569748>>569747Weird, I tend to work more in the enterprise/dilbert sphere of development (fintech, etc.) and there is definitely a requirement for degrees.
>the software labor market still has far, far more openings than qualified engineersmost of those openings are for people with 3-10 years of experience and specific niche skills like being a kafka or enterprise integration expert or something, not new grads. Turning out more bootcamp grads or even college grads wont address that.
>>569749Definitely depends on the sphere. Like game devs are infamously fucked compared to others. I am a backed web dev, for example.
But yes, mostly that applies to experienced workers.
>>569752probably the same as today but since it wouldn't be rushed for profit startup style, with a greater emphasis on good architecture, simplicity, maintainability, testability and low technical debt throughout its lifecycle.
All software would be free and open source and auditable by the public, so far as its practical to do so.
Under socialism software would be free from the constraints of capitalism and would greatly improve in quality. Video games would be entirely free to play with no microtransactions. Social media would be made to be non addicting instead of the recommender system driven dopamine-drip hellscape that currently exists. It would encourage and be engineered to produce pro-social behavior by algorithmically rewarding positivity and civil discussion instead of outrage bait and fbi.gov. It would encourage body positivity and anti racism by showing a variety of people in the feed instead of making teen girls feel bad due to showing only thin pretty white girls. It would prioritize not fucking up young peoples mental health.
Programming Languages and tools would not be based on corporations like Oracle/Microsoft, but on industrial associations of programmers like a DeLeonist council, which would incubate/steward projects like the apache foundation does now. All critical infrastructure software would be done this way.
>>569758>scale*Scala
The joke is ruined now
>>569759yeah you fucked it up.
Anyway there are probably a few scala jobs but its true that the vast majority of corporate jobs out there use Java/C#/Python/Javascript/Typescript. Maybe some C/C++ for embedded and video games. Every functional language combined has a probably single digit share of programming jobs.
The most popular functional language according to TIOBE is common lisp at #30 and thats actually multi paradigm not just functional.
Scala is #33
• Value can mean the “use value”. It is how useful the good is a to a human being. This is rather subjective and difficult, if not impossible to quantify.
• Value can mean the “exchange value”. It is the rate at which the good can be exchanged for another good.
• A commodity is a good that is, or in the future will be, exchanged. It has both a use value (otherwise nobody will want to exchange for it, since it would be useless), and an exchange value.
• There are goods that have no exchange value: For example, if a mother bakes a cake for her children from dough, the cake itself is not baked for the purpose of exchanging it for another commodity. The cake is purely made for consumption within the family. Therefore, the cake has no exchange value, but it does have a use value. The cake is not a commodity in this case.
• All commodities are goods, but not all goods are commodities, since not all goods are made for the intent of exchange. In a hunter-gatherer society where no trade exists, no commodities would exist – everything is made for personal consumption. However, in capitalism, most things are made not for immediate personal consumption, but for trade. Under capitalism, most goods indeed are commodities, since most goods are produced for the intent of exchanging it on a market. Capitalism is the mode of production where commodity production has reached its thus-far historical peak.
• While the distinction between “use value” and “exchange value” is important to understand which goods are commodities and which goods are not, this distinction should not be overemphasized: When we speak of capitalism, we must speak of commodities first and foremost, since these are the most common forms of goods. When we speak of value in capitalism, we are therefore speaking of the value of commodities. But: It would be wrong to split up the “value” of a commodity into exchange-value and use-value. The value of commodities is always both. If it has no use-value, it cannot be a commodity. If it has no exchange-value, it cannot be a commodity. The value of commodities is a unitary concept, not a dualistic one. The value of commodities is always both use-value and exchange-value combined.
• “Value” under capitalism expresses the relation between the commodity as a “thing” on the one hand and between human beings on the other. If all humans died from one day to the other, how could a Ferrari have any value? If all humans disappeared from one day to the next, all former commodities of the world would now just be mere objects, without any value whatsoever. For commodities to have any value, humans must exist. For value to have any meaning, goods and commodities must exist. Value is part of both the exterior world of objects and in the interior world of minds, both in the world of objects and in the world of humans, always these two sides at once: Value is a unitary concept.
• Value is what expresses the connection between humans and objects – the exchange-value being the social connection, the use value being the private connection we humans have towards these things, or, in the case of capitalism, towards these commodities.
• The exchange-value determines how the commodity-as-an-object forms a social relationship amongst individuals; the use-value determines the relationship between the subjectivity of the inside world of human desires and the physicality of the outside world of objects.
• Value is neither based purely on the extrinsic nature of a commodity (such as: the amount of other commodities you can exchange your commodity for), nor is it based purely on the intrinsic nature of a commodity (such as: how much energy or time it took to produce this commodity). Value has both an extrinsic and an intrinsic moment. The value of commodities is of course a social relation (since a commodity must by definition exist for the intent of trade), but it also has a natural component to it (the energy, the time needed on average and so on).
• Value is how society considers the material commodity. However, society and commodity are always bound by the laws of nature, such as the laws of energy, physics, chemistry, geology or the laws of time, aging and mortality. Therefore, just as much as society shapes its relation to the commodity, the commodity’s outside circumstances shape their relation to society as well.
• Therefore, in capitalism, a material product of concrete human labor acquires social character through value. Value is then the objective social process that gives the material product of concrete human labor the dimension of sociality, transforming it from a mere object to a commodity.
• Value can therefore be described as a social algorithm.
• What is an algorithm? An algorithm is an abstract logical procedure consisting of an ordinate and finite sequence of successive steps needed to solve a problem. For example, the sets of rules that allow for the four elementary arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) to occur are algorithms. Allow me to elaborate: For us, an addition of two numbers seems very logical, if not intuitive. You can take one object and another object, and now you have two objects. What we observe in these operations is the external form of the relationship between two numbers: We know the numbers, we know the arithmetic sign of the operation (here: a “+”) and its final result (the sum). However, we are not able to observe the logical procedure that leads to the correct result, which remains hidden and invisible, abstract inside our mind. Unless we are logicians or mathematicians, we are normally not even fully aware of the ordered set of logical rules that led us to solve the operation. Most people in this world can add two numbers, but how many people in this world are aware of the Peano axioms, which are used to formalize natural-number arithmetic? How many humans could axiomatize arithmetic (like the addition of two numbers) from the more basic facts of successor operation and inductions? Presumably not many. Yet, even though most of us do not know the exact nature of the logical steps behind adding numbers, the sequence of these logical steps really exists and produces factual results. It constitutes the algorithm of the arithmetic operation.
• Similarly, inside a market exchange, there is an algorithm that determines an equivalence-relation between commodities. However, unlike the algorithms behind elementary arithmetic, this algorithm exists outside our minds, outside the minds of sellers and buyers – it is not a pure act of human thought, but a generative social structure that most current-day humans were born into, that exists independent of their will. The value of commodities is, like the algorithm behind the addition of numbers, something that just “works” and produces reliable results – yet it is, unlike the purely mind-based arithmetic algorithm, a social algorithm, a real abstraction. Value is the algorithm operating within the social relation of the market exchange, which allows us to determine the equivalence-relation transforming qualitatively different commodities into quantitatively identical exchange-values. Value is what allows us to trade 1 kilogram of coffee for a given amount of money – qualitatively different objects, but quantitatively equivalent within the sphere of the market.
• Value is the set of successive steps leading to the determination of the exchange-value, which in turn is the formal expression of objectified abstract labor constituting the social substance of a commodity.
• Value is therefore the social algorithm of market-equivalence between commodities and between the individual concrete labors that produced them. The social process of value determines simultaneously the equivalence between two commodities (as a market-exchange-ratio) and as an objectified quantity of abstract labor. Or, in other words: A given market-exchange-ratio and a given quantity of objectified abstract labor are the mutually equivalent results of the social algorithm of value, expressed in the form of a given exchange-value. What the social algorithm of value adds to the material and merely bodily form of objects-of-use is the social form of exchange-value as the equivalence between market-exchange-ratio with other commodities and quantity of objectified abstract labor.
• In formal terms: If there is a set of commodities C, composed of the three commodity types x, y, and z, there is the following equivalence-relation, denoted by the symbol ~:
1. Reflexivity: x ~ x
Example: 10 grams of sugar = 10 grams of sugar
2. Symmetry: if x ~ y, then also y ~ x
Example: If 10 grams of sugar cost 0.10€,
then 0.10€ can buy 10 grams of sugar.
3. Transitivity: if x ~ y and y ~ z, then also x ~ z, so in total: x ~ y ~ z
Example: If 10 grams of sugar cost 0.10€,
then 0.10€ can buy you 10 grams of sugar.
If 0.10€ can buy you one bubblegum, then one bubblegum costs 0.10€.
Therefore, 10 grams of sugar are worth one bubblegum.
Both 10 grams of sugar and a bubblegum are worth 0.10€. 0.10€ can buy you both 10 grams of sugar and a bubblegum.
• The social algorithm of value is the set of real steps operating within the act of market exchange that puts the commodities (sugar, bubblegum and money) in an equivalence relation, where these formal properties are verified. [Note that money is now no longer based on gold-standard, which would make it commodity-money without a doubt, but now based on fiat-currency, which makes this relation more complex]
• The commodity has a dual-nature, it has both use-value and value, the latter is expressed in the form of a determined exchange-value. It is important the stress the logical difference between “value” and “exchange-value” here: Between the two concepts, there is a relation similar to that existing between the sum as an algorithmic operation of calculation and the sum as a result of this operation. We easily recognize the sum (= the result of an addition), but we do not easily understand the complex arithmetic algorithm behind this addition, the logical steps that lead one number to be added with another number to come up with a third number. Similarly, the exchange-value is the visible result of an algorithm, obvious to the world, while the “value” as a procedure within the market-exchange is the social algorithm leading to this result, a much more complex concept. When we refer to an already determined magnitude of value, such as that of a given commodity, what we are actually referring to is the social form in which we express value, which is the “exchange-value”. Vice-versa, when we intend to consider the origins of the already determined exchange-value to find out from where it comes out, we refer to “value” as the social algorithm, the sequenced steps leading to this result.
• The definition of “value as a social algorithm” contrasts with the idea of value usually presented in Marxist debate. Usually, value is conceived as a “substantial concept”, with the discussion being about what the substance of value consists of and how it is measured, be it labor-time embodied in production (the traditional productivist approach) or money realized in circulation (the newly emerging Western approach).
• Instead, value should be conceived as a processual concept, a social algorithm, a generative relational structure, representing an abstract procedure (the social algorithm) deriving from a real social process (labor), which continuously transforms abstract labor from potentiality into actuality, giving it an objective, a specific and a quantitatively determined social form as exchange-value.
• Value in capitalism is unitary (exchange-value and use-value always combined), but its substance (abstract labor) is dualistic, and its social form (exchange value as the end-result of the social algorithm) is also dualistic. Abstract labor is dualistic in that it reflects the social labor necessary in production and the social labor necessary to satisfy social needs; the social form of value, i.e. exchange-value, is dual too in that it simultaneously represents a given market-exchange-ratio and a given quantity of objectified abstract labor. The dualism of value is not between substance and form, but inside each of them. Value is the social process that momentarily resolves the dualisms inherent in its substance (abstract labor) and its form (exchange-value), which continuously re-appear in the commodities produced and exchanged on the market, placing them in a relation of equivalence. As a transformative process, value is neither object nor subject, but both things together in a social algorithm, because it is what transforms the subjectivity of its substance as abstract labor into the objectivity of its form as exchange-value.
• Marx’s concept of value is different from the Hegelian concept of Absolute Spirit, since it is not a transcendent subject from which social reality derives and to which it continuously returns, but, on the contrary: Value is an immanent structure that itself is a product of the immediate capitalist social reality. As real abstractions, the algorithm of value is the unconscious and spontaneous result of the concrete and material social practices of a multitude of individuals, the fruit of the myriad of exchange activities that take place at every moment on the market.
• Value is the procedure, the algorithm that converts the concrete, immediate and actual product of human labor into a commodity. Just as language is the code that transforms the sounds the human mouth can produce into socially communicable concepts, value is the code that transforms individual labor into social labor. This discovery is what allows Marx and us to find the key to decipher the social hieroglyphic of the commodity.
• Value has a relational, a processual and a dynamic nature, which leads to it constantly expanding, “endowed with a motion of its own”. When the social algorithm of value infects its own substance – abstract labor – it proceeds to establish the capitalist social relation of wage labor, the purchase and sale of labor power, and now becomes capital, self-valorizing value. “Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and as such, capital”.
• Value exists as capital – the social algorithm of value goes beyond mere social production and reproduction, and now invades with its abstract code both human and non-human nature. This expansion does not have a teleological character, but remains a spontaneous, socially objective process without a planning subject. The search for profit is the conscious aim of capitalists, the same way that organisms instinctively pursue the goal of survival.
• Value is what transforms mere objects of use for humans into commodities standing in social relation between them. Value is not a static concept, but rather a process, a social algorithm.
• Algorithms were not defined in the times of Marx. However, Marx, in his Mathematical Manuscripts, actually foreshadowed the notion of algorithms when he tried to interpret differential calculus. The mathematical procedure developed by Marx shows how it is possible to obtain from a purely abstract and symbolic process, such as the algorithm of derivation, a real and factual result, such as the function derivative, which is actually operating in nature and whose discovery has allowed important practical applications in a wide range of techniques. The concept of value, elaborated by Marx in the economic works of his maturity, presents strong logical analogies with the symbolic operator of derivation in their common structure of algorithm – a purely abstract procedure that produces factual results.
• Value is as a social algorithm operating in market exchange, acting as a symbolic operator of social equivalence between commodities. As operator, value consists of a procedure, an ordered and finite set of steps necessary to achieve a given result. As symbolic operator, value is an abstract procedure that applies in commodity market exchange to content or substance logically distinct from itself. As operator of equivalence, value determines a quantitative relation, requiring that the substance to which it applies is commensurable and qualitatively identical between commodities, differing among them only quantitatively. As social operator, value has a purely social substance, in the sense that it is independent of any physical, natural, and material features of the commodities. As Marx points out, the only possible common feature that meets the criteria of quantitative social equivalence is that the commodities are all the product of human labor. Labor is therefore the substance to which the social algorithm of value applies.
• Abstract labor is the substance of value, and has a dual nature.
• Exchange value is the form of value, and has a dual nature.
• Value is therefore measured dually: In money and in labor-time.
• In term, it must be possible to express labor-time in money, which would of course also mean that money can be expressed in labor-time.
• Unequal exchange is a situation in which value in production (labor time) is different from value in circulation (money).
>>569761This is a long effort post, I have some criticisms.
You are using the word "subjective" wrong. "Subjective" is not the antonym of "objective". Subjective means "as a subject". In capitalism a subject simply is an agent that can buy and sell commodities or capital goods in a market. It has nothing to do with any personal characteristics or what goes on in the brain of somebody.
I suspect that what you really meant to say is something like "personal preference"
The second criticism that i have is that you are not fully de-mystifying the money-veil, with this dual nature of value stuff.
If you make a fully materialist analysis of the economy, you should be able to fully describe it without relying on any idealist economic concepts.
I'm not sure unequal exchange is really a useful theoretical tool, because it implies that there could be equal exchange, but markets intrinsically create minority wealth concentrations, that rule out that possibility.
>>569640Aim for law school. Count on failing out in your first year if you don't line up a firm to direct hire you >>before<< you even take the LSAT let alone the BAR.
'We will show the people the structure of society, so they can tear it down with their bare hands.'
-V.I. Lenin
>>569766>>569767sure, I'll add Ian Wright to my text file for the OP. I recently watched that talk on youtube where he presents capital as a real god with real powers, very interesting
also cibcom seem to be making the rounds in the spanish speaking world
>>569769Tiobe tends to overindex embedded & mainframe developers compared with startups/faang/etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there's alot of legacy CL out there.
as for other FP languages, other programming language indexes also have them slow, if slightly higher:
https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.htmlThe most popular FP language on that one is scala, but its still less than 1% market share.
Even rust/golang are like 1-2%.
Doesn't look like most jobs will be switching off your standard OOP langs anytime soon.
Maybe typescript will overtake vanilla javascript due to just being objectively better though.
>>569772TLDR: Ultraleft garbage dressed up in pedantic verbiage. "lol Marx was a utopian for writing Gothakritik but we're more Marxist than Marx".
It's basically the same idiotic position as the boridigists on leftypol took back in 2017 saying that labor vouchers still don't fully abolish value.
Its a guy complaining that cockshott preserves a consumer goods market and adjust labor vouchers according to supply and demand. They basically claim TNS is "ricardian" socialism reborn and that their distinction between different grades of worker productivity preserves class. They actually also go even further and say that Marx himself made a mistake in critique of the gotha programme.
>If Cockshott and Cottrell’s “labour tokens” are by contrast possible, this is for a specific reason: because they reprise the value/price distinction. But the irony is that by doing so they sever them from their productive basis, in a way that risks re-mystifying relations of production.As for their solution? None given because we can't plan shit in advance because…. its somehow un Marxist.
If you actually read between the lines it basically implies any plan for socialism made in advance of it happening is unmarxist and ultimately "ricardian", combined with a borderline anti-communist reading of Marx himself which implies than any form of labor time accounting condemns a society to "incoherence" and authoritarianism, and that Marx was at least indirectly responsible for the supposed authoritarianism and wrongs of 20th century socialism (ex: the USSR). This surprisingly dovetails pretty closely with right wing critiques of communism like the austrians do.
This has reinforced my idea that communization/dauve-tards are basically just making an intellectualized version of anarcho-communism, but its actually worse than that because at least ancoms propose we do full communism now while leftcoms just critique everything outside their small clique of pseuds while providing no solutions or even attempts at one.
Because making plans beyond the next 5 minutes is utopian but imagining you can run a complex industrialized technological society in a radically different way just based on spontaneousness or whatever the fuck a bunch of philosophy-pseud mathlets can think of on the spot, isn't utopian… somehow.
There's a weird disconnect between people who claim that Marx's historical method allows Marx and Marxists to predict the inevitable downfall of capitalism and the emergence of an alternative system, that there exist 'laws of motion of history', that allow us to predict this with newtonian exactitude, but when it comes to the implementation details, that's apparently the boundary at which the immortal science no longer applies and its anything goes.
The fact is the pseudo-hayekan line of its so complex we can't possibly plan it in advance is not only wrong, but the exact opposite of what is true. The fact that a transition from a capitalist to non capitalist society is complicated means not only CAN it be planned, but it
MUST be planned.
Guess that's the difference between an engineer and a philosopher.
>>569772It's more about voucher schemes in general. The writing is verbose yet imprecise.
<the progressive replacement of workers by machines will — in so far as it is primarily the former that creates valuePrimarily? I though in the system of Marx it is
only human labor that does that.
The author says about the scheme with the labour vouchers in Critique of the Gotha Program:
<the worker receives the full “value,” or “labor cost,” for his toil…Yes,
after some necessary deductions. The author does mentions the caveat later, making this passage both redundant and misleading.
<Marx oscillates in his work between, on one side, a substantial, quasi-Ricardian conception of value according to which the value of goods brought to market is trans-historically correspondent with the “socially necessary labor time” required to create them (that is, the industrial average time required for their creation (knitting a sweater at home doesn’t count).The author writes here as if the state of technology were something transhistorical.
<While Marx acknowledges the presence of instances where capitalists acquire access to exceptional technological breakthroughs, thereby acquiring “super profits,” these do not alter the socially necessary labor time required to create a given product until they become standardized.Not quite, the new tech already alters it while used only in a minority of products.
<value emerges through a socially mediated process of production and exchangeI would say: Value becomes more visible in exchange, but it precedes it.
Then comes a passage where the author echoes Austrian economists by doubting labor time can be adequately estimated and quotes some other "communist" wankers who do likewise.
The author knows that we won't avoid all supply shocks nor know demand exactly, and an obvious way to deal with that is allowing the price of consumer goods to vary (as proposed in TANS).
<The problem is that, the moment the labor time goods exchange for is adjusted beyond the actual labor required for their creation so as to accommodate shortages of supply, this ceases to be an economy based on exchanges of equivalent labor times.Think about a product basket, not a single product. Some things get more expensive, other things get cheaper. In the big picture one hour of consumption points gets one hour of labor time. The heavy modification of the exchange of equivalents lies elsewhere: in the deductions
before you get your vouchers.
<We could add to this that it would be important that workers in such a society be — as Marx states — “equally productive,” to avoid the de facto subsidization of sloth…It's possible that people can choose to work in teams with faster or slower pace and get more or less remuneration for it (as proposed in TANS).
<It is somewhat difficult to imagine how “insurance funds” could be calculated without money.The author suffers from micro-macro confusion. From the individual point of view it works as if your saved money turns into consumption goods in the future, like milk turning into cheese. The reality is that non-workers today are catered to by people working today. That is we as a society make deductions in the present for performing services in the present.
<Towards a New (Ricardian) SocialismHere in the final third we get to TANS.
<Cockshott and Cotrell want to show that Marx wasn’t a utopian, that his positive propositions can really work. So in addition to discussing how many ponies an “urban commune” might be able to afford, they dutifully set out to elaborate Marx’s notion of labor certificates, revising it so that it can adapt to fluctuations of supply and demand, the differential productivity of labor, and so forth. But what they’re left with at the end is just money.The vouchers are still not money because they do not circulate. No person becomes a capitalist, hiring employees he pays with vouchers to produce commodities he sells to make a voucher profit. This is a substantial difference, far more substantial than whining about "unjust" prices of this or that good because of supply-demand fluctuations.
>>569774>UltraleftThe author craps on the insta-communizers in the section "Freunden Like These".
>>569772>say, a natural disaster results in a shortage of chips required for a technological deviceis this supposed to be a serious gotcha? the workers at the chip plant presumably still get their vouchers while effecting repairs. this labour has to be accounted for, and the obvious solution is to account for it in the extant stock of chips, thus raising the value per chip so the sum of values remains constant, say sum(vouchers) + sum(goods) = 0. another option is to not repair the plant and reassign its workers, in which case the value of the chips is unaffected. anyone who has done accounting knows this. debit and credit across all accounts always sums to zero
the author seems to be forgetting that the value of a good is not just the cost of the good in that moment, but the cost of reproducing its productive process. the entire mass of value has to be account for, from start to finish, both "vertically" and across time.
the author also doesn't seem to be aware that nothing prevents piece wages from being used, the only requirement being that values must again sum to zero
>If the social consumption fund must serve as “buyer” and “seller” of all goods, and if society must become organize production in accord with this, there is no way that non-productive administrative costs could diminish immediately. It simply wouldn’t work.>source: trust me broI will also say that "a non-administered administration" sounds precisely like what we're trying to achieve in here. that is automated administration, automatic
government>muh statism<From capitalism, it takes the idea of differential payment for each hour worked>what are piece wages?>exchange is when fluctuations in value are accounted forOK that's enough of this, I'm going to the pub
I do enjoy the author characterizing TANS as "monomaniacial" and "diabolical genius" however
I think
>>569774 puts it well that this is "pseudo-hayekan". the author is just parroting Alec Nove
>>569774>>569777Yeah definitely it is pseudo-Hayekian. What's so funny about it is that firms virtually never use market-like processes internally. I'm not saying it's literally impossible to use some play-money and have auctions for some resources internally, but just look around you, ask around. That's a very exotic way of running a firm.
Within the firm, the partially finished products, the tools, and other resources don't circulate as commodities. As Marx wrote in Capital:
<The rule that the labour-time expended on a commodity should not exceed the amount socially necessary to produce it is one that appears, in the production of commodities in general, to be enforced from outside by the action of competition: to put it superficially,each single producer is obliged to sell his commodity at its market price. In manufacture, on the contrary, the provision of a given quantity of the product in a given period of labour is a technical law of the process of production itself.Within the firm, the labor time is known directly and is something you plan with. Since this is true within the firms, even huge firms, why would it be a big leap of faith to say we can do that in socialism.
>>569779yeah
People's Republic of Walmart says the same thing
>>569782Yes sure you can say that 'well the surgeon getting paid 100,000 vouchers/year and the janitor getting paid 20,000 vouchers/year don't have different relations to the MOP so there is no class divide there' might be technically true in one sense but realistically it misses the point, if you have massive income divides then you have class in the modern sense if not the Adam Smith sense.
>>569783Well if that's the case it isn't a bit deal - let me look at the article itself tho.
>>569788Should skilled workers get more? The answer by TANS:
<Even if the compensation argument is an accurate reflection of reality in capitalist countries this does not mean that professional workers should obtain the same sort of differentials in a socialist system. The costs of education and training then would be borne fully by the state.(There may be a need to compromise on that part though if skilled workers threaten to emigrate.)
Here is the idea with the grade levels in TANS:
<One way of gearing reward to effort would be an economy-wide system for the grading of labour. For instance, there could be three grades of labour, A, B and C, with B labour representing average productivity, A above average and C below average. New workers might start out as ‘B’ workers and then have their performance reviewed (either at their own initiative or at the instigation of the project for which they work) with the possibility of being regraded as A or C. Note that these grades have nothing to do with education or skill level, but are solely concerned with the worker’s productivity relative to the average for her trade or profession.So no, TANS doesn't say surgeons should get more than janitors.
>>569772>>569776 (me)
One particularly silly thing from the article I forgot: The author briefly mentioned this reason to be against labor vouchers: black markets! Consumption points cannot be transferred to other people. Of course black markets can thrive when people use cash, which seems to be what the author wants instead. So how does the author's position make any sense?
I suppose the situation in mind at the moment of writing that passage was that prices of consumer items are fixed at labor cost and then when there is a massive discrepancy between supply and demand which could be addressed by price changes, this is refused because of ideological reasons. So some people benefit by bartering with the rare stuff. Black markets live and grow through repeated interactions, think about producing alcoholic drinks during the prohibition era. But what is described here is just a punctual random annoyance, so how could anyone make a career out of this.
>>569809nevermind it's been published:
https://github.com/lokehagberg/rhp>>569811just use an LP solver. you can constrain the rate of change of the technological mix like section 3.1 in pdf related
>>569814I think delegation of voting power except on issues that you feel strongly about can work quite well. no need to complicate it with non-linear voting shenanigans
how does the thread feel about voting secrecy? personally since it is effectively impossible to guarantee with computers, I feel voting in a computerized socialist democracy should be public. voting secrecy strikes me as cowardly and liberal. proudly proclaim your chosen delegate and proudly proclaim what issues you feel strongly about
>>569816Delegation Alice to Bob and Bob votes on the issue is not the problem, the problem is longer delegation chains.
Quadratic voting etc. is another topic. The ideal is the two goals of 1. giving minorities some power for e. g. allocating a budget while a majority block still has more power and 2. to avoid vulnerability to strategic voting and strategic nomination. The pure ideal is mathematically impossible when there are more than two things, so the question is how you can approximate that. (If a budget is to be divided between just two topics, there is a solution that is both robust and gives budget-allocation power to the minority faction in proportion to its size.)
>>569800pls update with
General Intellect Unit logo somewhere pls
>>569814What about Systemic Consensing (SK)?
I've implemented something similar in a few local orgs and it works pretty okay (also fits culturally which perhaps helps a lot too).
>>569827> but it seems to have a psychological effect.Thanks for the reply. And yep, that's why I use it. Where I am we use secret paper based preference voting, so the "mental shift" of SK was an easy leap and had an effect. Now we also have compulsory voting, so that help even out the power voters (extremities).
I was interested in fusing Paul Cockshott's HandiVote system with it, so an "anonymised" but publicly verifiable ledger. Failing that, sticking with paper. The key thing bout this method is how it can be used locally and directly, that's the main bit.
Add in sortition for delegates based on post code population (as a proxy for wealth, so basically fewer wealthy people ever get in at all), the ability to instant recall delegates with a 2/3 vote of no confidence in their "electorate".
>>569830I'm not sure if I agree with Paul's assertion that Bitcoin has no use-value. the network itself is useful for storing short snippets of text in perpetuity. the keys themselves are information, which surely is a form of use-value. their main use is as exchange-value of course
in a similar way someone could claim fiat currency has no use-value. but I could burn paper money for heat and melt or dissolve coins for the metal in them
>>569831casperforum.org could be used for that
>>569834sure, in the sense that git is also a blockchain
the most important property of cryptocurrencies is proof-of-work, which is quite literally congealed labour. it is also congealed in an explicitly deflationary fashion, and it is not productive
I'm arguing
you are right that bitcoins themselves are nothing but exchange-value. whatever other uses the network has are incidental
>>569836means of payment can be worthless and still function just fine. this is a central property of fiat money after all. no one believes a $100 bill costs anywhere near $100 worth of labour to print
bitcoins are in demand, which means that the labour that goes into them isn't mudpies. perhaps it is more appropriate to call the labour's "social usefulness" contingent on exchange. capital considers lots of unproductive activities
useful >>569836come to think of it, surely exchange-value is a type of use-value? money is
useful after all, and it is useful precisely because it can be exchanged for commodities
>>569838>>569837>>569838>come to think of it, surely exchange-value is a type of use-value? money is useful after all, and it is useful precisely because it can be exchanged for commoditiesNo. Use value is the use of something in its consumption. Exchanging it for something else isn't a use value of a commodity, because a use value is something inherent in the thing itself.
Fiat currency has no use value. It's just a number in a rationing system. The exchange value of 100 dollars is 100 dollars, its use value is that you can wipe your ass with it. Trying to define use value as "you can exchange it" means that its use value is not defined by its uses but by its market price, and leads to a recursive definition of "it's useful because it's worth something because it's usefull because it's worth something".
A healing like of shit doesnt get more use value just because scam artists drive up its price in an economic bubble.
>>569840>>569842 (me)
expanding on the rent concept, this means early adopters can be compared to people who engage in land grabs. these people can later portion off pieces of the land/coins for a price much higher than they paid initially. as we know, land itself has no value, being merely a free gift of nature. only improvements to the land can have value, and no such improvement is possible with cryptocurrency coins
>>569845people are likely still going through it.
someone update his wiki plz "published works"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Cockshott >>569849I don't get the critique. Completely went over my head. Watched it several times.
>>569851>>569853What's the response?
>>569855Union contracts.
If you're paid for 8 hours a day but you then work 10 a day outside of agreements, you either do not care much, or youre a retard.
By and large unpaid overtime shouldn't exist.
>>569860you could try and get a pilot project going somewhere
read up on the relevant theory
agitate for planning/in-kind calculation
where are you located?
>>569859Cool
>>569860I think what would be much more usefull is if people set up some international think tank primarily focussed on the following:
>Primary: Creating accessible educational material about economic planning for the global communist movement>Researching algorithms and solving practical problems faced by historical movementsThe programming aspect of this is pretty tiny. Full fledged implementations and micro optimizations depend wholly on the situation it is implemented for, and is better left up to be done at the moment it can be implemented.
For that educational material, we might want to implement some demo's but its not the primary thing we need I think. Educating the movement about economic planning is our primary goal, as even many communists (especially the new generation) lost trust and hope in economic planning.
It would be interesting to set up such a group but coordinating an online org and having everyone put in time (consistency is more important than volume in the aspect of an org) is hard. Idk what form of communication would fit such a org best.
>>569861>it has less to do with "programming" and more to do with accounting"accounting" is doing a lot of work here. Economic optimisation on a large scale is primarily a computer science problem, only a small part software engineering, and a political problem. Writing down the numbers isnt really the issue.
>he is dryer than any pussy he encounters.The fuck is that supposed to mean lmao
>>569863>I think what would be much more usefull is if people set up some international think tank primarily focussed on the following:>>Primary: Creating accessible educational material about economic planning for the global communist movement>>Researching algorithms and solving practical problems faced by historical movementsthis is more or less what cibcom.org is doing, but for the Spanish speaking world. they've also been releasing material in English. there's also casperforum.org but that's more a research and discussion forum than an org
>The programming aspect of this is pretty tiny. Full fledged implementations and micro optimizations depend wholly on the situation it is implemented for, and is better left up to be done at the moment it can be implemented.I agree. we've had people in these threads asking for concrete implementations, not realizing such implementations would necessarily be historically contingent. that said check out Hagberg and Zachariah's rhp project
>>569812>For that educational material, we might want to implement some demo's but its not the primary thing we need I think. Educating the movement about economic planning is our primary goal, as even many communists (especially the new generation) lost trust and hope in economic planning.I think most young comrades simply don't know what planning even
is >>569860Build interactive toys that demonstrate problems or neat things similar to what
https://ncase.me/ is doing. For example, what happens when people all start with the same amount of money and they do a couple thousand random exchanges. Suppose people have a constant stream of the same income, the same outgoing expenses for basic costs of living and some random spending requirements on top of that because of good or bad luck and people with excess money lend to people with no money at interest. What happens over time.
There are hundreds of voting systems and not all seem to have implementations for online polls etc. and there is more to results than picking a winner. For example, when filling out forms with approval marks or ratings you get a display what gets most approval marks etc. but this could also be used to visualize other things like whether some fans of A rate B very low relative to the rest of voters or vice versa.
>>569868I find cybernetic socialism fascinating idea, I'm just trying to figure out how unwanted optimisation artifacts are addressed in the theory. If you want to make an optimized system, it first and foremost optimizes itself to be optimizable. As cybernetic capitalism has proven, all the weirdness of humanity makes calculations difficult and hence it expends huge amount of energy to simplify people. Advertising algorithms cluster people and reel them tighter by feeding them stuff from the artificial category assigned to them, just by the necessity of data processing technology.
You guys are basically dreaming of an AI that rules over humanity. You gotta have some sort of solution to the alignment problem.
>>569869anon why would we give a shit what people do in their free time? one consistent demand from the labour movement is a shorter work week
>alignment problemsmug_xj9.png
>>569864>this is more or less what cibcom.org is doing, but for the Spanish speaking world. they've also been releasing material in EnglishIt would be interesting to see if there can be some english language branch set up.
But i dont really have time to commit to such a thing in the coming year do to other roles i already have.
>>569884The Future.
Dickblast Z.
>>569887shitty internet might be out of his control
shitty audio is not
>>569886I wonder the same thing. there's some german beer in the background
>>569640Micro economics will be useful to learn the flaws of capitalism from the viewpoint of the individual.
Push your professor on 'marginal utility' as hard as you can. Constantly tell the class 'Ceteris Parabus' is an assumption and required precondition for the math to work. Remind everyone that we are presuming perfectly rational actors with perfect information for every inch of their theory. Finally, present every question from the point of view of the employer not the employee. The professor must concede to the most inhuman shit or abandon the position.
Macro economics will pretend that GDP was invented the day before God said let their be light. Ask about when GDP was coined as a term and whether a country with zero Agricultural output and zero Manufacturing output has any GDP. Then ask whether agricultural subsidies can be substituted for agricultural output. Carbon tax flows neatly from this and you have your final paper already written. Demand to learn about derivatives and insist that an economy possessed only of derivatives is a thing and is the optimal strategy. From here define imperialism for the class.
>>569640Skip undergraduate econ other than a minor or whatever the minimum classes needed for grad school in econ would be.
If you really want become a great political economist, double major in MATHEMATICS.
You need MATH to be good at grad school in either econ or CS, or both.
Take a probability and a statistics class if you can as well.
>>569900looks like he's dunking on some Chinese chauvinist
>But what does he mean by this?he did the meme
How many ways to produce a thing are known? If we don't glue ourselves mentally to a particular physical object, if we instead think of production of useful effects, we have to admit there are always alternative recipes, because there are many ways of gaining happiness. And there is joint production everywhere. Imagine a factory that only puts out thousands of units of exactly one type of Swiss army knife. The factory uses one process for one physical output, but it is joint production of useful effects.
It is important to avoid a one-sided assessing of production from only a naively physical point of view, in so many tons of steel and cement and so on. While this perspective helps against pitfalls of money-obsessed thinking (a landlord claims to be productive because of how much money he "makes"), it has its own pitfalls. Defining a thing in terms of specific physical materials and how these materials have to be configured exactly can go through several iterations. Starting with a simple specification of a product that leaves out many sensible aspects because they seem too obvious can soon lead to these aspects being omitted in the next generation (or hopefully just a prototype of that) because they cost something and meeting the spec at cheap cost is the goal after all. This leads to a more concrete physical spec with fewer openings for creative interpretations that would annoy the spec writers, but also fewer openings for creative interpretations that the spec makers would be delighted to see.
Precise physical specs about how much to use of which material and where deletes opportunities for cheating the stats of extensive growth, but it also deletes opportunities for realizing intensive growth. It is more farsighted to plan in terms of useful effects. Using less of some material for a product because a different physical configuration gives the same stability is a good change. For this to also appear as a good change by the standards of the specifications, we should avoid statements about minimum amounts of this or that specific material, but instead talk like "behaviorists" and list aspects like nine out of ten units of the device still working after one hundred drops onto concrete from a certain height, without dictating how the object achieves that.
>>569904joint production and multiple recipes can be handled by linear programming. see
>>569812we could choose to optimize for labour time, which naturally leads to picking the cheapest production methods that yield the desired use-values
>>569906then what is the point? of course we can achieve similar use-values in multiple ways, and some of those ways require less labour than others. we would expect a socializing economy to prefer standardized parts. an FM radio has an associated bill of materials which would be fed into the plan solver. if 10,000,000 people want that radio then we know to produce such-and-such many capacitors, coils, knobs and so on, which in turn require some amount of polyethylene pellets, copper wire, aluminium foil and so on. plus the necessary labour for all that.
I'm not sure what you mean by "naively physical". please elaborate.
>>569907do this one
>>569908>I'm not sure what you mean by "naively physical"Almost every statement about joint production or different production techniques regardless of political leanings of the author.
>an FM radio has an associated bill of materials which would be fed into the plan solver.A radio has
functions. Objects that are distinct physically can fit the same functional specification, even one that is high-detail.
There's a sim of socialism with ecological constraints:
https://play.half.earth/ which is roughly based on the book Half-Earth Socialism. Here's a nice interview with the authors:
https://totalliberationpodcast.com/87-half-earth-socialism-a-plan-to-save-the-future-from-extinction-climate-change-and-pandemics-w-troy-vettese/And here is a less nice (and superior IMHO) interview:
https://lbo-news.com/2022/10/16/fresh-audio-product-half-earth-socialism/The book got also mentioned in >>>/edu/2940
>>569920*hard to avoid in a
single player game
A very positive review of "Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis":
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/12/15/planning-and-the-climate/Underneath is a comment by German anti-communist Wal Buchenberg (who has been a self-identified Marxist for decades btw.).
<Which products do we want and which products can we do? Timesheets don’t help at all with these questions.Of course it matters how long it takes to make something, because that tells you that certain combinations of quantities of products are impossible.
<What we need and want is, above all, needs-based production. Suppose there are 100 elderly in a community, 10 of whom need a wheelchair, 20 need insulin daily, 30 need Makromar, 90 need daily care and attention. None of these 100 old people work in production. How can we meet their specific needs? Timesheets and working time calculations don’t help us a bit either. A non-capitalist, moneyless distribution system would therefore have to practice a distribution system beyond “work slips” for the majority of people who do not work.This is incoherent. It does not logically follow from distribution according to need that the time it takes to make something doesn't matter. Healthcare can be organized in a way that is independent of how much money each individual "costumer" has, it doesn't follow that the people working in that sector cannot receive hourly salaries.
<“… I must take this opportunity to state that just as the cost of production differs for labor of different grades, so must the values of labor employed in different branches of industry differ. The call for equal wages is therefore based on a mistake, is an unattainable, foolish wish.” K. Marx, Lohn, Preis und Profit, MEW 16, 131.That section in Marx was about the impossibility of such a reform under capitalism.
<On the one hand, there is a factory that makes two bicycles a week because they do almost everything by hand. There is also a modern factory that produces ten bicycles a week with the same number of workers. How are the respective workers paid with time sheets? Are factory workers paid five times as much as factory workers? After all, your work output is five times higher.The performance is judged only relative to the means available, duh. (This is already true under capitalism once the two factories are under one umbrella.)
The rest of his comment assumes firms continuing to exist as entities, notes that socialist plans are at odds with the plans of these assumed entities and concludes from this conflict with ghosts that socialism can't possibly work.
>>569922>amazon linkis it possible to get the book without giving money to uncle Jeff?
I think my only gripe with what I've read so far is the Dapprich's opportunity costs give me neoclassical vibes. but maybe that's just the name. many a smug liberal have gone "muh opportunity costs" at me over the years
>>569930That question at the end,
wut about muh minorities with gluten intolerance wahwahwah -_- (They will all be executed of course!) It's not really different from producing clothing at different sizes, and not just the size the median voter would ask for. You can actually just recycle list-free proportional voting methods for surveys about that stuff.
>>569933>They will all be executed of course!you have to be 18 to post on this website anon
things that would be actual issues are political veganism, halal slaughter and other spicy things. to offend the western sensibilities of this board, imagine planning the production of dog meat
>>569927>Is this any good?No idea, I can get my child like hands on it or their other recent one DD:
When is the /leftypol/ Dickblast Autism Conpendium coming out with his works + stupid boomer takes in the apendixes
Longtimers have already heard of this, but here it's interactive and super-easy to understand: Models from econophysics show that money accumulates automatically in a very uneven fashion:
https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/ (This is not a communist website, so they don't propose labor vouchers to fix this.)
>¿Es el cibercomunismo tecnocrático? - Maxi Nieto<Extracto del encuentro con Santiago Armesilla en el que Jesús responde a la cuestión de si el cibercomunismo es una propuesta tecnocrática o no.Cibcom published another video. Unfortunately I don't speak Spanish so I can't make much sense of it but they seem to be responding to accusations of "technocracy". Might tie to Cockshott's latest video, as market "socialism" is still a popular meme in the Spanish speaking world.
This is on Santiago Armesilla's channel. Seems cibcom will be publishing a cut down version here in 10 days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgHf3MlnN7Q >>569951co-ops can be a stepping stone, even Marx thought so. they're just not the destination like market socialists believe. what is especially relevant is if you can find two or more co-ops to connect using planning
>>569955good idea. the game is pretty good, if a bit iffy on desktop. to what extent does the book talk about planning?
>>569941This response is absolutely mediocre, he basically blames definitions to Iñigo Carrera to then criticize the same definitions he invented himself.
Just to give an example, when he points out that the attribute of exchangeability is the confusion of value with exchange value, it is clear that this man did not understand shit.
Value is the attribute of exchangeability, the capacity of a product to enter into any exchange relation, that is, to circulate as a commodity, exchange value is the quantitative representation of this power between goods. The emphasis on the former reveals the conditions of production, the emphasis on the latter the already mystified movement of circulation.
Iñigo's critic (and Marx), starts precisely by seeing realized in the latter, the content of the former.
What does Cockshott's answer have to do with this development? NOTHING! It is just a sovereign stupidity
>>569956>co-ops can be a stepping stone, even Marx thought so. they're just not the destination like market socialists believe. what is especially relevant is if you can find two or more co-ops to connect using planningYeah well the thing is, for that to be viable, you would need to have co-op *factories* able to produce enough commodities to provide a comfortable life. Building just one factory would require probably millions of dollars, very VERY unachievable for workers like us.
I was thinking more of a planning consulting firm or something like that. Provide the software, the management, the support etc. Sort of like SAP I guess? Would be interesting to research if SAP could be adapted for economic planning.
>>569957>Value is the attribute of exchangeabilityno, that is exchange-value. value is transhistorical, exchange-value is not.
>>569959>Yeah well the thing is, for that to be viable, you would need to have co-op *factories* able to produce enough commodities to provide a comfortable life.of course
>I was thinking more of a planning consulting firm or something like thatliterally every firm is planned internally
>>569968Lets bring this back a step of abstraction.
Marx used the word "Wert", worth or value, to describe the property of the inherent valuation of a commodity within the capitalist economy. Why is this? Where does this worth derive from? It is because the capitalist economy fundamentally minimizes labour costs, and from this the property of worth *emerges*. The value of a commodity is all that matters, its what the whole game is about, the whole economy relies on this sole aspect of a commodity. The economy does not care about environmental impacts, it does not care about energy usage, it does not care about fundamental limitations in resources, only about value, which is only limited by the amount of labour available and put in it fundamentally, thus value is equal to the labour put in it.
It is, therefore, NOT transhistorical. It only exists because the capitalist economy optimises for labour minimization within a generalized commodity production mode of production.
Value did not exist in hunter gatherer societies, because primarily, products were made for personal consumption. Sure, you can *measure* the avarage social labour time of a piece of mammoth. But the avareg social labour time is not its
value. It is not taken into account by the people making and consuming it.
Similarly, value as described by marx may and will seize to exist under higher stages of communism. Why? Because while labour is an important limiting factor, it will not be the *sole* limiting factor in production. Communist planning is, after all, planning in kind, so we can take into account the limits of the natural world, the extend to which we want to trade in forests for farmland, limiting needless competition over limited resources, making sure we dont exceed our energy limit, etc.
These will all be major factors in the limits to which we can or can not produce certain products. As such, value, as in, the fact that the sole aspect of a commodity that matters is its SNLT, to compare product A and product B, will not exists under a rationally planned communist society. The amount of labour something takes will still be *a factor*, but it will not *the only factor* that solely determines the worth of a product. It will not be the sole factor that will determine whether or not to produce steel via cokes or hydrogen, whether to make cutlery out of metal or plastic, whether or not to use pesticides.
That is why its not transhistorical. Value is a very specific condition of capitalism where the availability of products is ultimately determined by the amount of labour, where production is always shifted to maximise the produced product per unit of labour, and thus the value of a commodity is its labour content, only under capitalism. Not in feudalism, because the labour that went into grain was not the primary determinant of the worth of it, but its utility to the nobility. Not in war economies, because limited resources that cannot under any circumstance be subject to competitive extraction for efficiency and price gauging sake, and the optimization of on the basis of a planned production goal, not labour top efficiency. Not under communism, because we will plan as well, with constaints such as how much land we are willing to dedicate to XYZ, how much emissions we want to emit, etc.
So to conclude, this:
> all human societies form a social average on the amount of labour necessary to perform various tasks. even in primitive communism we expect shirkers to be shunned.Is wrong. The social avarage time it took primitive tribes to make clothes did not drive its value. Value, its worth, is defined by Marx, intentionally as shown by the use of the word WORTH, only within capitalism as equal to labour. This is why he also defined use value, as different from SNLT value. To a hunter gatherer, the worth of clothes is not its SNLT, but its utility, and their internal mode of production did not use marker exchanges, and did not use optimizing your own labour to gain as much SNLT in return, to run their society.
>>569969Small addition:
BE aware that Marx was German, smart, and studied philosophy. The fact that he chose to use the word "Wert", worth or value, to describe equilibrium prices under capitalism, being equal to labour, rather than making up a new word which is childs play in German, shows intentionally. He intentionally chose to link the concept of valuation, how important something is compare to other things in the abstract, to describe the way the capitalist economy views products. Products under capitalism are no longer products onto themselves, like shoes to a caveman, but only their labour content. They arent the rubber in them, the CO2 emitted in their production, the toxic rivers of sludge that flow through India due to its production, only the labour. This valuation is unique to capitalism. To a peasant, grain was not worth its labour time. It was food, you could eat it. To a war time economist, oil is not its labour time, its oil, its a limited resource that is not interchangable with something that did in fact take equal amount of time to produce. To the war time economist, a barrel of oil is not the same as 5 grams of gold, they arent worth the same to him, they dont have the same value, because you cant run tanks on gold, but to a capitalist market economist it is the same, they have the same value.
Marx chose his words explicitly, and even went so far as to revise badly chosen words from earlier in his life. Value is not transhistorical. The definition of value is inherently linked to how a society, how an economy, views its products. Under capitalism value is equal to SNLT. Under other societies, value as defined as such does not exist. SNLT does still exist, but so does energy cost then, as it does now, environmental impact, etc.
>>569969Marx gets "value" from Smith, who also calls it the "natural price" of a commodity
>It is, therefore, NOT transhistoricalthe word "value" isn't, but its essence (SNLT) is.
all human societies form notions of SNLT as your example with mammoth meat shows. they don't
call it value, but it is value nonetheless, because value is SNLT is value. communist society would likely dispense with the word value and simply talk of labour time however
>It only exists because the capitalist economy optimises for labour minimizationdo you think primitive communist societies or slave societies piss away labour?
>within a generalized commodity production^ it is only this part that is cishistorical
>it will not be the *sole* limiting factor in productionfor practical purposes it will, and if you knew anything about planning you'd know that. take CO2 as an example. if you wish to emit more CO2 than the environment can otherwise handle then you must deploy labour to sequester it. we can extract more minerals from mines normally considered depleted by applying more labour to them. we can bring marginal land into production if necessary. this because it is labour that is the ultimate input. true we can't overcome these constraints, but we can slide along them by applying more labour
>Not in feudalism, because the labour that went into grain was not the primary determinant of the worth of it, but its utility to the nobilitywrong. surplus value extraction exists in all class societies. each lord has only so many serf-hours at his disposal per year, and he is in competition with other lords. Marx goes into this in vol I
>war economieswar economies are not productive. but even so every soldier has a definite number of workers backing him up, and your war planning board will certainly want to make best use of said workers. there is little exchange-value at play of course
>This is why he also defined use value, as different from SNLT valuethe term use-value dates to much earlier than Marx
>To a hunter gatherer, the worth of clothes is not its SNLT, but its utility, and their internal mode of production did not use marker exchanges, and did not use optimizing your own labour to gain as much SNLT in return, to run their society.no shit, primitive communism doesn't feature exploitation. but you will still see tribes try to make the best use of the labour power available. it is just not mediated through exchange
>To a war time economist, oil is not its labour time, its oil, its a limited resource that is not interchangable with something that did in fact take equal amount of time to produceoil can be synthesized, and indeed Nazi Germany did so, and doing so cuts into your available supply of labour power. thus the value of the oil goes up, which is not great for the war effort which calls for the cheapest possible bullets and bombs
I am curious how you explain Marx separating value from exchange-value. why does he bother to do that at all when seemingly value would do just as well? because to me it seems rather easy: value has units of time whereas exchange-value has units of money
>>569971NTA - but id guess that the classic marxist take is that value is a social construct of the capitalist mode of produciton, meanwhile cockshott argued (i forget where exactly) that Marx misread Adam Smith and that value is actually transhistorical insofar as it refers to social labour.
The problem I have with folks like
>>569969 is that what this implies is that we can't meter the use of labor under a higher mode of production when in fact the exact opposite is true. We need to meter it even more.
>>569969>But the avareg social labour time is not its value. It is not taken into account by the people making and consuming it.Of course people care how long it takes to do something, whether that something is a commodity or not. Even animals care about that.
>The amount of labour something takes will still be *a factor*, but it will not *the only factor* that solely determines the worth of a product. It will not be the sole factorThat's also true in the TANS model and in capitalism as well.
>maximise the produced product per unit of labourNonsensical phrase.
>>569972>>569971Retard. Learn to read.
>The problem I have with folks like (You) is that what this implies is that we can't meter the use of labor under a higher mode of productionYour entire self masturbatory declaration of being right rests on your insane idea that "value == measuring how labour something costs".
The entire point is that under capitalism, labour IS the ONLY aspect that matters, due to generalized commodity production and externalisation of everything else.
I explained
several times how how long things take to produce is still measured under communism, youre just strawmanning and are unwilling to understand.
Re-read what i wrote and try to actually comprehend it.
>>569972certainly we need to meter labour time if we want to minimize the length of the working week. in fact we should expect workers to be enthusiastic about that, since it means more time off work
>>569974it may be useful to know that before Marx the classical political economists had great trouble nailing down both what value is, and what the value of labour power is. hence why Marx spends many pages ridiculing the physiocrats. Marx cuts this Gordian knot by declaring that labour
is value. the capitalist pays the exchange-value of the wage worker, but gets to make use of the worker's use-value, namely the ability to create more value than the worker himself contains
>>569974the problem is, in labor voucher schemes including Marx's or cockshott's you can reduce non labor factors to labor, thus reducing economic calculation to a scalar value.
Its possible to optimize an economy with more than just labor but it makes the math more difficult
>>569978>the problem is, in labor voucher schemes including Marx's or cockshott's you can reduce non labor factors to labor, thus reducing economic calculation to a scalar value.If your takeaway from Cockshotts work is "we should just use
money i mean labour vouchers and nothing else" then you should re-read his work. Even despite cockshotts weird brainknots, his other papers hammer home planning in kind, not in labour.
You cannot reduce non labour factors, such as the amount of carbon emmissions, or available resources, into labour. Capitalism doesnt do the former, and does the latter by just throwing private ownership and cutthroat free for all competition over limited resources at the wall and see what value rolls out (and in case of monopolistic outcomes like with oil, it doesnt even follow the law of value).
Optimizing the economy in kind is possible, it is what we should do, and cockshott wrote many papers on it and talks about how its perfectly possible.
>>569980labour vouchers aren't money. they are only used for remuneration, not planning
>You cannot reduce non labour factors, such as the amount of carbon emmissions, or available resources, into labouryou literally can. you can reduce it to anything you like. Dapprich picks corn as an example
>>569980This is the whole crux of why value isnt transhistorical, btw. Value and the law of value (potato potahto) doesnt take any of these into account, and resource ownership, just like landlordism, is in its core pure commodity production, but naturally monopolistic. Only government owned, free-for-all competitive extraction (think, panning gold in a public river) would actually be a form of pure capitalist commodity production. Only processing of resources can be purely capitalistic in its workings if you ignore the land on which a factory stands as negligible to profitability.
>>569981>you literally can. you can reduce it to anything you like. Dapprich picks corn as an exampleShow me how we reduce a limitation of the amount of carbon we emit into labour, diptshit.
>>569982>anything that isn't orthogonal to labour I should say<Everything is reducable to labour (except all the things that arent but are factors in economic planning) >>569984and to add to this, this means the unit value of whatever you wanted to produce in the first place goes
up. therefore this won't happen in capitalism because it's very hard to compete if your product is more expensive than the competition's
>>569984No no no. You just said we cannot plan for things in kind, now you cant just start keeping track of how much carbon is emitted. Single dimension only, buddy.
Also
>We will fix it with magical carbon sucking technology despite it being literally physically impossible to capture back the carbon we emit using a fossil fuel based energy supply.>I will ignore the fact that there is limited amounts of land. Just buy more with vouchers. >>569980>his other papers hammer home planning in kind, not in labour.Yes, specifically "neurath to kantorovich: calculation in natura" or something along those lines. Brilliant paper, but doesn't detract from that being more difficult to do. I didn't mean to imply in kind calculation was impossible.
The bigger problem is on the consumption end. If goods and services are measured in terms of labor then you can have people exchange certificates for goods. If there's nothing like that then either you have to allow people to consume freely (post scarcity star trek utopia) or plan all consumption in advance. The latter can work but only in a situation where you run society like a military, where the quantity of food, clothes, etc. are all planned and chosen in advance, probably with less variety in consumer goods (though this may not be a bad thing from an environmental perspective).
>>569988Calculation in kind and the labour-voucher consumption rationing system arent in contradiction. They are in fact kissing, sloppy style, pressing their boobs together, even.
The planning itself is in fact done in kind, not in terms of labour time. It is only rationed in labour time, because workers only get what they put in, labour. The planning of the economy is still subject to non-labour considerations, the amount of labour is only one part of the equation. The economy is not (neccecarily) optimising on labour time.
>>569986<what are trees<what is chemistry>limited amounts of landthe netherlands would like to have a word. moreover there are things like greening the deserts, colonizing the antarctic etc.
>Just buy more with vouchersI said no such thing. I said that you can apply labour to counteract things that would otherwise violate various constraints. labour is the ultimate input and therefore labour is the ultimate constraint. find me one thing can't be substituted with labour
>>569989>The planning itself is in fact done in kind, not in terms of labour timeI mean, labour time is one of many in-kind constraints. the big thing is that only labour is social
>>569991>the netherlands would like to have a wordYeah I live there. You will not find a more anthropocentric commie than me but at the same time, you must realise that the techno-rapture isnt coming. Being Dutch also means I know when not to stake my life on some not-yet-invented future saviour technology.
>>569992>You will systematically overproduce goods/services because the labor time paid out will never equal the totality of goods and servicesIdk what youre smoking but it isnt the good stuff.
The amount of goods and services total labour cost will always equal the total hours worked. What seems to be the confusion?
Brb my house just started leaking.
>>569994> If i work 8 hours and the economy produces goods of 8 hours + resources/carbon, do i just pay for the 8 hours of labor?Yes
>and so the "price" of the good/service in labor doesn't accurately reflect its "cost"Correct. The whole point of communist planning is to solve problems through intentional political decisions, not through asking the people to please research every product ever so they can engage in ethical consumption under simulated market state capitalism.
If we as a society decide we want to reduce carbon emmissions by 50%, we should change production to achieve that goal, not try to do it through consumer activism by slapping a 5% "killing the planet" tax on 95% of the products.
>>569995>If we as a society decide we want to reduce carbon emmissions by 50%, we should change production to achieve that goal, not try to do it through consumer activism by slapping a 5% "killing the planet" tax on 95% of the products.that's not really the point anon. the point is that the value of goods under such a regime
objectively becomes 5% higher
>>569997>the point is that the value of goods under such a regime objectively becomes 5% higherNo it doesnt.
Why would it?
And even if it would, so? That just means theres 5% less purchasing power.
There is no way to turn "killing the planet", "cutting down a nature reserve" or "poisoning the local watersupply" into a numeric labour time value anyway.
Decisions on how to use resources must be made politically. Distribution of goods is based on how much individuals contribute in terms of labour, so long as such a rationing system remains neccecary. I fail to see the problem. Yes, if we want to cut down 50% of carbon emmissions, productivity will drop. So you can buy less per hour worked. Big whoop. You dont need to bring in retarded liberal ideas of carbon taxes into it for no reason whatsoever. I dont want to live in a society where the planning authorities are going to say
>"look, i know 95% of you want to stop dumping Agent Orange into your water supply, but 5% of your population believes in lizard people and magical stones so to meet their demand we are going to dump 5% of the Agent Orange in the watersupply."We decide on that shit by majority, and then after that you can buy whatever brand of sugary cereal you want.
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>>569999>sure there is, if there is a labour process to compensate for it. if there isn't then such production does not take place.Im done talking to you. You're just in denial of reality, how production happens, how humans constantly trade in nature for productive expansion, especially in developing nations, for the next few centuries at least.
>I don't understand what's so difficult to understand about per-unit costs going up whenever we have to compensate for the negative effects of certain productionYou litterally just made up this tangent of "OH BTW ITS MORE EXPENSIVE BECAUSE IN MY UTOPIA WE USE MAGIC EPIC ELON MUSK CARBON MACHINES TO FIX EVERYTHING AND OTHERWISE WE WILL JUST NOT GROW FOOD".
Reality does not work this way. Learn to think. Nature is, and will be, sacrificed for human prosperity for centuries to come. Communist planning is putting control over how, where and how much into the hands of people directly, rather than blind market forces. A decrease in production to save some environmental aspect will just make people less productive and thus lower purchasing power. A forest being cut down to make room for agriculture will bring down the cost of that agricultural product, with no price negatives in the consumer prices. Because all decisions about externalities that arent labour will be taken by people, and not in your magical fairy land where we can magically stop greenhouse emissions and all other externalities with epic cool communist techno utopia tech.
>that's not what I said dummy. No because you didnt say shit up until now, only faffing incoherently, and what you just said is idealistic and retarded. You have the mind of an Elon Musk fanboy except you think technoStalin will save you from human impacts on the environment instead.
>>570000>You litterally just made up this tangent of "OH BTW ITS MORE EXPENSIVE BECAUSE IN MY UTOPIA WE USE MAGIC EPIC ELON MUSK CARBON MACHINES TO FIX EVERYTHING AND OTHERWISE WE WILL JUST NOT GROW FOOD".there are oodles of ways of fixing CO2 from the atmosphere. here's one: use the chloralkali process to turn bicarbonate ions in the sea into carbonates. this requires electricity, which we make make in a myriad of ways
>purchasing powerwhy are you using porkoid terminology?
>epic cool communist techno utopia tech.I imply no such thing. there is plenty of already existing technology that merely needs to be applied. you are like the people who go "reee we have to get rid of internal combustion engines" and other dumb shit. remember that the rate of exploitation sits at 100%. that means we have 20+20 hours per worker's worth of leeway here.
>>570003If you just slap labels on Cockshott. It's not possible to differentiate you from a crypto-reactionary liberal using culturally coded othering to demonize Cockshott because he is advocating for socialism and the liberation of workers, or whether you have a general disagreement with some of his views. I can't tell if this is pretext for anti-communist prejudice, or genuine disagreement.
In any case you should feel at least a little bad for eliciting a sectarian outburst from
>>570004If you're not a liberal, please grant a fellow comrade and important socialist cybernetics theoretician like Cockshott the benefit of doubt and treat a disagreement as cause for debate and not a whitchunt-trial.
>>570006Cockshott rejects the Hegelian philosophical jargon on dialectics, not the concepts behind it.
He said these concepts should be learned through newer language, that is more accessible to most people today. He advocates that you learn set-theory instead, which is conceptually very similar. And only lacks the point that negation is inherent to the process of definition. Meaning if you define something you negate a bunch of stuff. This is important for understanding why there is so much fighting about definitions. You can learn the basics of set-theory in an afternoon, you'll never fully understand Hegel.
Cockshott's main criticism on Hegel is that he is doing philosophical cheating.
Hegel tries to get 3 pounds of theory from 2 pounds of axioms.
He's getting more information out then he's putting in, and that's not how that works.
>>570008No Cockshott rejects dialectics entirely, including Marx's dialectical method. Set theory is not similar to dialectics and negation is central so removing that changes it completely. You can understand Hegel if you want to by actually engaging with his work, the same as you can with Marx.
Marx does exactly what you are describing, he successfully "get 3 pounds of theory from 2 pounds of axioms". Its not an error its intentional and the foundation of his thought.
>>570012>Set theory is not similar to dialectics and negation is central so removing that changes it completely.Null is not a set as such
Nevertheless the set of all sets can include the null set
or notThe set of all sets including itself can cause interesting things that largely are not useful
There we go
>>570010Under an economically planned economy, foreign currency is just another commodity. Due to its planned nature, it is always transparant what are the real costs of a product. Due to this, the system can automatically detect where purchasing foreign goods results in a net gain of value and which goods to sell for maximum monetary return on value produced on the socialist state. As opposed to capitalist countries, running a trade deficit is actually positive since you just gain value. A socialist state doesn't care about the value of its non existing currency. Because of this a socialist country engaging in world trade can extract value from the capitalist world. The capitalist world can't because of its unplanned.
See the TANS chapter on trade for more info.
remember to report and hide bait
>>570010what
>>570015 said. but also we can expect a planned economy to abuse all the same tactics that large corporations do, only moreso. do everything to avoid paying taxes. perform industrial espionage and sabotage. if the commune forms models of how each competing firm functions, their inputs and outputs, then it can start doing things like starving key industries in bourgeois countries of resources until they go bankrupt, then buy them up for cents on the dollar. or more accurately for seconds on the hour since we're talking about value. an error committed by the USSR is that it did not seek this kind of expansion. the PRC currently does, sort of
>>570019I'm actually completely Dengpilled. Before, I understood Marxism, but thought simple reform ala Sweden would be enough, how wrong I was.
I can't believe I never understood the genius of Deng Xiaoping thought, which was continued and expanded through with the Three Represents theory, and is now concluding in Xi Jinping thought. I've now read Deng and Jiang's collected works twice each, and the Governance of China more than I can count.
Before this I'd read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Luxemburg and some other Marxist theorists but they just didn't seem right. Something too childish about completely tearing down capitalism and replacing it with an entirely new mode of production, despite my agreement with the Marxian view of history. Marxism seemed to me to be more about destroying the old than building the new. This delusion ended when I read Deng. Through Socialism with Chinese characteristics, China has eradicated poverty, homelessness and illiteracy. The capitalists are represented through the party to keep them from being compradors, and are kept in line, with Xi Jinping thought now nationalizing and controlling the private rapidly. The genius of Deng's theory is keeping the dictatorship of the workers while also using the benefits of global capitalism to build the revolution.
America's fate was sealed when Deng inherited a broken China and built it into a superpower.
LONG LIVE DENG XIAOPING THOUGHT! LONG LIVE CHINA!
>>569594How much knowledgeable must one be in Marxism to read TANS? I'm familiar with Computer Science concepts, but not much of a Marxist; most of my reading has been just history, not Marxian economics.
Should I at least read the communist manifesto before diving in?
>>570023the manifesto doesn't really give you much in that regard. I think I had read vol I of Capital before reading TANS. but Capital is thicc of course. the go-to summaries of the concepts are these two:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/about 30 pages each. I actually forget whether TANS goes into the basics of classical political economy
>>570030>proprietary softwareno. although it sounds less terrible than other noise removal filters I've tried. a similar effect could be achieve with removing the echo and boosting the bass I suspect
>>570031in my experience trying to "fix" noisy audio just makes it sound worse. all you're doing is gating the noise. you can't really improve the SNR unless you have a very accurate model of the noise
>>570032>Waaaaaaaaah muh fossIts Free retard. Use whatever tools capitalists give you. Your fundamentalist adherence to Foss is idealism, similar to commune living. Foss will be the result of the revolution, but until then we must use whatever tools are best for the situation. Foss fundamentalism is ultra leftism.
>You cant fix the noise unless blah blah blahIt's an ai, not a filter over Fourier data. And it does sound better, just listen to it.
>>570033>Its Free retard*gratis
>Your fundamentalist adherence to Foss is idealismit's about worker power
>And it does sound better, just listen to it.doesn't matter. building workflows that rely on proprietary shit always bites you in the ass. sooner or later unprincipled people like you come crying to people like me, despite us warning you exactly what would happen. it happens again and again.
what useds like you don't realize is that even if it's "free" you're contributing to network effects that will eventually cause this shit to cuck the rest of us. if the cucking was restricted only to useds then that would be fine. but it isn't.
>>570042>terrible UXis acually good, retard
http://techstory.ru/but proceed to post on reddit
>>570054it's a mess to read
also I wonder who got >>1333333
>>570034>Workflow>Workers power>network effectIm talking about using this tool thats free right now to re-work the existing material of an old dying man. There is no workflow. There is no workers power in FOSS. There is no network effect.
You fuckers would probably leave a stash of guns out to rot because "using these found weapons means we dont have workers power".
There will be an identical AI free, sooner or later.
FOSS fundamentalists are ultra leftists and need to be put against the wall.
>>570060Stick it up your ass. All you will ever do is shout down comrades putting in the work to try to move communism forward over not being pure enough.
You are literally "how can you be against capitalism when you use a computer made under capitalism" but on the other side of the political fight.
Interesting snippet from a not-so-related article:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-trounces-U.S.-in-AI-research-output-and-quality
>As a government-owned power distributor, the State Grid Corp. of China also boasts one of the best AI research arms among Chinese corporations. This is made possible by the big data collected from hundreds of millions of smart meters. State Grid is developing technology to predict power demand and to detect problems in the electrical grid.Data really let's you build cool stuff
>>570069I thought you meant like planning everything ahead of time, like planning how many rolls of toilet paper you want.
But anyway, people arent good at planning ahead everything. Imagine needing to schedule ahead your boiler 2 days in advance. Or your shower, when you suddenly get caught in a heavy cold pour and now you cant warm up from near hypothermia because youre only schedules a shower for tomorrow.
>>570072i dont think cybersoc was about praxis, its just about how to run a planned economy efficiently and arguments that its possible against libertarians who say it isn't.
cybersoc needs to be combined with a more traditional form of praxis. Once the proletariat seizes power its a pretty clear roadmap. Turn every enterprise into a workers coop, then use that as a transitional stage to a planned economy.
However the proletariat seizing power is the hard part
>>570075>how tf are you going to overthrow the libs with all their tech, weapons, ai, cyberwarfare, survaillence, and neverending money?? we're like ants trying to fight GOD. and nobody has a plan aWhen a technologically advanced, smaller force, is forced to shut down its information infrastructure, the larger masses will win out.
Use the workers to control or eliminate internet infrastructure, use workers to control the roads and harbours. A revolution is different from before, but not that different, because in the end the bourgoiesie relies upon workers to resupply their guns, relies on workers to be their soldiers, relies on workers to transport their fuel and ammo, relies on workers to keep the surveilance running.
In the event of revolution, alternative ways of communication between the party and workers, other than the internet, need to be employed. Think of short wave radio, for example. Couriers. Limited access internet infrastructure.
>>570075revolutionary optimism comrade
>>570077you can't really destroy the internet due to the way it is structured. you can only make it slower
>short wave radioshortwave is narrowband and the antennas are conspicuous. this gets worse when you get into mediumwave and longwave. not that it doesn't have its place. the range per W is great. you can run internet over shortwave if you really want to (HFIP), but VHF and UHF are more appropriate (NPR)
what you'll probably actually want are things that can be self-hosted. that way you are not subject to the whims of surveillance capital, FAANG and the like
>>570078you can make smaller antennas, something like this would allow to transmit indoors, in terms of being detected the size of the antenna isn't the thing to worry about, its the power. you emit, direction finding can be used to figure where you are transmitting from is commonly used by even amateurs, to reduce (it can never be eliminated).
the risk of detection
1) transmit at the lowest power possible.
2) change the location you transmit very often, almost every time
3) transmit in short bursts, digital modes are recomended, Olivia MSFK allows to transmit at a signal to noise ratio of -14dcb, this allows you to use really low power,
4) bonus points for using the day night cycle to limit who can hear you, some freqs can only travel long distance (skip) during different parts of the day, 7mhz only skips at night, if your location is close to the dawn and you transmit on 7mhz only people to your west can receive your transmission if you transmit on 12mhz close to sunset, only people from your west can receive you,
this is one less direction you can be direction found.
there are other tricks I've though about in other radio frequencies
>>570079yeah I'm aware of all this. forgot about loop antennas tho
another option is the KGD antenna:
https://www.nonstopsystems.com/radio/frank_radio_antenna_KGD.htmboth of these have the downside that they're rather narrowband and require retuning as temperature changes. an automatic tuner probably helps
this stuff is likely more useful in espionage situations rather than reaching the masses. for the latter you're looking at broadcast FM and AM
>>570079How abut laser based communication ?
It's almost undetectable unless you cross the beam. And it has no problems with shared bandwidth.
It uses much less power than radio wave based communication. each laser diode can run at 1/100th the output of a regular laser-pointer and still get several km range.
You can use any old solar panel as a really big receiver diode that makes it easy to align the communication beam. Bandwidth limitations are basically just how good your signal filter electronics are.
The downsides are that you need to have line of sight (unless you use an x-ray laser, which is madness), and if you move your location you have to realign the link (kinda like setting up a tv satellite dish) and some weather phenomena like very dense fog or dust-storms as well as smoke can disrupt the connection. For a laser-network each node needs at least 3 lasers and 3 receivers.
>>570082there's nothing fundamentally different between visible light comms and say 24 GHz
>It uses much less power than radio wave based communicationthis very much depends
>You can use any old solar panel as a really big receiver diodenot really. there are papers on this idea relating to space comms
>Bandwidth limitations are basically just how good your signal filter electronics arenope. a PV cell is a very broadband receiver. you're going to get a lot of noise before your filters have a chance to act. at the very least you want an optical filter centered on the same range your TX's frequency. but even then the best of filters have a limited Q, which with visible light still works out to many THz
>>570094A lot of this is him (rightly) bitching about value form theorists. The interviewers and question askers are absolute dogshit though.
On a positive note, after watching a this, I've come to the conclusion that we finally know Cockshott's tendency: Ultra-Maoist
Cockshott says that what Lenin describes as contradictions are actually more accurately the result of conservation laws, and that Marx was not a philosopher but an anti philosopher who replaced philosophy with the study of what actually governs society, thus replacing philosophy with science. And that Marx, in the German ideology, never used the terminology of German idealism, and regarded the categories of such as derived from the bourgeois and even latent feudal superstructure of 19th century German society, citing soviet jurist/legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis and his work "The General Theory of Law and Marxism". He also says Marx attended lectures on natural science and knew about the conservation of energy before writing Capital. And that Marx
TLDR: His whole take is literally that it isn't until Mao that Marxism really is stripped of it's Hegelian idealism as it is only Mao who concretizes dialectics by applying them to the political and military circumstances of the Chinese Revolution. Mao problematizes the simple contradictions of Lenin and Stalin, and creates a more multi-determined[overdetermined, in the Althusserian Terminology] and concretized version of "dialectics", rescuing the atomist Marx from the prison of Hegelian idealist influence and substance monist ontology. So actually Mao understood Marx more than Stalin and even Lenin. It was Mao who was actually the most materialist 20th century Marxist revolutionary.
>>570097>replacing philosophy with sciencescience is a branch of philosophy you dolt. but yes based on what Cockshott is saying Mao does appear to be the more clear thinker
>And that Marxyou can't just leave a cliffhanger like that
>>570097>His whole take is literally that it isn't until Mao that Marxism really is stripped of it's Hegelian idealismI get that you are shit posting but you literally didn't even mention this or maoism at all
t. reads more than the first and last 3 words of a long post
>>570094Reminder to all Hegel dorks: In German (both philosophical and ordinary usage), Widerspruch doesn't just mean
logical contradiction, but also
disagreement or
conflict in the making. So it shouldn't be surprising that Cockshott can replace the translation this word usually gets in Marxist texts ("contradiction") with "conflict".
>>570107What the fuck are you guys talking about?
This better not be about "aufheben"
>>570121Simply pointless. You see, if you really wanted to prepare society for socialism, you would need worker's control in factories and farms i.e. places where the actual things that we use to live each day are made.
Since factories are inhumanly expensive, you have absolutely zero chance of ever buying/building one yourself as a proletariat.
Read Marx.
>>570121look up venture communism
>>570122you lack imagination
farming to where you can provide basic food for comrades can be immensely helpful in drawn-out industrial action, and doesn't have to be particularly expensive. lots of stuff in the "base of the base", that most important to reproduction, are goods and services that are relatively cheap to provide
>inhumanly expensivethe total value of all fixed capital is somewhere around 5 labour years according to Farjoun, Machover and Zachariah
>>570126The law of value is an economic tendency that forms in generalized commodity economies so that everything it optimized to maximize exchange value vs labour, causing the exchange value to equal labour.
Unlike what Cockshott convinced himself of, the law of value does not hold in medieval economies, in hunter gatherer economies, and will not hold in a socialist society.
The law of value appearing is what caused the enclosures. Peasant farmers do not optimise for sale on markets. Hunter gathers do not optimise for sale on markets. Socialists do not optimise for sale on markets. Thus any prices that may exist under lower stage communism (socialism) will not be set by the law of value, but by other means (namely, explicit political decision making), and prices can and will diverge from their labour content. After all, some things which are intensive in labour are beneficial to make available for cheaper and produce above their "market level", and vice versa.
>>570130>Peasant farmers do not optimise for sale on marketspeasants do not piss away labour, and neither do their lords
>prices set by political decision makingyou can choose to
price things different from their value, but that doesn't change the value of those things, because value is SNLT. value has conservation laws that apply even in communism. pricing things by their value is the simplest thing, and almost surely what will be done initially. only by explicit exceptions can things be priced differently from their value, and such price changes must be accounted for. in the necessary accounting, value must always sum to zero
>>570131>>570132If any of you actually read marx instead of just saying "UUUUUUUUUUUH KNOWING HOW MUCH EFFORT SOMETHING IS IS IMPORTANTTTTT" you might actually be able to make an argument.
Peasant farmers did not plan their crops based on how much they SOLD FOR. They planted the crops, hunted on the side, for their own use primarily, and whatever was left over, they might be able to sell. Lords of the lands, while they could demand profitable or luxery crops, did not enact the law of value, exactly because the peasant lord relationship was not a matter of the lord directly directing the labour and the labour being a limited resource. The lord simply demanded as much as possible while maximizing the important parts: population to fight in his army and having food. How much labour shit took was not the primary determining factory in medieval peasant economies.
It wasn't until the late medieval period in western europe where lords took direct control of production by kicking farmers off and hiring shepherds for sheep, that production of said land began to be primarily determined by production for direct sale, using purchased labour, thus enacting the law of value.
>you can choose to price things different from their value, but that doesn't change the value of those things, because value is SNLTThe LAW OF VALUE is an ECONOMIC PHENOMENON WHERE EXCHANGE VALUE CONVERGES TO BE PROPORTIONAL TO ITS LABOUR CONTENT. The existance of "things take a certain amount of xyz resource to make" is not the same as a general economic law of a system of production. There isn't a law of coal, a law of water or a law of energy, even if production requires those at some stage. Merely because it is important to know how much shit goes into making other shit, doesn't mean the economic law exists.
Learn to fucking think through what you write down, fuck.
>>570131>you can choose to price things different from their value, but that doesn't change the value of those things, because value is SNLT. value has conservation laws that apply even in communism. pricing things by their value is the simplest thing, and almost surely what will be done initially. only by explicit exceptions can things be priced differently from their value, and such price changes must be accounted for. in the necessary accounting, value must always sum to zeroAlso this entire paragraph hinges on the assumption of operation under specifically Cockshotts labour voucher system, a system which explicitly chooses to emulate the law of value (pretty arbitrarily). Break out of the mindset of generalized commodity production or emulated quasi market commodity production and the law of value is not an economic law anymore. Its hardly a law in cockshotss system either, because economic laws explicitly describe phenomenon in systems of independent actors doing as they do. An economic law generally isnt used to mean "the rules we litterally made up to run a top down economy which we can discard whenever we want", because then it would be a law about economics, not an economic law, much like a law of nature is the fact that gravity exists as a result of other weird shit interacting chaotically, while a programming implementing gravity isnt a "law of nature", its just a rule they can break if they want to and which is explicitly conciously chosen to exist.
>>570134>enact the law of value>enactthis uygha seems to think the law of value is a literal legal law
>the labour [not] being a limited resourceit literally is, always was and always will be
>The lord simply demanded as much as possible while maximizing the important parts: population to fight in his army and having foodwow it's almost like he's subject to the law of value or something. amazing
>There isn't a law of coal, a law of water or a law of energyyeah because only labour is social. it is labour that regulates reproduction in all human societies
>>570135>this entire paragraph hinges on the assumption of operation under specifically Cockshotts labour voucher systemno it does not
>>570130>Unlike what Cockshott convinced himself of, the law of value does not hold in medieval economies, in hunter gatherer economies, and will not hold in a socialist society.Consider a caste society of almost autonomous villages with people born into roles like smith etc. Such a village will perish if it doesn't stay within certain proportions of people in this or that role. The law of value gets faster and stronger under capitalism, but it is already operating in that village.
>any prices that may exist under lower stage communism (socialism) will not be set by the law of value, but by other means (namely, explicit political decision making), and prices can and will diverge from their labour content. After all, some things which are intensive in labour are beneficial to make available for cheaper and produce above their "market level", and vice versa.Of course some stuff is priced differently already in capitalism (ground rent, anyone?). Things are subsidized or taxed at different levels (lower VAT for food is common in Europe), so I don't see how one could argue that this practice is something particularly socialist.
>>570136>>the labour [not] being a limited resource>it literally is, always was and always will be>If I literally change what you say I will be rightWow you're actually retarded and doshonest. When I say the lord does not care about how much labour crop X or Y costs I meant what I wrote.
>The lord wanting as much population as possible means the law of value existsFucker that's not what the law of value is.
Define law of value, look it up.
>Consider a caste society of almost autonomous villages with people born into roles like smith etc. Such a village will perish if it doesn't stay within certain proportions of people in this or that role. THATS NOT WHAT THE LAW OF VALUE IS YOU UNWASHED BONOBO So to sum up to the actual peabrain who doesn't even read Marx why other modes of productions do not follow the law of value:
The law of value is an economic emergent behaviour of generalized commodity production, because in commodity production labour is always the limiting factor in the goal of producing as much as possible, and labour is the aspect that surplus can be extracted from because it requires less of itself to sustain itself. This entire thing hinges on labour being sold as a commodity and thus having a production cost.
Under feudalism, lords did not buy labour from peasants. The lords did not direct production to maximize exchange value from the labour they bought. A lord was interested in other optimization goals. Maximizing population so you have more soldiers, even if this means putting in more labour to grow more intentensive crops to sustaim them, and less left over exchange value that can be produced per acre to be sold to maintain the army core. This is litterally what can be seen in the enclosures, where feudalism ended and turned into capitalism because of a drop in population causing the emergence of generalized labour markets for the lords in light of not enough farmers to farm the generationally bound land. This labour being commodified led to the economic conclusion, now that England was relatively stable and not constantly at war with itself needing local soldiers, that the lords could extract more surplus value from their land by producing less value overall using sheep's herding because of the relatively high exchange value of wool.
So you can see here, the law of value, that being "prices of things converge to be proportional to their labour time" only happens in economies where labour is a commodity and production is conducted for exchange. If your economic goal is anything different from maximizing the surplus you can get from your land, like maintaining large populations of surplus soldiers, or I don't know, being a socialist society that doesn't prioritize blind anarchistic profit seeking but human development set by political goals, then your independent actions and those of your peers in society do not create the emergent property of the prices of things converging to their labour time. Because labour is no longer a commodity, it is not the limiting factor. Under feudalism, under slavery societies, and under a planned economy, labour is a resource already possessed. It does not need to be bought, it has no variable cost, it can not be not bought. If it is not bought, already exists, and pretty much has constant costs, then your production will not lead to the law of value results. Peasant economies did not plan their production based on market prices and maximizing profits. Ancient Egypt did not plan their economy (and it was pretty much planned) based on market prices.
Think through what the law of value is and what causes it. Cockshott might have some good ideas regarding planning but he has terrible ideas as well. Things like his stances or trans issues, or his idiotic idea that an emergent property of generalized commodity production is somehow transhistorical despite pretty much every other marxist ever including Marx disagreeing.
>>570138anon you are using "law of value" to describe the actions of Capital. the emergent phenomenon you describe is not the law of value, but Capital. it is the form that the law of value takes in capitalism
>idea that an emergent property of generalized commodity production is somehow transhistorical despite pretty much every other marxist ever including Marx disagreeing.David Harvey also holds this position, namely that Marx solves the Gordian knot of what the value of labour itself was by declaring that value == SNLT by definition. it is axiomatic
these kinds of tedious discussions and especially value criticoids like you anon is why I'm starting to think it is better to talk just of labour content. expunge the word "value"
>>570139>The law of value is an economic emergent behaviour of generalized commodity production, because in commodity production labour is always the limiting factor in the goal of producing as much as possible, and labour is the aspect that surplus can be extracted from because it requires less of itself to sustain itself.This applies to any society where one group extracts a surplus from another group. Does Marx use the word "capitalism" in such a broad way?
>So you can see here, the law of value, that being "prices of things converge to be proportional to their labour time" only happens in economies where labour is a commodity and production is conducted for exchange.Why wouldn't prices be roughly proportional to labour time in a society of self-employed small producers?
>Because labour is no longer a commodity, it is not the limiting factor.If I prepare a dish closely following a recipe and using ingredients I have right now in my kitchen, do you believe what the limiting factor is in that situation in some way depends on which of the ingredients is a commodity or not?
>>570144infinite heads
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>>570155there's a bunch of texts in the OP but perhaps there's something overlooked
spontaneously I think Stafford Beer
>>570158>Why the fuck an introductory book 600 pagesmathematical programming do be like that
>>570180Marx makes a big deal out of the human ability to plan ahead, distinguishing humans from non-human animals that way. It was known in the days of Marx that you can teach tricks to dogs. Since then experiments have shown that you can also teach new things to fish and even insects. And given that dogs are vastly more intelligent than those animals, what does that tell you.
There are many animals that are ready to go once the moment they are born or just a few hours after that. Human babies have massive heads with an unfinished skull. There is a remarkable lack of finished "wiring" in a new human. Humans have an extreme flexibility.
An ordinary adult human can instantly switch between many different tasks. If the planning horizon is longer, we can add skilled tasks to that. What that means is that we can plan not just with concrete types of this or that labor, but also with the concept of generic human potential which can be molded over time. In other words, abstract labor is not just something brought about in a particular type of society by equating different concrete activities in the market as some nu-"Marxists" would have it (they have a wrong position which amounts to saying communism is impossible).
Cockshott is correct.
>>570180>behold, a man!I think dickblast has also suggested AI can have feelings. very spooky
the only thing that is special about humans is that only humans are human
>>1383525>Labor is not the sole source of "value",stopped reading right there. go and re-read Capital please
>>570180Labour is the source of value simply because it is our base resource we can spend. If 100 cows made farming Hella easy the dynamics of production in a market would make it worth less because it would take so little effort to get the food so you could do more alternative work while the price is driven down via competition.
It's got nothing to do with skill or oxen. Labour is the source of value because it is optimised for by free producers and by proletarians and the bourgoiesie. Nature has no value in this sense, because it takes human effort to transform things in nature to things you can use. If fertile soil exists it does not add value, it simply amplifies your productivity, while your value output remains equal.
>>570167Economic Embargoes
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>>570186But labor is not the source of all use values.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm>Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.>>570187 >>570189I said value, not use-value, not wealth
>>1383713>value is actually exchange-value u guise>ackshully slavers and feudal lords totally pissed away labour>this is totally not a plot to sneak market "socialism" or otherwise anarchic production in through the back doorOC related for (you)
>it begs the questionit
raises the question, retard
>>570191>Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.Engels the vulgar
>>570196<In the USSR, pay differentials between manual workers and educated skilled workers were far smaller than in capitalist countries, and this fostered strong resentment among the latter and strongly contributed to the downfall of socialism in the 20th century. Furthermore, the notion of allocating goods according to labor time in a socialist system necessarily mostly wipes out pay differential and brings about an equality of labor. As Cockshott and Cottrell argue in Toward a New Socialism, pay differentials on the basis of productivity and effort could be introduced in a socialist system, but there would be no skilled worker premium, because there is simply no justification.
<Perhaps - and I’m completely open to the idea I’m wrong on this, but perhaps - Capital as Power-ism is the product of a stratum of educated high-income leftists who balk at how the labor theory of value necessarily leads to the notion of the equality of labor. As such, they desire an economics that challenges gross capitalist excesses, but that does not homogenize labor and ends up treating the work of lowly unskilled workers as being equal to that of educated skilled workers. The Capital as Power school provides that and thus offers an attractive alternative to Marxism, especially in light of the demise of Keynesianism.OK I can imagine the comparison with the West making you slightly frustrated as a doctor or engineer. But is it true that those were
very hostile to socialism? Highly-skilled labor and highly-paid labor are not quite the same concept. I believe people in administrative positions got into their positions mostly due to luck and tit-for-tat in personal connections and so I don't think of them as highly skilled. And it is them who could expect the biggest gains by switching to capitalism.
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