robbo203
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Titled ‘Forest and Factory: the Science and the Fiction of Communism’, here is a new contribution — having appeared just days ago — on the topic of production under socialism.
——————————I’ve had a quick look at this piece. It’s long and could do with another reading. It does contain many useful points.
I would focus on just one or two at this stage.
The authors seem to be quite strongly opposed to the “localist” bias of people like Mau. They say, for instance:
“However, our principle objection is not to localization tout court, but rather to the idea that “land, water, energy, [and] technology” can or even should be controlled locally. At the purely technical level, the reality is that very few of these things can be localized to a city-sized commune in a fashion that would actually provide for modern population sizes. Even assuming a given commune has large tracts of arable land, ample reserves of freshwater, and good renewable energy amenities, none of these resources can be efficiently utilized without modern industrial technology that is, on average, extremely difficult to localize. Good luck building and maintaining a water purification plant with no inputs from outside of a 200km radius!”
I agree but at the same time, there is no reason why we should not strive, as a matter of principle, to localise the sourcing of material inputs as far as practically possible (information goods are another matter since they are not scale-dependent). There is a concept called the “ecological transition” coined, I believe, by John Bennett in 1976. He is basically, coming out against the kind of thinking you see in Ricardo´s theory of comparative advantage. For instance, we would surely not want to have the kind of wasteful “Coals to Newcastle” type of phenomena we find today in capitalism e.g. the importation of coal from China or Eastern Europe or wherever. It makes sense to source materials as close as possible to where they are needed.
Bennett´s point is that an over-extended spatial division of labour tends to desensitize communities to the environmental impacts of production decisions. If you in the UK get your salad crops from the greenhouse belt in Almeria in Spain you are not going to worry as much about the environmental repercussions of all this greenhouse production, is what he is suggesting. It’s out of sight and more than a thousand kilometres away from the “White Cliffs of Dover”. In other words, local communities need to bear more of the burden of external costs they generate because it will then incentivise them to reduce these costs
Given that environmental constraints are likely to play a much more important role in decision-making in a socialist society compared to today one can go along with the logic of what Bennett is saying. I think the SPGB´s concept of planning in a socialist society as being multi-tiered – global regional and local – accommodates both this concern and the practical realities of supply chains that the authors refer to.
Another point the authors make concerns the “transition”:
“Communist construction is ultimately defined by its character as a transition from one society into another, and this transition is successful only if the remnants of capitalist society, including temporary measures that may bear some superficial resemblance to wage or price (i.e., labor vouchers or priority distributional weights assigned to scarce necessities) are being inexorably wiped away without regression.”
Of course, we (in the SPGB) don’t ourselves, go along with the idea of a labour vouchers scheme. I think it would prove a lot more administratively challenging and socially divisive than its proponents imagine. It will also, I believe, help to reinforce not diminish, a scarcity mentality. Not good news.
That said, I think a lot more discussion is needed around the subject of shortages – how they are going to be dealt with – in a socialist society, particularly in its early stage. What kind of goods are most likely to be subject to shortages and how ought they to be rationed? I don’t believe a universal system of rationing (like labour vouchers) is required. A partial or selective system would probably do the job
Interesting article but LOL this bit
“Earlier this month, it issued a detailed ideological statement in Qiushi, the party’s main official theoretical journal, calling on banks, pension funds, insurers and other financial organisations in China to follow Marxist principles and pay obedience to Xi Jinping.”
I think I’ve written about it twice, maybe three times, in my whole life
______________________________________Fair enough Stuart but this thread kicked off with a reference to an article that you co-authored with Dan Greenwood some time ago in which you explicitly said and I quote
“As Hayek in particular emphasised, the fundamental problem for a socialist economy concerns knowledge. The highly decentralised market process of exchange and price generation captures and communicates a vast amount of dynamically changing knowledge, responding to highly complex and ever-changing demand and supply levels and reflecting the locally situated goals and decisions of individuals across society. By contrast, state planning, even at a local scale and most certainly at national and international level, necessarily involves an element of centralisation”
Seriously Stuart? You reckon the fundamental problem facing a socialist system “concerns knowledge”? What is that if not an endorsement of Hayek´s own ill-informed take on the subject of socialism? Also, what is this “knowledge” the market is supposed to ever-so-efficiently process? The market responds to price signals. What is the information that prices themselves are supposed to convey? Human needs? Environmentally sustainable ways of disposing of pollution? What?
In your latest piece, you allude to the so-called Hayekian “knowledge problem” yet again:
” The question that came up straight away – as Dan Greenwood, an academic at the University of Westminster, related in a talk given at the launch of his new book, Effective Governance and the Political Economy of Coordination (2023, Palgrave Macmillan) – was, just how is any of that going to be achieved? Through top-down government interventions? Or through decentralised processes of innovation in the market and civil society? ”
I can surely be forgiven for thinking that you have swallowed hook line and sinker the Hayekian take on the feasibility of “socialism”. I appreciate that what you and he mean by “socialism” is what we in the SPGB called state capitalism as in the Soviet Union – although, in fact, the Soviet Union was far more decentralised than the carefully cultivated caricature of it as a “planned economy” suggests
But this is part of the problem. Free market types are forever going on about the false dichotomy of central planning versus the decentralised market as if the only way you can have a polycentric system of decision-making is through the market which is complete nonsense. I have yet to come across a serious critique of a polycentric non-market model of socialism. Perhaps you can be the first to attempt it….
Perhaps I’m playing Devil’s advocate here, but if the argument is that production goods cannot be effectively allocated without a pricing mechanism how is saying “planning will be decentralised” an answer to that?
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DJP.The reason why it is an answer is because, quite simply, a decentralised or polycentric system of planning allows you to have a feedback mechanism whereas an apriori society-wide system of central planning, by definition, does not. Once you have a feedback system you have a means with which to effectively allocate inputs based on their relative scarcity/abundance. In other words, you have a self-regulating system of stock control in place, using only calculation in kind and straightforward mathematics to adjust the ratios of different inputs that comprise any particular bundle of inputs to ensure the most effective allocation of these inputs – based on their relative scarcity/abundance as mentioned.
This is the answer to Mises´ claim that you need a single unit of accounting to ensure the effective allocation of resources in a socialist society. You don´t. Mises couldn’t see this because he started from the false premise that a socialist society would be a centrally planned system (and the sense of society-wide planning). He was thus not able to recognize the possibility that a completely nonmarket system of production could indeed incorporate a feedback mechanism (providing it was a decentralised or polycentric system)
It’s not as if we have to reinvent the wheel here. All the basic aspects required for an effective system of socialist allocation beyond the market already exist. Even under capitalism, you can’t run a business without them. It is not money or any other single unit of account that is the necessary foundation of an advanced system of production but rather, calculation in kind. Try running a modern supermarket without stock control and you will soon enough discover the truth of this.
The whole Misesian calculation argument is a red herring and an irrelevance
I think there is a very marked difference to what is implied by Von Mises. Power of disposal is the key, it implies that the body, not the community has the power to allocate and also therefore not allocate distribution.
==============================================Baron von Mises took the view that a single mind, a single planning authority, would assume absolute control over the (apriori) allocation of inputs and outputs within what he called a “socialist economy”. He dubbed this the “Fuhrer principle”. This naff fairytale has been endlessly regurgitated to the point of utter tedium ever since, by Ancaps and others (I don’t know if Stuart would now consider himself to be an Ancap or a liberal or some sort of hybrid or whatever)
At any rate, the position of the SPGB is absolutely clear. There won’t be anything remotely like what Mises had in mind in a socialist society because there can’t be. It is completely antithetical to the basic principles that inform such a society – quite apart from being completely impractical. Sure, there will be planning in a socialist society as there must be in any society (including capitalism) but it will be a polycentric planning system operating at different spatial levels of organization – global, regional, and above all, local. The interactions between all these production and distribution units being effected via distributed computer networks and operating on an essentially self-regulating basis that does away with the market completely.
I don’t know why this seems to be so difficult to comprehend yet you have people like Stuart droning on about the Hayekian “knowledge problem” – as if anyone literally advocates apriori society-wide planning in that sense. (Actually, not even Cockshott does in that apriori sense though he does support the idea of central planning AFAIK.)
The whole thing is a complete red herring. Perhaps Stuart in his next “Moneyweek” article might care to address this model of a socialist society that socialists like us advocate rather than some bogus model that few if anyone actually advocates
It has become an anarcho-capitalist cliche that the only alternative to the market is central planning and that the only alternative to central planning is the market. It surely can’t be the case that these two ex-members, Stuart and Dan, have not heard of a third possibility – a decentralised non-market system of production.
Why then do they avoid any mention of it? The whole “informational complexity” line of argument promoted by the likes of Hayek is a complete strawman argument. If these two favour a market approach to the handling of this informational complexity then you get people on the “other side” of the debate like Paul Cockshott, who favour central planning (in the sense of apriori society-wide planning. The number-crunching capacity of modern computers makes this entirely possible, claims Cockshott.
Both sides of this debate are deeply flawed but for different reasons. Cockshott because he doesn’t understand the implications of central planning (computers can at best strive only to track changes in the real world but you can’t impose an apriori central plan on a world that is in a state of constant flux); Watkins and Greenwood because they don’t seem to appreciate that the “information” they are dealing with has to do with is effective market demand, not human needs or externalities and that even on its terms the market is prone to market failures)
Cockshott can be forgiven for thinking as he does since he comes from a background of supporting state capitalist regimes – like the Soviet Union – albeit in a qualified way (he thinks the problem with the Soviet Union was that it was not sufficiently democratic). Watkins and Greenwood have less excuse for thinking as they do, having once been members of the SPGB themselves. They should have known better than to trot out this nonsense about the market
So apparently Biden would be out on his ear if an election was held now and Trump would beat him. So much for voting for the lesser evil. Migration, as one might expect, is one of the issues driving Trump’s popularity – as with the resurgent Far Right in many parts of Europe too. Globally migration is on the rise and one of the reasons for that is war and military conflict which of course the Biden regime has had its fair share in promoting directly or indirectly
Some of the stuff Trump is coming out with is really borderline Nazi if not the real thing – like the drivel about racial purity and immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country”. I thought American capitalism prided itself on being a land of immigrants and opportunity for all etc
I have not seen Alan J post in a while. Is he okay?
————–I don’t think anyone has heard from him since he suddenly disappeared. He lives abroad and I fear something bad might have happened. A lot of people here are concerned….
For once, the Tory toff, Rees-Mogg, is spot on
Zionism is a vile racist and nationalist political ideology that many Jewish folk themselves rightly oppose.
Yet astonishingly:
“The US House of Representatives has passed a resolution that explicitly labels anti-Zionism as antisemitism, after warnings from senior Jewish members of Congress and opponents of the measure who fear that it dangerously conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish attacks amid Israel’s siege of Gaza”
We truly live in Orwellian times…..
If anything is going to encourage and strengthen racist anti-semitic ideas it is stupid senseless measures like this. People, appalled by what is being done in Gaza at the hands of the murderous Netanyahu regime, are simply going to say to themselves “Well I guess that makes me an anti-Semite then”. They are not going to forsake their feeling of revulsion over what is happening.
These idiot US representatives who voted for this measure don’t seem to realise that they are only helping to make anti-semitic ideas respectable
Keir Starmer – a hypocrite to the core
Compare Keir Starmer's statements on the siege of Gaza with his arguments at the International Court of Justice in 2014, where he argued that the Serb siege of Vukovar was a case of genocide.
A thread on Starmer, international law and Gaza. pic.twitter.com/lu0X6sgXfB— Nicholas McGeehan (@NcGeehan) November 28, 2023
Some information on different Jewish ethnic groups:
Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews
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It would seem that some Jewish folk have a rather racist attitude towards other Jews. Would that be antisemitic?
https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/racism-in-israel-some-jews-are-more-equal-than-others-28109
It seems that there was a chance that this whole pointless bloody war could have been avoided but for the intervention of the Western powers and in particular the person of Boris Johnson who reputedly urged the Kiev regime not to sign anything with Russia that would have prevented war According to this report, Johnson said: “we will not sign anything with them at all, let’s just fight.” If this is true, then this individual has blood on his hands
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“We already know that Ukraine, in early April 2022, rejected to make peace with Russia. We know this from talks by the former prime minister of Israel Naftali Bennet, from the former Turkish foreign minister, from former chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder as well as from reporting from Ukraine.But only now do we hear the same story from a Ukrainian official:
Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo – 21:45 UTC · Nov 24, 2023
🇺🇦🇷🇺🚨‼️ BOMBSHELL: Ukraine admits that Russia only wanted neutrality from them!Russia wanted Ukraine to be neutral like Finnland was! But Ukraine was not sure if they can trust it and then Boris Johnson came and said:
-> “We will not sign anything, let’s do war!”I knew it!
videoThe video in the tweet above has English subtitles. It is part of a Ukrainian TV interview with the leader of the Servant of the People parliament faction David Arakhamia by the journalist Natalia Moseychuk. In March and April 2022 Arkhamia had led the Ukrainian delegation at peace talks with the Russians in Belarus and Turkey.”
So what will your little band of bruvvers (and two sistahs) do to retain your recruits, assuming you make any in the first place?
Offer them a share of the £2.6 million which they can hopefully spend before it’s too late?
__________________Moderator, do we have to put up with endless crap? I don’t know what this troll is doing on the forum, anyway, given her views on where she imagines the SPGB is heading…
