I have been thinking about a few things lately. A lot of it comes from my own increasing pessimism that certain types of decision can be generally democratized, which is a topic for another thread. But it has led me to pose again a question that I have never seen plausibly answered: can there really be a modern economy that has neither the discipline of the market nor the discipline of an authoritarian state? Talking to some party socialists, it would appear that no experience in central planning has engendred scepticism about the vanity of that project and the false and dangerous view of knowledge that it presupposes.

So my first question is that. My follow-up questions are:

What is the consequence of repeated bad decisions in resource allocation and production in a socialist economy? How, and by whom, is what is a bad decision determined? What is the mechanism for correction? What is the incentive to have such a mechanism?

What is the consequence of personal laziness?

I've talked to some socialists who reject the idea of market socialism or worker owned democracies out of hand. But I never have the sense that they have grappled with the difficulties inherent in the alternatives.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]

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Originally posted by rasmus raven:
can there really be a modern economy that has neither the discipline of the market nor the discipline of an authoritarian state?

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Well, I'll try to state my opinion on that, but the question is a bit difficult to understand... maybe that's because of how late it is, and my brain is a bit tired.

First, Communism is supposed to be the end result after the step of Socialism. It is supposed to be society working as 'communities' without a government. I personally don't believe that is workable or possible, because 'someone' WILL take advantage of the situation and build an elaborate system of exploitation where there is no government. But how to build a government that doesn't become itself, or at least aid the exploiters?

Socialism and Capitalism are at violent odds with each other. The clearest current example is probably Venezuela, where Capitalists are continuously trying to create unrest and overthrow the Socialist government. So what options are there? In the end Chavez will have to decide whether to tighten the grip on the Capitalists and curtail individual freedoms, or risk having everything undone which his government is accomplishing for the people. There appears to be no third option for the long haul, and we will witness how that chapter of history unfolds.

So, to attempt to answer your first question, I would say that ideally a Socialist state should not nationalize all industries, but should allow private enterprise on a small scale, but no Corporations. There should be controls in place that allow for the rewarding of people with initiative to create without permitting the excesses and exploitation of the labour of others to ones own gain, as we are experiencing in Capitalism.

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Talking to some party socialists, it would appear that no experience in central planning has engendred scepticism about the vanity of that project and the false and dangerous view of knowledge that it presupposes.

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In my opinion, the state should regulate and/or even control all services deemed essential by society, while all non-essentials should be allowed in the hands of private enterprise. However, private enterprise should be held solely responsible for any damage to the environment or otherwise. For example, Cuba appears extreme in its limitation of innovation by largely not allowing people to operate a small business. I believe that is an error based on fanatical fear of anything that could remotely lead to Capitalism, but it is also holding the country back in terms of innovation.

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What is the consequence of repeated bad decisions in resource allocation and production in a socialist economy?

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I believe the problem lies in what I just described more so than repeated bad decisions.

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What is the mechanism for correction?

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The actual mechanism, or the desired mechanism and outcome?

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What is the incentive to have such a mechanism?

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In control-economies there likely is none, while in Capitalist economies there is too much.

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What is the consequence of personal laziness?

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I don't know. However I believe that laziness should not serve as an excuse for anything.

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I've talked to some socialists who reject the idea of market socialism or worker owned democracies out of hand. But I never have the sense that they have grappled with the difficulties inherent in the alternatives.

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Red Albertan:
First, Communism is supposed to be the end result after the step of Socialism. It is supposed to be society working as 'communities' without a government. I personally don't believe that is workable or possible, because 'someone' WILL take advantage of the situation and build an elaborate system of exploitation where there is no government. But how to build a government that doesn't become itself, or at least aid the exploiters?

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So the answer to stop this seemingly determinstic outcome of an elaborate form of exploitation is to build an elaborate form of exploitation.......BRILLIANT! Need I remind you that band/tribal societies lasted about 100 000 years.

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Socialism and Capitalism are at violent odds with each other. The clearest current example is probably Venezuela, where Capitalists are continuously trying to create unrest and overthrow the Socialist government. So what options are there? In the end Chavez will have to decide whether to tighten the grip on the Capitalists and curtail individual freedoms, or risk having everything undone which his government is accomplishing for the people. There appears to be no third option for the long haul, and we will witness how that chapter of history unfolds.

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Originally posted by rasmus raven:
What is the consequence of repeated bad decisions in resource allocation and production in a socialist economy? How, and by whom, is what is a bad decision determined? What is the mechanism for correction? What is the incentive to have such a mechanism?

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First of all, I think we have to realize that the experiments in socialism were shaped by the competitive forces of capitalism at the mid-point of the last century. Stalin's departure from true Marxist ideals with "war communism" and accelerated transformation from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one was a reaction to the 14 nation invasion of Russia to put down the revolution and world war. Cueball described this well, and I think the fact remains that the socialist experiments did not happen within a vacuum in the way that, say, Milton Friedman and los Chicago boys were given free rein in Chile with that experiment in laissez-faire capitalism. Chile, Argentina, El Salvador and Haiti and the rest of the capitalist third world have not had to endure cold war trade embargos, and they still fell short of emulating the model - an agrandized, mythical free market economy in the United States, the largest country responsible for promoting neo-liberal democracy and globalism today. Some economists will say that socialist-style central planning was responsible for picking America off its knees economically and allowing it to prosper through the cold war years, even if socialist central planning was distorted towards Keynesian-militarism and socialism for the rich. James Galbraith says that the rest of the world doesn't fully understand the American economic model. European's haven't recognized that public spending in the States is responsible for a great deal of wealth created every year. And yet the IMF/World Bank have enforced strict market reform policies on loan conditions for poor countries that were never part of New Deal in America or rising Asian tiger economies.

We know that millions starved to death in Ukraine, considered to be have been Russia's bread basket at the time of Stalin's purges. The Ukraine famine was not a direct result of central planning and was done on purpose. Perhaps that incident is best left at that description.

We know that tens of millions starved in China, an indirect result of central planning. But it's not enough to say that central planning was solely responsible for mass starvation in China during the Great Leap years. Mao, unlike Stalin, did not purposely order the starvation of farmers holding out for control of their land. There were no Cossacks to defy Mao's rule. Illiteracy and ignorance leftover from imperialism would have undermined any system. We know it took a short time for people to starve to death and news didn't travel as fast as it does today, which makes global famines and poverty seem even more premeditated today. WHO and UNICEF give notice of regions at risk months in advance.

But the plain truth about China is that in 1949 it was a fourth world nation, behind India in terms of infant mortality and poverty. By the time of Mao's death in 1976, China's infant mortality was improved over free market India's rate today. Yes they've still got a long way to go, but for centuries, people were born in China's rice paddies and died not far from where they were born an average of 30 years later. I don't believe the Czars or Emperors counted infant mortality or famine casualties.

So far, no other system has equalled Mao's efforts on that scale. Market-driven economy gives the appearance of working. It's how to get from third and fourth world poverty to a society capable of doing anything worthwhile that's the secret which pro-market ideologues choose to ignore. Market economies make bad decisions all the time. 30 thousand innocent children are sacrificed to an invisible hand every day while cash crops are exported to a free market that doesn't care.

A centrally planned, federalist government can ensure that basic needs are met first and foremost, like: housing, education and health care. These things can be measured and quality controlled. All education should be a basic human right as per UN human rights declaration. Our education system is fallen into Victorian era mentality that the sole purpose of education be to help industrialists make more money or to find a free market need for some technical skill to serve industry's short-term needs instead of producing learned thinkers and fostering creative abilities. And so now we've managed to commodify higher learning in North America, and we're short of doctors in both countries. What else can free markets make scarce ?.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

rasmus, those are the deep questions, but I wouldn't know how to approach them in the abstract without landing on a firm conviction about "human nature," which I don't have. I used to think I did, and I don't really want any alternative to what I used to think, but I think that what I used to think has pretty much been ground into the dust by experience, so there you go.

It depends on how one defines socialism.

Some call Norway socialist. Others say socialdemocratic systems are essentially capitalist but are more caring *as long as these societies can afford it*. (Consider Schroeder's reforms). Wasn't it Lenin who called Kautsky the first revisionist?

As an undergraduate (decades ago, i.e. when the Soviet Union was still fairly functional) I took an interesting course called "Comparative Economic Systems". The premise was that there is no pure socialist or capitalist system anywhere as even the USA has a public sector and the Soviet Union with its kolchosy [sp?] markets had a private one. What I found particularly interesting was (still functional) Yugoslavia, a mixed system with a relatively large private sector and a large public one. (Incidentally also a lot more personal freedoms than the other people's democracies.) Of course there were also the socialdemocratic countries like the Scandinavian ones and others.

As to corporations -as much as I dislike most of them- they have an important function, namely to limit one's risk in a particular venture to just the funds invested in it. Disallowing this form of organisation means that many projects will not be carried out if a person can lose his/her entire lifelihood (and more: consider debtor's prisons in Victorian England) if things go wrong. Would a polio vaccine, for instance, ever have been tested if the people doing it might lose every thing they have?

As to limiting executive salaries *by law* to a certain multiple of the lowest paid workers in an outfit is IMO *not* a good idea. However, in the absence of any such laws not so long ago the obscene differences, which exist in today's capitalist countries, didn't even exist in the USA. In any case, I don't think the state should pass laws about what salaries the private sector may or may not pay. Tax systems would be much more appropriate and flexible IMO and would have the same effect (coupled with laws dealing with "non-monetary" remuneration like stock options).

Frankly, I do not know anymore what socialism means to me. When I was much younger, I had many 'romantic' dreams about it. I do not see the NDP, or ,heaven forbid, the Britsh Labour Party as socialist. On the other hand socialdemocratic governments can bring about a more caring society with greater equality. Historical evidence suggests however that this doesn't last or at the very least can't withstand bad times. Germany's first post WWII recession in 1966-67 saw a massive attack on working people. Today's Germany is no different. Tony Blair's policies resemble those of the neo-cons in many ways. What will happen to Norway's system when the oil wealth will have disappeared?

Whether we like or dislike the 'discipline of the market's greed', it (unfortunately) seems to be a good motivator in most societies. Government bureaucracies are not very flexible systems and are in no good position to determine what economic activites should, or should not, be carried out.

In any case, as an "anarcho-soialist" I want to see the size of the government limited to the smallest *necessary* size. Good laws about the environment, which are enforced would temper the excesses of the market. Public funds for those who can't fill their needs with what the 'market provides' could make edcucational opportunities accesible to all. They could provide decent housing and daycare (and whatever I have forgotten to mention).

I recently read Ronald Wright's A Short History Of Progress and -while not dealing specifically with socialism- it is relevant for the present discussion I think. In any case it's a master piece (in spite of its shortness) and can be read in a Sunday. So many plans (and unplanned/unforseen) things have gone wrong throughout history.

edited to fix a few minor mistakes

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

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Originally posted by rasmus raven:

So my first question is that. My follow-up questions are:

What is the consequence of repeated bad decisions in resource allocation and production in a socialist economy? How, and by whom, is what is a bad decision determined? What is the mechanism for correction? What is the incentive to have such a mechanism?

What is the consequence of personal laziness?

I've talked to some socialists who reject the idea of market socialism or worker owned democracies out of hand. But I never have the sense that they have grappled with the difficulties inherent in the alternatives.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]

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What is worng with laziness? It actually seems pretty normal in all social orders, and I think serves other functions integral to work.

This challenge to the socialist idea, I find, is often latently expressed here in Canada by the folk prejudices people have about unionized workers such as city workers. Whom are often described as lazy.

"It takes 10 guys to dig a trench 2 to dig it an 8 to watch"

But actually these kinds of work stoppages that appear occasionally and seem evident to people who want to see them, can be sourced to all kinds of quite normal adminstrative practices that arise, or simply from day to day human foibles (material not being available at the site), such as a dispatcher sending out a whole crew with the expectation that the eight extra people will be working on various tasks later. It is simply illogical and inefficient to have people running from one site to another, on a "just in time," basis.

Over staffing workers in large city projects, serves to ensure maximum effieceny in the overall maintenance of city building, maintenance and repair projects by ensuring that there are always enough people available should need arise for them. Hiring "extra" people in this manner is rather like the builidng a car plant with exapnded production capacity, so that should the market require more cars, the plant can add a night shift to add to production, as opposed to having to build a whole new plant.

In these ways apparent immediate ineffiecency, is taken up by a more general effiecency.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Nature is redundant. [/QB]

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Is that why thousands die in earthquakes or other natural disasters?

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Originally posted by Cueball:

What is worng with laziness? It actually seems pretty normal in all social orders, and I think serves other functions integral to work.

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African lions hunt in prides for around 4 hours a day and sleep for the rest of it.

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But they get the job done. Or they do without.

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Originally posted by VanLuke:

Is that why thousands die in earthquakes or other natural disasters?

How does one relate social systems (i.e. culture) to nature?

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Where?

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This thread isn't for die-hard socialist-haters to come and leave a threadcrap in.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:

But they get the job done. Or they do without.

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And in nature everyone eats, young and old, when the job is done.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
I know, I know. A bad carpenter always blames his tools.

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So this is the new thing is it? We can define the rules of the thread right off, and people have to abide?

So, I can simply state: "this is a thread about Israel and the Palestinians, entirely from a pro-Palestinian point of view, and you all others are trolling?"

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Originally posted by Fidel:
And lions take from nature what nature can bear.

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From each according to their paw, to each according to their maw?

Is that it?

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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So, I can simply state: "this is a thread about Israel and the Palestinians, entirely from a pro-Palestinian point of view, and you all others are trolling?"

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Try it out! (You might try it with more diplomatic language, though.)

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: writer ]

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But it has led me to pose again a question that I have never seen plausibly answered: can there really be a modern economy that has neither the discipline of the market nor the discipline of an authoritarian state?

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Maybe. I think that's the best we can do. It's never been tried. There are things we can do to make it more probable but that's about it.

In the 1930s, when the Soviet Union started to look really bad and socialism seemed off the cards, Trotsky responded by saying that even if slave societies were a permanent feature of human life, the task of the socialist was to organize the slaves against the masters. ** If anyone has a reference for this, I'd greatly appreciate it **

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Talking to some party socialists, it would appear that no experience in central planning has engendred scepticism about the vanity of that project and the false and dangerous view of knowledge that it presupposes.

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Yes. I received an email in the last day or so from the person who recruited me to Marxism posing the same questions as you are.

To respond on two levels:

On the micro: Very few of us have any experience of any kind of planning that is not highly authoritarian. Family, school, church, media, work, culture tends towards being extremely arbitrarily authoritarian or libertine indulgences. Day to day life in North America has little to do with democratic collective planning, and when it does appear many of us piss it away, out of impatience or apathy.

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And in nature everyone eats, young and old, when the job is done.

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Do you know anything about lions?

Sure, mostly everybody eats. Something, anyway.

The lion or lions that caught the prey get first dibs. The lions who sat it out back at the veldt get whatever the hunters say they can have, which is often nothing, or else it's a spinal column with a few tatters of meat left. It ain't the good stuff.

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A good working woman makes with her needles only five meshes a minute, while certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time. Every minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of the workingwomen’s labor, or again, every minute of the machine’s labor, gives the working women ten days of rest. What is true for the knitting industry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed by modern machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!

Paul Lafargue
The Right To Be Lazy

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Originally posted by blake 3:17:
rasmus has asked some very interesting difficult questions here. Could the repetitive jokesters just joke somewhere else?

I shouldn't feel like an uptight jerk for putting some effort into thinking and writing about serious political questions.

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Yes, you ahould. Actually, your attitude is terrible, and completely invalid, since I am one of jokesters, but my post (number 7) is a serious response, and the levity, only that.

Perhaps, since you feel that you and Rasmus have serious issues to discuss and my original post, simply a distraction, you could take it to PM.

How about it?

But I guess you have some serious theory to get into, and my personal observations about working life, even working class life, organization and adminstration of work, merely interdict the production of the abstract model.

Sorry.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Originally posted by Michelle:
I think blake is right. This topic is interesting, and the people seriously participating would like to do so without sidetracking. I think it's okay for them to politely request that this thread be saved for that.

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I don't think it was a very polite request frankly. It was laden with presumed guilt, implied by "I shouldn't be made to feel like a jerk," etc. He made the request and presumed that he would be made to feel like an uptight jerk. He just assumed it.

No one had even had chance to say anything, or act according to his request. It was the fist time the request was made.

And also assumed that others, myself among them, were not making "serious contributions" to the thread, ignoring what were in the main serious posts by all of the jokers.

The implication being that anything us "Joksters" were saying was not worthy of inclusion in the discussion, since we also happend to pass a few jokes around as well.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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The abstract model is the fun part.

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No it isn't. Abstracting human behaviour is where we run into problems. So is thinking that we'll achieve utopia in our times.

Although I'm a socialist, in that I believe humans are inherently and fundamentally social, I don't buy big ideas anymore. Human society will always be struggling between the strengths, weaknesses and aspirations of individuals and how best to balance those with sensible social policy.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

Back to Magoo's interesting statement about males taking the lions share. Yes, sometimes when the pride male is present, he will horde the kill for himself but not always the rule. The hunters tend to eat first, then the pride and cubs in that order. In many cases, the males aren't around for days on end and miss a feast altogether. Organs and intestines are considered best vittles for those without a full set of teeth.

But the point in this example from nature is that lions are social animals like us. Efficiency of a collective hunt by the pride produces maximum results. Lions don't enslave one another or practice class distinction, nor do they promote self-interest over the collective interests of the pride. This general arrangement has allowed them to thrive for about 40 million years until special self-interested parties began encroaching on nature relatively recently.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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But I guess you have some serious theory to get into, and my personal observations about working life, even working class life, organization and adminstration of work, merely interdict the production of the abstract model.

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Monday is the new Sunday. I work in low waged reproductive labour Tuesday to Saturday. It's totally abstract.

I have hard time participating in my union (CUPE Local 79) because my unit is the most insecure and I'm currently working three jobs and the last few meetings would take me two hours on TTC. Ha ha ha. So funny. So abstract. Ha ha ha. Hilarious when people in psychoses have punched me and thrown desks at me. Ha ha ha.

(Aren't economic models in and of themselves abstract, whatever they are arguing? Do other animals have economic theories to adhere to or challenge?)

Is it possible to reject economics as the central organizing structure for modern societies? What about culture? Human rights? Etc.?

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But the point in this example from nature is that lions are social animals like us. Efficiency of a collective hunt by the pride produces maximum results. Lions don't enslave one another or practice class distinction

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You yourself referred to the pride male. What's he, if not the upper class?

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nor do they promote self-interest over the collective interests of the pride.

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Except that the hunting lions, as you noted, take the best parts of the kill for themselves.

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Originally posted by blake 3:17:

Monday is the new Sunday. I work in low waged reproductive labour Tuesday to Saturday. It's totally abstract.

I have hard time participating in my union (CUPE Local 79) because my unit is the most insecure and I'm currently working three jobs and the last few meetings would take me two hours on TTC. Ha ha ha. So funny. So abstract. Ha ha ha. Hilarious when people in psychoses have punched me and thrown desks at me. Ha ha ha.

TGIM.

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Look, I like what you post most of the time. I just thought your request was badly phrased and kind of insulting, since I don't see why a group of people who are all answering the thread topic seriously, and in a manner that they feel is apropos, and then throw a few jokres around should be chasitsed as if they aren't contributing.

Perhaps the following can be incorporated:

Confused lions 'hunt' small cars

And:

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A lion’s life is filled with sleeping, napping, and resting. Over the course of 24 hours, lions have short bursts of intense activity, followed by long bouts of lying around that total up to 21 hours! Lions are good climbers and often rest in trees, perhaps to catch a cool breeze or to get away from flies. Researchers have often noticed lions lying around in crazy poses, on their backs with their feet in the air or legs spread wide open!

... A pride is made up of 3 to 30 lions. The pride consists of lionesses (mothers, sisters, and cousins), and their cubs, along with a few unrelated adult males. The pride has a close bond and is not likely to accept a stranger. The unrelated males stay a few months or a few years, but the older lionesses stay together for life.

... Hunting as a group means there is a better chance the lions will have food when they need it, and it is less likely that they will get injured while hunting. Lion researchers have noticed that some activities are “contagious” in prides. One lion will yawn, or groom itself, or roar, setting off a wave of yawning, grooming, or roaring! Lions and lionesses play different roles in the life of the pride.

Lions live in a matriarchal society. The lionesses work together to hunt and rear the cubs. This allows them all to get the most from their energy, keeping them healthier and safer. Being smaller and lighter than males, lionesses are more agile and faster. During hunting, smaller females chase the prey towards the center. The larger and heavier lionesses ambush or capture the prey. Lionesses are versatile and can switch hunting jobs depending on which females are hunting that day and what kind of prey it is.

While it may look like the lionesses do all the work in the pride, the males play an important role. While they do eat more than the lionesses and bring in far less food (they hunt less than 10 percent of the time), males patrol, mark, and guard the pride’s territory. Males also guard the cubs while the lionesses are hunting, and they make sure the cubs get enough food.

Mammals: Lion

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In case anyone still has any doubt about which lion gets most of the food (no it ISN'T the lead hunter):

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Females do 85 to 90 percent of the pride's hunting, while the males patrol the territory and protect the pride, for which they take the "lion's share" of the females' prey.

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[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: writer ]

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Originally posted by Fidel:
Absolutely!. Animals in nature would seem really unproductive to economists and efficiency experts. African lions hunt in prides for around 4 hours a day and sleep for the rest of it. We have our own biorhythms and natural cycles. People are inefficient by nature. How efficient for their sake.

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And what does Lion infanticide reveal about our own nature, and how socialism can or cannot work?

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I personally don't think socialism as we understand it is possible, not in our lifetimes. At least not without some sort of unexpected paradigm or technological earthquake. I don't think that's the point anymore.

We are human - by definition, we cannot foresee all eventualities, and we cannot possibly encompass all potential outcomes of a given set of actions. All we can do is try to learn from our mistakes. For a progressive, that means identifying the weaknesses and errors in progressive history as much as it does identifying mistakes made by those of other political views.

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Originally posted by writer:
And what does Lion infanticide reveal about our own nature, and how socialism can or cannot work? They don't just hunt and sleep, you know!

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:

Do you know anything about lions?

Sure, mostly everybody eats. Something, anyway.

The lion or lions that caught the prey get first dibs. The lions who sat it out back at the veldt get whatever the hunters say they can have, which is often nothing, or else it's a spinal column with a few tatters of meat left. It ain't the good stuff.

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That ain't strictly true either. Don't forget the top male, who rarely bothers hunting but tends to get what he wants. Basically, he operates as the girls' gigolo, getting food and pampering in return for sex. Nice work if you can get it, which is why he has to fight off other males trying for the position so they can quit hunting and start screwing.

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Originally posted by rasmus raven:

I have been thinking about a few things lately. A lot of it comes from my own increasing pessimism that certain types of decision can be generally democratized, which is a topic for another thread. But it has led me to pose again a question that I have never seen plausibly answered: can there really be a modern economy that has neither the discipline of the market nor the discipline of an authoritarian state?

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"Yes." There you go, rasmus.

More seriously, I think probably. First of all, even if you accept the notion that some sort of central planning is needed for a solid "Socialist" state, I don't see that that necessarily implies an authoritarian state. There's plenty of central planning in Canada now. Heck, there's plenty central planning in the US, and a lot of the most "laissez faire" policies actually require a bunch of central planning to implement. So what would theoretically stop there from being an old-vision socialist, centrally-planned state in which the directions the central plans went were determined democratically by party elections, plebiscites and whatnot? I don't see what's inferior about the discipline of a non-authoritarian state. It might work better, actually, because then the people can act as a discipline on the central planners.
In our current environment, it's hard to envision a democratic state going fully socialist and resisting the encroachment of capital. But Venezuela's interesting. And heck, I would suggest that if the US economic implosion that many people are expecting finally takes place, thus seriously discrediting the right, already-leftish places in Europe may in some cases shift further towards full-blown socialism without becoming in any way less democratic. What's intellectually respectable and fashionable is subject to big shifts over time.

One notion I have is that what sorts of social structure is possible varies to some extent with technology. I don't think technology *determines* social structure, not at all. But it does put boundaries on what's possible, and conversely technological expansions can take away boundaries from what's possible.
To take some extreme cases--you can't have a continent-wide nation-state, such as Canada, if your technology is stone age level. Doesn't matter what your political ideas are, how amazing your vision, or how impressive your organizational skills, the communication capabilities and capacity for division of labour just are not there. Generally, you're not going to have nation-states of any size at all; there's your Incas and Aztecs, but while technically it's true that they didn't use much metal, they did have various key agricultural technologies, good roads and so forth.
At the other end, if you have technologies involving cheap low-grade AI, excellent robots, limitless energy, and ready replenishment of raw materials from the asteroid belt and whatnot, then you no longer have an economy of scarcity at all. The existence of wage labour becomes a largely arbitrary construct which might still be used for social control purposes but would serve no real economic function.
To get relevant, I think with sufficiently good communication technologies widely available, and a fairly sane economy that allows leisure more at the French level than the North American, it should be possible to incorporate rather more democracy into an economy than we now have, using distributed but non-market methods to set "prices". And, for instance, it brings onto the table things like Michael Albert's Parecon allocation schemes--especially when combined with good number-crunching computers such as we also have. You couldn't do Parecon's allocation without computers and pretty much universal internet communication. With them, it seems to me it would become plausible.

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Originally posted by Vigilante:
So the answer to stop this seemingly determinstic outcome of an elaborate form of exploitation is to build an elaborate form of exploitation.......BRILLIANT! Need I remind you that band/tribal societies lasted about 100 000 years.

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Workers in a capitalist economy don't necessarily have to try and overthrow the whole edifice of capitalism at one go. A much more reasonable approach is to attack specific problems, and try and draw as many as possible into the fight.

At the same time, choosing those battles has to come from a principled outlook. That way, it is possible to relate a single struggle to a larger goal.

Capitalism itself will have it's problems as resources gradually wind down. Socialists should be involved in preparing for the struggles that will come as a result of capital's profligacy.

If sitting back and saying, 'I don't know how socialism will rule the world, so I can't/won't get involved' is one's view, then there really is no point in any struggle. Might just as well accept capitalism with it's wars, chaos, environmental degradation, and human suffering - 'til the day the resources run out and we're back to communal iving.

In the end, it's not about a 'system', it's about our willingness to back certain principles, and to engage in struggle when, and where, those principles are threatened.

Racial tolerance, human rights, workers rights, environmental responsibility, all these, and many more, are under constant pressure. It is the socialists job to defend these principles.

Terrifying it surely is, but its ability to sustain itself in prolonged warfare, is hampered by its sophistication. The weapons systems may be effiecient on paper and in combat testing, but really terrible mistakes are made on a regular basis. The finicky M-16, which has finally been put out of its misery is certainly the best known example, but for the last 30 years US soldier's went into combat with a rifle that the could not trust to fire.

Meanwhile the soviet desinged AK 47, designed shortly after the secod world war, is still in favour with soldiers all over th e world, its simplicy and ruggedness in design, not to mention its relatively low cost making it possibly the most succesful personal weapon in history. The Soviet RPG is similarly succesful as a means of delverig a grenade in combat, as much because ay moron can aim it and fire it for effect, as opposed to the complex grenade launchers accesorized to the M-16.

Other's include helmets made to exacting specifications that cost thousands of dollars, whereas the Chinese make theirs for pennies, and for most purposes are just as good.

At this time they are upgrading all of their expensive utility sports vehicle "Hummers" by building in new armour plating for the bottom, because no one considered the idea that people might dig bombs into roads. Of course, this modification itself causes all kinds of problems, due to the extra weight putting stress on the chasis, which actually buckles, while the drive train is also increasingly stressed, in a system precariously designed on the very edge of its exact original specifications.

[ 14 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]

The short answer is: No.
Because 'modern economy' is already very badly screwed up. A lot of it would have to be discarded.

Lions hunt and eat. They do not buy a jillion plastic toys for their cubs and they do not waste monumental quantities of labour to produce things whose only function is to explode. Right there, we see why people in a modern economy have to work so much. That, plus making profit (which has no relevance in nature) for somebody else.

And because there are simply too many of us. The modern state is too unwieldy for direct oversight by, or accountability to, the populace. Thus, leaders inevitably get away, not only with bad decisions, but with corruption. And they are in a position to hoodwink the populace into believing that governance is too complex for it to understand, let alone control.
Of course, we all know when a decision is bad: we can all see whether a strategy is working or not - but we're too cowed and confused to do anything about it.

What might be possible, under these circumstances, is honest democracy. When it's working, democracy tends toward socialism. When that happens, the greediest bastards do all in their considerable power to abort it, subvert it, derail it, trash it. If we really wanted democracy to work, we'd put our greatest effort toward rearing an alert and confident electorate - rather than a docile and efficient work-force.

[ 15 November 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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Actually i would say the US military industrial complex is one of the worst examples of bad central planning and ineffieciency ever.

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Agreed.

But that isn't a complete picture of US capitalism.

For instance, Moshe Safdie thinks that the AT&T monopoly was a clever way to camouflage central planning. When it was done the company got broken up.

And they've done as good a job as anyone building a unified US phone system.

Militaries are not really geared to be efficient other than for killing people.

....and I'll add this picture simply because I put some work into it before reading here and concluding that the 'discussion' went in many twisted ways.

Congratulations Magoo!

Do you ever get bored with derailing serious discussions?

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSluxemburg.htm

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were executed without trial on 15th January, 1919

We'll win in the end!

[ 15 November 2005: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

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My definition of socialism is economic democracy.

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On the laziness issue. I don't care a whit about laziness and I don't fetishize work or productivity. Speaking for myself, I'm lazy. If other people want to stay busy making the necessities of life for me while I dabble in my pleasures, I'm happy to do that. But if everyone does that, soon we have no one making the necessities of life, what to speak of all the other things we consume and enjoy. This society actually tolerates a fair amount of laziness if you have no dependents and can tolerate a marginal existence. Of course it's easier if you're a straight white man who knows how the middle class works and thinks. But there is a cost -- there's a marginal existence. In theory, there's a cost also to being a lazy worker next to productive workers. Often, especially in large offices, there isn't, and a minority of hard workers do a disproportionate share of the work. My question isn't whether a socialist society can make people hum like bees all day. It's whether there is a reason to work at all, and if so, what is it?

Rufus and Blake have tried to grapple with the question of authoritarianism. But I still don't see the economies functioning without some discipline.

I simply don't see how independent worker-owned enterprises can exist outside some kind of market. First, what prevents them from competing? Second, what if one workplace just produces crap? In Michael Albert's Parecon model, what determines HOW people use the information readily available to them? Can't they still make poor decisions, have shoddy work practices, and so on? And if so, what is the consequence of these?

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Originally posted by rasmus raven:

Rufus and Blake have tried to grapple with the question of authoritarianism. But I still don't see the economies functioning without some discipline.

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I think that there has to be some degree of discipline whatever the economic system. But to say that workers need to be threatened with job loss for lack of personal effort is old school thought on work place productivity even here in the west. Karl Polanyi said that in some ways, the free market model based on industrial production is more authoritarian than imperialism in that workers no longer have the option of living outside the system as agrarian farmers with the ability to feed ourselves by our own efforts. This was always an option for British peasants leading up to enclosure and Locke's private property laws.

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Originally posted by rasmus raven:

Rufus and Blake have tried to grapple with the question of authoritarianism. But I still don't see the economies functioning without some discipline.

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Sure, I'll buy that. Well, barring, again, certain sorts of ideal technologies which I don't really expect. For instance, the free software "economy" functions without discipline. But other economies can't do that unless energy, material resources and fabrication acquire the characteristics of software--that is, decentralized production requiring very little capital. That isn't likely to happen any time soon.
But "some discipline" and "the authoritarian state" can be a looong ways apart. The utterly stateless society may be implausible. The darned sight less state-ish society may not be. Degree is important.

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I simply don't see how independent worker-owned enterprises can exist outside some kind of market.

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Well . . . to take the Parecon thing, for a second. Note that I'm just paraphrasing here, and I do have reservations about some aspects of Parecon, especially in the area of individual incentives. But as I understand it, Albert's contention is that prices are just a way of signalling what people want and how badly they want it. The problem is that, while neoclassical economics tends to swear up and down that this signalling is perfect and somehow encapsulates all relevant information about the thing with the price, in real life it's not only imperfect but contains a number of systematic distortions--externalities, demand created through advertising, concealment of many kinds of relevant information, and so forth.
So he figures that what's needed to replace prices is a more direct, if somewhat more cumbersome, mechanism for people to signal their demands by simply saying what they want and how much, directly, and producers to say what they can arrange to produce--and all this to be mediated by a certain amount of information and/or requirements as to the nature of what's to be produced. So for instance, people can specify that what they're demanding is organic food. In the sense that demand is being communicated, it is in a way "some kind" of market--but it's skewed enough from what we think of as markets that it's reasonable to call it something else.
I won't get into the computer-mediated iterations of almost "bargaining" between producers and consumers because I don't completely understand them.
Now mind you, that bit just determines how much of what is going to be produced; it doesn't really determine which bits cost how much of your remuneration. I believe the plan involves things like prices, but with pro-rating built in such that, for instance, anything that causes environmental damage gets that added in so it's more expensive.

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First, what prevents them from competing?

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I'm not exactly sure if that would apply in the normal sense. For one thing, Albert envisions pay based purely on effort--hours worked. Period, full stop, the end. So it wouldn't really do you much good to "compete".
(Personally, while I can see his equity argument for that, I really think some incentives would be needed. Like, say you come up with a way to get an hour of your work done in forty minutes--at least you should be able to count that forty minutes as a full hour. If the other people adopt your method and become more productive, the co-op is ahead of the game even if you're working a bit less hard. If you don't at least get that, why bother doing things smarter?)

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Second, what if one workplace just produces crap?

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Actually, I don't think there's anything in the Parecon model that precludes brand loyalty. That is, I don't think there's anything to stop somebody from saying in their consumption projections "I want to get a bike, and specifically I want one from the Rugged Wheels co-operative, and definitely not from the Spokes of Straw co-operative". If you had a workplace, and nobody wanted any stuff from that workplace, then it would pretty much have to disband, I guess. The workers could go somewhere else that people had a heavy demand from.
I suppose theoretically some group could insist on producing stuff that the demand-bargaining wasn't asking for. But presumably that would be in some sense illegal--if there's a state there would be state-type repercussions, if not presumably the word would go out that their money's no good until they stop.

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In Michael Albert's Parecon model, what determines HOW people use the information readily available to them?

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Well, mostly they do, I guess.

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Can't they still make poor decisions,

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Oh, sure. But I think Albert figures that unlike owners, they don't actually have a vested interest in fucking things up. So distortions and screwups may exist, but in his opinion wouldn't be the kind of systematic distortions created by the current allocation and pricing methods.

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have shoddy work practices,

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Probably, although that depends just what's meant by "shoddy work practices". Two things about Parecon are relevant here. First, it is quite specific about work practices: Equal pay for equal amount of work. And, equal work, at least on an intra-firm basis and possibly on an economy-wide basis (I'm not quite clear about the intent here, and I can see some difficulties either way, nice though the basic idea is). That is, within a firm you don't have a janitor and a financial planner. You have people who each do a bit of cleaning, a bit of line production work, and a bit of empowering planning-type work. So, it's hard to create shoddy work practices in the sense of exploitation.
As to how that setup would be enforced--good question. The second relevant point is that Parecon is not explicitly anarchist--in fact, it is explicitly not a complete political economy, but solely an economic vision. So, just what political structures would be enforcing the economic institutions is open. No matter how cool one may think Parecon, it does not solve everything--it offers a possible egalitarian economy, but does not solve questions of politics, which in turn means that some questions around the edge involving regulation are not dealt with.

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And if so, what is the consequence of these?

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Well, if someone managed to have exploitative work practices and they didn't get shut down, presumably the "price" mechanism would involve marking that firm's goods more expensive to reflect it.

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I'm with skdadl -- we have to imagine alternatives, including transformative ones. But part of that is taking seriously the difficulties they pose.

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And I'd like to say that I respect your efforts to engage these questions seriously. I agree that there are problems. But you seem a little down, so I thought I'd take a relatively optimistic view, within vaguely realistic constraints, and try to cheer you up a bit.

My view is that it is almost certainly true that the ultimate pure social anarchy is not possible. But successive approximations are another matter. The goal for me is to arrange the institutions in such a way that the slippery slope turns the other way--so that rather than constantly fighting tooth and nail against the apparently irresistible encroachments of capital, endlessly eroding our hard-won gains and rights, instead it is capital that finds itself desperately swimming against a rising tide of egalitarian institutions and economics.

I think that's why I take such an interest in Free Software. It seems as if things are structured in software such that it is the big plutocrats who are floundering, trying tactic after tactic but unable to stop the progress of the free, open model. It's a commons that, far from being progressively enclosed, seems to sweep in like the tide to encroach more and more on the enclosed space. And tons of people advance it without even realizing they're doing anything ideological, just as in most of the world we find that we're collaborating with capitalism just by existing, whether we mean to or not. I want me some of that.
(I have a friend who jokes that Richard Stallman will be remembered as the man who created Communism in One Industry)

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Originally posted by Cueball:
Actually i would say the US military industrial complex is one of the worst examples of bad central planning and ineffieciency ever. They have managed to evolve this horendously complicated techno-warfare that is completely ineffiecient in the larger scheme of the actual conduct of warfare.

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Ah, but the capitalists know not to privatise the army. It would lead to low wages and shoddy uniforms - something along the lines of the Russian army before WWI when the Tsar rode to the front lines by train to war with his cousin, the Kaiser. And it was home again for the fearless leader on weekends to make woopee with his wife while soldiers went badly equipped. Many had no boots.

Kennedy's space program was another example. The American's didn't trust the free market model to beat the Russian's to the moon after they put Sputik and Gagarin in orbit, and this after the country was ripped apart by two world wars and civil war.

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RA:
I do not support a system of exploitation, I simply point out that the means that ara available today to those who seek power and exploitation of others, are vastly different than what was available for 100,000 years of tribal societies. Modern communiction, weapons and transportation allow those who seek power to enslave whole societies in a matter of just a few months or years. Those people will not go away. Without a government (actually) by and for the people, there is nothing stopping the greedy from making you their slave.

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Well first of all, one of the most important things that should be done is a complete dismanteling of the techniques of our opression as to not alow this to happen in the fist place. Besides the prime use of those biopolitical nightmares will be used to try to stop a revololtion. If the big R is succesfull, then these techniques, and the technocrats who wielded them will have been overcome and hopefully the social awareness of egalitarian and un-egalitarian techniques will be enough to ward them off. And as scary as the modern state is in sustaining blows, it has been shown that a good autonmous cell based tactic of strike(in connection with social struggle) can be enough to destroy this complex as we know it. There are unfortunately people(witnissed on this board) who still believe these inherently un-egalitarian techniques can be adjusted to a "better society". Starving Stalins and leaping Maos is what we got last time this was attempted.

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What exactly does this mean in practical terms with respect to investment,production and consumption?

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To start with, a regulatory and taxation regime that promotes the common good, including environmental sustainability, rather than protects narrow vested interests, or allows them to do what they wish at the expense of the rest of us and the environment.

My unanswered questions would still remain: what happens to people who don't work? How do they survive?

Related to that: what about what people WANT to do? Supposing people WANT to make or do something, but no one else wants to buy it, or at least knows they want to buy it? That is, is all the information going from potential buyer to producer?

Also, the computer communications model seems to me to ignore that it seems like a lot of work to input one's desires and so forth into it. (Why wouldn't apathy be a factor?) It presupposes people can enumate these effectively, and also that there will not be bias in the system in terms of whether a certain type of person is going to be better at expressing their wants (and therefore distorting the "market") than others, and likewise, there will be differences in how people use the information. Also, I assume there will be differences in capitalization cost. Are capital costs met based on anticipated sales as expressed in the information exchange?

I've sometimes wondered what the effects of similar ideas would be if applied on a smaller scale in the existing economy. For example, if you forced hedge funds and derivatives traders to reveal their positions daily, the business would likely dry up. In part it exists because of information inefficiencies that allow those with privileged access to information to get an edge in market bets. Capitalist ideologues call speculation of this sort "stabilizing" in the overall market. But would greater transparency be more or less stabilizing? Much of the current system while relying ideologically on models of the market that presuppose free access to information, is in fact built around closely guarding and protecting information sources.