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Socialist Anarchism
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Do you have a critique of capitalism that doesn't feature worn-out clichés involving oppressed workers, and people forced to slave away at the hands of their whip-cracking capitalist overlords?
No, that's capitalism
I'm not quite sure what you're on about here, to be honest.
I expected as much.Hold on - we've been told that there's no such thing as money in anarcho-socialist land, just how are workers remunerated?
Depends, under syndicalism they could be payed via labor token, or conceivably have value sent to a credit account. Before making misinformed comments however - note that is not the same as money as a medium of exchange.:rolleyes:
Ah yes, roll-eyes, an attempt to divert attention from the fact that your incapable of debate - cute.Then you'll have no trouble pointing out the millions of deaths you believe to have happened as a result of free-market capitalism, right?
Free market capitalism has never existed - its a Utopian abstraction . I can give a figure for deaths caused by existing capitalism however
This is a joke, right? You linked a piece of propaganda YouTube video which showed some happy-go-lucky workers defending a factory that they forcefully took control of. Did you notice the light-hearted soft rock music that was played everytime they showed the busy worker-bees going about their work with not a care in world? I thought it was a cute touch. If anything more than a two-bit company was run in this manner, I'd give it about two weeks before the whole system imploded.
Ship building and Hospitals aren't exactly ''two bit operations'', nor does every industry in Catalonia qualify as a ''handful''. The factory takeovers in Argentina double every year - and have proven so far successful with regards productive output. Denial of reality satisfies your ideological dogmatism it would seem, typical libertarian cultist dementia. Now do you want to actually respond to my examples or will you ''as I suspect'' make another sarcastic remark in order to mask your intellectual bankruptcy ?
And you have yet to answer my question - can you provide me with one functioning historical example of libertarian capitalism ?I'm sure "Heyek" is rolling in his grave at this definition of capitalism.
Hayek is dead and if there's an afterlife hes probably in allot of pain somewhere.To be honest, I see little point in trying to have an informed debate with someone who merely regurtitates convoluted Marxist rhetoric, and believes that welfare is synonymous with capitalism.
Likewise I don't see the point in debating someone who is incapable of understanding relatively simple economic arguments - then uses their intellectual shortcoming as an excuse to accuse their opponent of being ''convoluted'' and using ''Marxist rhetoric''.0 -
donegalfella wrote: »This post has been deleted.
Donegalfella - speaking from a position of ignorance as usual. Free advice - next time you try intellectual inteimdation make sure theres no who actually understands your position on the opposing side
The economic calculation argument is finished, and we won. While you are correct that In the case of gaussian elimination we would run into overt complexity, socialist theorists in the field of mathematics and computer science have simplified the labor value problem. The method of successive approximation is used in place of gaussian elimination - in which case using modern computers labor values for entire national economies can be calculated in a few minutes (rather than thousands of years). This is what happens when you don't keep up to date with your opponents theoretical advancements.
BTW - I love Mises commentary of colonialism, the fact that he refuses to equate it with capitalist development is a clear illustration of his warped interpritation of history.0 -
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The news may not yet have reached the pages of the Socialist Weekly, but it's rather common knowledge nowadays that the Austrians persevered in the socialist calculation debate. It is their position—that planned economies fail due to the lack of price information—that mainstream economists now accept to be correct.
Please neo-kaynsianism is on the verge of going mainstream - and they generally laugh at Austrians. The economic calculation argument while interesting, doesn't apply to models of stagnant economy ect. It is by and large an argument against command economies - regardless of their political underpinnings. It correctly identifies the problem of assigning value to capital goods and the issue of scale in calculation. Thankfully mises arguments have been refutedAgain, can we have some references for these "theoretical advancements"?
Cockshott - Towards a new socialism
The problem of scale
In his book The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983), Alec Nove emphasized the importance of the sheer scale of modern economies. He said that the Soviet economy included some 12 million distinct types of product, and quoted the estimate of one O. Antonov that to draw up a complete and balanced plan for the Ukraine would take the labour of the whole world’s population over a 10 million year period. The same argument may apply to computing labour values. It is one thing to solve the equations for our toy example of an input–output table. It would be quite a different thing to solve a system of 12 million simultaneous equations.
But it is not enough just to say that calculating labour values for a large economy is complex, we have to know how complex it is. The estimate quoted by Nove gives an impression of vast and unmanageable complexity, and seems to close off the question from further discussion. (We should point out that Nove is by no means alone in making this sort of claim. Such arguments are quite routine amongst opponents of socialism. We cite Nove in order to show that even leftleaning economists tend to throw up their hands at the complexity of socialist planning.) But what we need is an account of the laws which govern how long it takes to compute labour values for economies of different degrees of complexity. It may be impossibly difficult to prepare the plan (or to calculate labour values) by manual methods, but it does not follow that it would be impossible using 3This is obviously a very simple input–output table, having only two inputs and two outputs, while a real economy would have hundreds of thousands of commodities. But whatever the scale of the economy the mathematical principles are the same. From an input–output
table a set of linear equations can be derived of the form:
L1 + I11v1 + I12v2 + I13v3 + · · · + I1nvn = Q1v1
L2 + I21v1 + I22v2 + I23v3 + · · · + I2nvN = Q2v2
Ln + In1v1 + In2v2 + In3v3 + · · · + Innvn = Qnvn where Li is the amount of direct labour used in the ith industry; Iij is the quantity of industry j’s output used in the ith industry; vi is the per-unit labour content of the product of the ith industry; and Qi is the total output of the ith industry. We have n equations and n unknowns: the vi’s. Since there is the same number of independent equations as unknowns we can in principle solve for the vi’s. But these are the labour contents of all of the goods, which is what we were looking for.
48 Chapter 3. Work, Time and Computers
To decide on this we need to establish quantitative relationships between the scale of the economy to be planned and the amount of computer time that will be required. The time that it takes to perform calculations is studied by a branch of computer science called complexity theory.
The idea of complexity Complexity theory deals with the number of discrete steps that are required to perform a calculation. These discrete steps correspond roughly to the number of instructions that would have to be executed in a computer program that performed the calculation. As an example consider this problem. You are given a deck of 99 cards. Each card has a number between 1 and 99 printed on it. The cards are in an arbitrary order. You have to sort them into ascending order. How do you proceed? One solution applies these rules. (1) Compare the first card in the deck with the second. If the first has a higher number than the second, swap them round. (2) Repeat step 1 with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th pairs of cards, etc., till you reach the end of the deck. (3) If you found that the deck was in the right order, then stop, otherwise go back to step 1.
How long will this take to sort the deck? That depends upon the original order of the deck. The best case would be if the deck was sorted to begin with, then a single pass through the deck, performing 98 comparisons, will be enough. The worst case is if the deck is originally in descending order. You now have to reverse the order. The first card you look at has the number 99 on it. Step 1 moves it to position 2 in the deck, step 1 is then repeated until we reach the end of the deck. Each time, the card with 99 on it is moved along one position.
Eventually after 98 repetitions it arrives at the back of the deck. It follows that a single pass through the deck will move one card into the correct position. We have 99 cards in the wrong position to start with. So we will need 99 passes through the deck. This involves 99 × 98 comparisons. If we had 50 cards it would take 49 × 50 steps. The number of operations in the worst case will be about n2 where n is the number of cards. In computing we say that this technique is of time order n2. This means that the time to solve the problem can, as a rough order of magnitude be assumed to be the square of n.
There is a better solution.
(1) Divide the deck into 10 stacks depending upon whether the last digit on the card is 0,1,2, . . . or 9. (2) Form a new deck by putting these stacks one behind the other starting with stack 0 and ending with stack 9. (3) Starting from the bottom of the deck, re-divide it into 10 stacks depending upon the first digits on the cards. (4) Repeat step 2. The deck is now sorted.
The problem of scale 49
Using the second method we only have to look at each card twice. The number of steps is thus 2n where n is the number of cards. This is clearly a much faster method than the previous one. We say that it is of time order n. Problems of time order n are easier than those of time order n2. The worst problems are ones that require an exponential number of steps for their solution. Exponential problems are generally considered too complex for practical computation except for very small n. In looking at the problem of economic planning and the feasibility of performing the necessary calculations on computers, we have to determine the time order of the computations involved and the size of the input data (n).
Simplifying the labour value problem Let us return to the problem of calculating the labour values of all the commodities in an economy. The conditions of production can be represented as an input–output table, and from this table a set of equations can be derived, as in the examples above. In principle, these are clearly solvable—we have the same number of equations as we have unknown labour values to solve for. The question is whether the system is practically solvable. The standard method of solving simultaneous equations is Gaussian elimination. 4 It is equivalent to the school textbook method. This method yields an exact solution in a running time proportional to the cube of the number of equations (see Sedgewick, 1983, chapter 5).5
Let us suppose that the number of distinct types of output in the economy to be planned is of the order of a million (106). In that case the Gaussian elimination method applied to the input–output table would require 106 cubed or 1018 (a million million million) iterations, each of which might contain ten primitive computer instructions. Suppose we can run the problem on a modern Japanese supercomputer such as the Fujitsu VP200 or the Hitachi S810/20, then how long will it take? These machines are capable of performing around 200 million arithmetic operations per second when working on large volumes of data (see Lubeck et al., 1985).6 So the time taken to compute all of the labour values of the economy would be on the order of 50 billion seconds or 16 thousand years. Rather obviously, this is far too slow. When one runs into a scale problem like this it is often convenient to reformulate the task in different terms. The input–output table for an economy is in 4We start off with n equations in n unknowns. These can be reduced to n − 1 equations in n − 1 unknowns by adding appropriate multiples of the nth equation to each of the first n−1 equations. This step is then iterated until eventually we have 1 equation in 1 unknown.
This is immediately soluble. We then back-substitute this result in the immediately preceding system of 2 equations in 2 unknowns, and so on. 5 The intuition behind this is simple. For each of the variables eliminated we must perform n(n − 1) multiplications. There are n variables to eliminate, hence the complexity of the problem is of order n3.6It should be borne in mind that computer technology has advanced considerably since the mid ’80s. By the mid 1990s manufacturers hope to deliver machines capable of about 1 million million operations per second.
50 Chapter 3. Work, Time and Computers
practice likely to be mostly blanks. In reality each product has on average only a few tens or at most hundreds of inputs to its production rather than a million. This makes it more economical to represent the system in terms of a vector of lists rather than a matrix. In consequence, there are short-cuts which can be taken to arrive at a result. We can use another approach, that of successive approximation.
The idea here is that as a first approximation we ignore all inputs to the production process apart from directly expended labour. This gives us a first, approximate estimate of each product’s labour value. It will be an underestimate because it ignores the non-labour inputs to the production process. To arrive at our second approximation we add in the non-labour inputs valued on the basis of the labour values computed in the first phase. This will get us one step closer to the true labour values. Repeated application of this process will give us the answer to the desired degree of accuracy. If about half the value of an average product is derived from direct labour inputs then each iteration round our approximation process will add one binary digit of significance to our answer. An answer correct to four significant decimal digits (which is better than the market can achieve) would require about 15 iterations round our approximation process.
The time order complexity of this algorithm7 is proportional to the number of products times the average number of inputs per product, times the desired accuracy of the result in digits. On our previous assumptions this could be computed on a supercomputer in a few minutes, rather than the thousands of years required for Gaussian elimination0 -
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they point out that a socialist economy has no way of generating the required data in the first place. The latter is their killer point, and the socialists have no answer for it.
The data processing capacity exists, your implying that we lack sufficient data gathering capacity, an argument that's both outdated and false. Modern communication technology allows consumption patterns to be tracked in real time - something the capitalist market falls short on, contemporary planning would outperform the market in meeting consumer demand due to the ability to gather once dispersed data at a faster rate. Some large supermarkets use this technology and it works with great precision, consider utilizing it for an entire economy. Measurement of consumer behavior can make very accurate predictions for demand. As for your referral to meteorological modeling - this further weakens your case given its increased advancements over time.
Austrians also ''assume'' subjective valuation to be the only means of finding costs, which leads them to make silly statements like (we cant avail of the all sufficient info) . Market prices are not required to ''rationally'' make social decisions, despite what the hacks over mises.org tell you. I mean do you seriously think we would be making roads out of gold in the absence of market price ? - socially necessary labor time encapsulated in the product via code problem solved. Another problem that emerges is differing definitions, you make no real distinction between the terms profitability and rationality which leads you to believe that (human action) in absence of market prices will be irrational, which is nonsense when we remove the idiosyncratic re-definition. Using machinery that requires high energy costs to undertake a task that could have been done with a smaller machine may be profitable, in that the machine used may have been cheaper on the market due to overproduction, however its not rational or efficient in terms of energy wasted.
Here's more refutation of the calculation argument http://www.cvoice.org/cv3cox.htmIf we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic.
And so, Hayek signs the death warrant of Austrian dogma 0 -
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There you go again, conflating life with the 'free market.'donegalfella wrote: »This post has been deleted.
Even if producers and consumers need to plan consumption and production, that still leaves plenty of room for individuals to act spontaniously. And such planning needs to occor in capitalism too in order for the services and consumer items to be available to use in the first place, the only difference is the mechanism by which those plans are decided.
Impulse buying on the other hand is something we can mostly do without I think, and as it stands, it's a brand new invention, didn't exist 100 years ago, and there is a new industry designed by psychology experts to manipulate people into making rush decisions to spend money they can't afford on things they don't need.
The latter is people coming together in careful consideration of the facts and reasoning out a solution to a problem. In free markets, it's millions of people acting on their own, and solutions happening all by themselves. Haphazard, unregulated and it would probably end up looking something like thisBuying a new pair of shoes, or buying your kid an ice cream cone, is not exactly the same thing as forming a lynch mob, is it?! On this note, I don't really see all that much difference between "mob rule" and your vision of everything being decided by the "democratic will of the collective." Isn't the latter simply a more polite version of the former?
The federations of cooperatives. You claim that only capitalism can produce these things, but the USSR managed to get the man in space and their fighter jets were every bit as good as the capitalist U.S. planes. I'm not saying that central planning is a good alternative, but it does refute your premise that only markets can allocate the resources required for the production of highly complicated machines.Communities may be able to plan for some of their basic needs—but your model of community planning doesn't scale up. Where are the airplanes going to come from? The CAT scanners? The arthritis medications? Hi-fi systems and microwaves and mobile phones and computers? All of these things can't be produced at the community level.
What happens when I go down to my local capitalist shop and order those exact same things. I too am told to feck off because I can't afford any of them. You want the freedom to consume luxury items that only the richest 1% can afford. That is the freedom your capitalist utopia provides for.So what happens when I go down to my socialist ordering facility and place orders for a grand piano, a collection of single-malt whiskeys, an Armani suit, a surround-sound entertainment system, a home gym, and a Lamborghini? I'll simply be told to feck off, yes? In other words, the producers are not simply going to produce whatever the consumers want.
In anarcho socialism, businesses don't provide the dynamism, the people do. In capitalsim, only the owners of capital get to decide what is a good idea and what is a bad idea (and their decision is usually based on what will make them the most profit)And isn't this all part of the market discovery process? The 20 percent of businesses that do survive will help to reshape the economy, making it healthy and dynamic, and keeping established firms on their toes. Once you stop people from launching new businesses, you've already created stagnancy.
Look at the dragons den. You have people who work extremely hard to bring a product from concept to development, they do hundreds or thousands of hours of work. They go looking for investment, the 'dragons' take 30% of their company for the sacrifice of a few hours of work and a small percentage of their disposable income, and if the idea is a good one, but the 'dragon' can't see it making them a profit (if it's break even perhaps) there will be no investment and the idea is rejected.
So what?Any the consumer can only know what he himself wants—that's the problem. Not to mention the fact that his wants change from week to week, even hour to hour.
I have linked to loads of information that shows that cooperatives are at least as efficient as corporations that you probably have no intention of reading. (it would affect yor ability to make blanket assertions like 'socialism is always inefficient")If you're concerned about people's time and resources, why advocate socialism? Socialist economies have always proven themselves to be dreadfully inefficient and unproductive—so why call for it as a solution to the alleged inefficiencies of the free market? In the market's rush for profits, he who wins is going to be the one who made the best use of time and resources, hence there is always a tendency towards greater efficiency and productivity.
The 'true value of things'? Who cares what the picasso is 'worth' unless you're only interested in selling it for a profit.Just one question—how do you derive "the true value of things," if not through trade and speculation? If I have a Picasso hanging on my wall, how do I know what it is worth? In a free-market economy, I could ask an art dealer, and he could make a valuation based on what other people have recently paid for similar art works in the speculative art market. In your economy, I wouldn't have that ability. So how much is my Picasso worth?
The market doesn't price the true 'value' of things. It prices how much someone is willing to pay for something, and one of the biggest distortions of this value is speculation. The picasso might be a terrible piece of art, it might be the worst painting he ever made, it might be a fake, but if a bunch of speculators get the idea into their head that the painting definitely will increase in value, then they will pay a very high price for it.
What was the true 'value' of all those tulips? What was the true 'value' of a share of a start up internet company in 1999 that had never earned a penny in revenue? What is the true 'value' of a shoebox apartment in a village in the commuter belt?
When resources are scarce, they would be allocated to where they are needed the most rather than to whichever individual or group can afford to pay the highest price for them.And can you explain exactly how socialists allocate scarce resources? I've never understood this—other than vague gestures towards the idea that there never would be any scarcities.
When there is not enough to go around, some people will have to do without. A fair distribution system would have to be devised (lottery, or to those most in need first for example) And re hyperbole, it's nothing of the sort. Under the current system there are people having banquets and throwing away vast quantities of perfectly good food because they can afford to, while others are dying of starvation and suffering from malnutritionBut what happens when you don't have enough to go around, no matter how clever your calculations or intelligent your allocations? Nice hyperbole at the end, btw!0 -
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But the above seems to signal a real distrust for the principles of emergent order. You seem to be saying that the hand of the regulator is absolutely essential, or else people will immediately start doing things that are ugly, nonsensical, and plain daft. In other words, you don't trust people to make good choices when left up to their own devices.
Its about co-ordination, when people not communicating with each other are all undertaking completely separate projects conflict emerges between opposing interests and problems occur due to lack of organization. If people come together and decide on a set of general targets - then the overall situation will be better. Your also creating a false dichotomy, peoples ''individual choice'' may be to enter into collective proceeds.Well, you do have to admit that American cars were a hell of a lot better than Soviet cars The Soviets cared about getting into space, building nuclear bombs, and fighting wars, and so they devoted resources disproportionately to those things. They didn't generally care so much about providing things that most people wanted and needed—thus the rampant shortages that plagued their system.).
From a previous post - where your historical distortions on the USSR where exposed
Did the USSR fail ? Well lets look at the facts. The liberal assertion that the USSR was a failure is predicated upon its being compared economically with the USA or Europe within a given time frame - a ridiculous comparison in that that these areas had been developed prior - you would have to go back about 800 years before both economies where alike. The rational comparison would be to look at nations that were similar to the soviet states in 1910 and compare their level of development in 1990. So we could compare Russia and Brazil or Bulgaria and Guatemala ect. Brazil for example should be a wealthy nation given its vast natural resources - peace ect (Russia being destroyed by world wars). Brazil is actually better equipped to develop than Russia ever was. Theirs a reason no-one undertakes the above comparison - because the result exposes liberal sophistry.
For Brazil about 5-10% of the population enjoy a high living standard, however the remaining 80% live in conditions comparable with central Africa. For the vast majority of Brazilians Soviet Russia would have looked like heaven. In fact when you look at the rate of industrial development within the USSR - it surpasses that of the developed western world. Living standards shot up from around 1917 - 1950 in terms of average income. The economy stagnated around the mid 60s until its collapse. Now if we compare living standards from the last period of the soviet regime - to the period of economic liberalization we see something very interesting, massive reduction in living standards and an increase in poverty levels. UNICEF documented half a million additional deaths a year in Russia alone due to the implementation of capitalist reform, or more accurately the removal of social supports and price controls. In the Czech Rep poverty went from 5.7% in 1989 to 18.2% in 1992. In Poland during the same period from 20% -40%. The massive votes retained by the eastern European communist parties aren't hard to explain at all in light of the facts - with the Russian CP alone averaging with roughly a third of the vote. Some months ago Moldova voted the communist party back into power. Now its often thrown around by misinformed liberals that this is due to the ''youth vote'' - who had no experience of soviet misery. The truth is actually the opposite - the majority of communist party voters are the elderly. So did the USSR fail ? - well the USSR had internal problems - social repression, difficulty with adequate production esp in the form of consumer goods ect. However its clear that it resulted in a higher standard of living than economic liberalism would have provided within the given time span.Second, the foundations of the Nordic electronics industry was laid by companies like Nokia and Eriksson long before the advent of protectionist socialism. And thirdly, I'm not saying that only free-market economies can produce complex machinery.
From a previous post - where your historical distortions on Sweden where exposed
The implimentation of protectionism via tariffs started in 1816. The tariffs where dropped and the market progressively liberalized from 1830 until around 1857. In 1880 the free market experiment ended and protectionism was re-enacted in response to american competition in agriculture. In 1892 further protectionist tariffs and gov subsidies where set up around industry esp engineering, consequently leading to high growth. None of this can be described as ''liberal'' economic policy.
The speed of economic development is always higher during industrialization, developed nations invariably experience lower rates of growth. Moreover, 1946-1969 saw great economic and social development, very low unemployment - this period is known as the post war boom. Sweden ranked 3rd place in per capita GDP by 1970.
LOL - (Some free advise) - Lying will always get you into trouble.
From 1976-1982 the ''liberal'' moderate party where in power, privatization and deregulation were enacted. The liberals took power again from 1991-1994. The crisis of the 1990s was not ''caused'' by a comprehensive social welfare system seeing as the economy had performed optimally under successive tax hikes. What actually caused the crisis was sub-prime lending, eventually cumulating in a vast credit bubble. Liberalization of the financial sector ? - hmmm, I wonder who did that. The crisis that ensued caused massive unemployment and put great pressure on the welfare system. Bourgeoisie propagandists responded ''as they do'' by blaming the (welfare state) for the crash that they caused. Like all crashes - the upper class are provided with an excuse to push their liberal agenda and appropriate public assets at ''friendly'' rates, what were once tax burdens now transform into sites of investment and profitability.I disagree. People in this thread and the other have found tons of problems with this "cooperative structure." The general consensus seems to be that it sounds fine in theory but can never, ever work in practice.
Evidence as to why no-one should really bother arguing with libertarian cult members - ''Economic theories can never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. All that we can and must verify is the presence of our assumptions in the particular case" - Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order. In other words when reality disproves Austrian theory ''reality must be wrong'' LOL 0 -
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