|
Barrels of oil are an actual commodity without dispute (I hope) and you can't just run out there and buy one like a loaf of bread in the grocers; they're subject to intense transport and logistical requirements, both regulatory and de facto. The oil sits happily in a silo and does not much move or change form in its relationship to the means of production, whilst its ownership, and derivatives on its ownership, might change hands many times between stakeholders. It might not even change actual ownership much (e.g. commodity fund buys a chunk of it, and then it is the derived ownership in the fund that flies through the ledger). Shuffling the labels so that the main derivative is sovereign debt, and whereby the decisions within the going concern are premised on separable tradeoffs subject to constraints, or binding agreements between subordinate departments, doesn't seem to me to be a change in nature. And in practice national healthcare delivery is devolved to a level far below even that, and devolved entities have some discretion on the disposal of their grants, and they mainly use this discretion as a market agent: making tradeoffs subject to budgetary constraints. Although the Soviet system in the Stalin period nominally avoided the concept of rate of return, interest rates, etc., the mandate to plan resources efficiently eventually innovated a concept of a "payoff period", because the social planner still has to decide how to deploy productive and scarce capital over time, and the payoff period measured the time duration for a given investment project to recover its inputs. This figure is not denominated in money and so avoided any capitalist taint, but mathematically it's just the inverse of an interest rate! (see also: LV Kantorivich's work in Soviet planning). There is no deep difference between a market and a shadow market if all of the participants, in the ideology of the day, go on to formulate prices or shadow prices respectively, and justify their decisions by appealing to these tradeoffs. The outcome is going to be, more or less, a market in a thing experienced and consumed as an alienated commodity; the underlying political struggle is about pecuniary externalities and allocations instead. ronya fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Jun 5, 2019 |
#
?
Jun 5, 2019 08:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 15:02 |
|
|
i think perhaps there's a disagreement here over what a commodity is - obviously even a 'pure' planned economy would need to do some accounting to deal with change in value over time, and this will include some level of abstraction, but simply imposing budgetary constraints does not, as i understand the term, a commodity make - you need some profit motive for that the point about people choosing their careers seems like an enormous underestimation of the coercive power of the market system and educational impulses - the social costs are unemployment instead of being sent to siberia for choosing the wrong career, but those costs are still entirely real and there is very limited 'choice' in the matter. this might be me going full foucault, though e. that is to say, being a commodity is more a relationary property and less an intrinsic property on the part of an object. the barrel of oil can be a commodity and usually is, but once it's removed from a market (say it's left in chernobyl or w/e and made permanently inaccessible) it stops being a commodity, because it's no longer able to fulfil that function V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Jun 5, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2019 08:20
|
|
