Karl Barks posted:

I've posted this a few times, and I'm just going to keep posting it!

https://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black


read on to find out!!

rudatron posted:

Demand, in terms of total production, is unbounded. Even if you assume consumption can be satiated (it can't, it simply shifts into ever more expensive products), collective projects such as spaceflight or whatever will always exist as a sink of production - the limit factoring is not demand, but supply. Surplus will always be sought because it's the object of production, and that's the same under both socialism and capitalism. You're better off leaving it as a conversation about externalities, 'costs versus gain' doesn't work.

Karl Barks posted:

I've posted this a few times, and I'm just going to keep posting it!

https://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black


read on to find out!!

Larry Parrish posted:

i generally think the people who want to abolish money and wages and stuff are masturbatory navel gazers. money and even limited markets are an easy way to handle resource distribution between individuals or small groups for the foreseeable future. unless one of you utopian communists sees a way around scarcity without inventing clean fusion power and a space elevator. that said the way forward from capitalism is decommodifying everything it takes to achieve a decent living. we will always have limited luxuries and personally I think the best way to distribute that is a market economy instead of like, rationing them out as equitably as possible. So even if we aren't paying for houses and healthcare and food and stuff out of our wages, how do you handle people who want cigarettes still? How do you handle people who want to go camping or on road trips. I guess some of the insane tankies online think there just shouldn't be anything that isn't provided to everyone equally but the truth is people want different things, and I'm ok with people getting my share of caviar or whatever

rudatron posted:

planned obsolescence takes advantage of the ignorance of consumers to extract money from them - since they cannot, at a glance, immediately determine how long an object will last, they have no way of distinguishing an under-manufactured item from simply a cheap (ie efficient) item, and so simply follow the consumer logic of 'buy cheaper'. It comes from the power difference between consumers and producers, not proof of limited demand. Demand is unbounded, but in this case, consumers cannot satisfy their demand (of good products), but producers can (more money for us, gently caress you), because of that power difference.

rudatron posted:

aren't you also confusing 'surplus' as 'difference between costs of production and gain in value' and 'excess commodities that cannot be sold because of low marginal value'? realizing 'social utility' necessarily requires surplus, and whether you get that surplus from 'increased gains' or 'lower costs' is irrelevant.

comedyblissoption posted:

You can do equitable distribution and production for some necessities and markets for others (e.g. caviar). The case for abolishing markets for housing, healthcare, and food is overwhelming.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Ruzihm posted:

Love to make caviar factory workers compete for wages when an alternative exists for other workers

rudatron posted:

but that's not proof of consumer's 'low demand', but of the ability of producers to deny consumers realization of their demand, by taking advantage of their ignorance/powerlessness. It's equivalent to rent-seeking - just because landlords often refuse to maintain their properties, and tenants have to live in filth, doesn't mean that some tenants don't want to live in filth.

comedyblissoption posted:

what if you have at least one idiot fucker that demands dominion over the entire universe and anything outside of that

rudatron posted:

the article is also very very wrong - price signals aren't distorted because of 'noise', but because they represent an entirely different thing, exchange value, not use value. it's also absurd to call a system with government-backed finance as 'socialism' - so long as you have private accumulation, you will have Jeff Bezos, and so long as you have Bezos, you have corruption, income inequality, and capitalism.

quote:

How should these socialized firms actually be governed? A complete answer to that question lies far beyond the scope of an essay like this; minutely describing the charters and bylaws of imaginary enterprises is exactly the kind of Comtist cookshop recipe that Marx rightly ridiculed. But the basic point is clear enough: since these firms buy and sell in the market, their performance can be rationally judged. A firm could be controlled entirely by its workers, in which case they could simply collect its entire net income, after paying for the use of the capital.2 Or it could be “owned” by an entity in the socialized capital market, with a management selected by that entity and a strong system of worker co-determination to counterbalance it within the firm. Those managers and “owners” could be evaluated on the relative returns the firm generates, but they would have no private property rights over the absolute mass of profits.3If expectations of future performance needed to be “objectively” judged in some way, that is something the socialized capital markets could do.

Such a program does not amount a utopia; it does not proclaim Year Zero or treat society as a blank slate. What it tries to do is sketch a rational economic mechanism that denies the pursuit of profit priority over the fulfillment of human needs. Nor does it rule out further, more basic changes in the way humans interact with each other and their environment — on the contrary, it lowers the barriers to further change.

comedyblissoption posted:

I'm not saying markets are good. I'm saying that for someone that thinks markets are necessary, you can more easily convince them that we should at least abolish markets for necessities and you can still preserve markets for other things. Thinking you can only have markets and not-markets is a false dichotomy.

Ruzihm posted:

Labor power is a necessity so I'm curious how that market can be abolished while wages are still being paid

comedyblissoption posted:

note that I personally think markets suck, but you can certainly imagine a mixed market and non-market economy

Karl Barks posted:

you don't have to imagine it, it's called china

rudatron posted:

It's the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, necessitating infinite growth for system stability, that engenders systemic collapse in capitalism, not the pursuit of surplus production, which is what any rational organism will do. In a time of crises, when production has to contract, then it has to contract, but that doesn't mean that demand disappears or has been short-circuited. Moreover, you inability to realize your demand, because you lack units of exchange, is irrelevant to this discussion, because you being poor is the reason can't realize that demand, not that demand is bounded.

Infernot posted:

Some of you really can't imagine a society post-capitalism considering you're describing features of capitalism and how they could be good for socialism. Calling anything that seeks to move past this as utopian is so smooth brain it hurts to read. Thinking of commodities as simply luxury items misses the whole analysis of capitalism that people like Marx did. That also applies over to anyone who thinks money is bad without understanding why money is bad in the first place (I suggest reading Capital I to find out).

Infernot posted:

Some of you really can't imagine a society post-capitalism considering you're describing features of capitalism and how they could be good for socialism. Calling anything that seeks to move past this as utopian is so smooth brain it hurts to read. Thinking of commodities as simply luxury items misses the whole analysis of capitalism that people like Marx did. That also applies over to anyone who thinks money is bad without understanding why money is bad in the first place (I suggest reading Capital I to find out).

rudatron posted:

but that's a different problem entirely - over-exploiting resources or environmental destruction is a net loss of social utility, and so a rational system will not do it, because it seeks the greater surplus between productive costs and gains. And demand exists independent of the ability to realize it (supply), an increase in total production allows more total demand to be realized, but the demand itself is always unbounded, because wants cannot be satiated.

comedyblissoption posted:

lets say the state completely nationalizes healthcare, food, housing and their labor allocation and distribution completely devoid of market distribution

the state can just create money for the workers involved in these enterprises that they can use in the market for caviar with caviar producers

note that I personally think markets suck, but you can certainly imagine a mixed market and non-market economy

Karl Barks posted:

so inteligent... rotating a post-capitalist society hypercube in my mind

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

THERE ARE FOUR CORNERS OF PRODUCTION IN A SINGLE LABOR DAY. FOUR STAGES OF PRODUCTION. THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION IS QUADRILATERAL. IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS THEN YOU'VE BEEN EDUCATED BOURGEOIS!!!

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

THERE ARE FOUR CORNERS OF PRODUCTION IN A SINGLE LABOR DAY. FOUR STAGES OF PRODUCTION. THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION IS QUADRILATERAL. IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS THEN YOU'VE BEEN EDUCATED STUPID!!!