Market socialism

[Grave Disorder]

I doubt that anyone can deny that capitalism, despite it's inhumanity, is at least a productive system. My question is, does anyone here believe that this productivity could be retained in a genuinely equitable society, and if so how? Even Marcuse didn't (maybe couldn't) elaborate on how technological progress would be maintained at a rapid rate in a socialist socety as he claimed, can anyone here explain how it could be so without the accelerating effect of competition?

[Paul Smith]

Greetings comrade

Productive in that it produces comodities.  Well I think that's hard to deny comrade!

Marx and Engels both covered your main point if memory serves me I don't have any quotes to hand.

But basically labour would become "life's prime want".  There is a wealth of historical evidence to back this up, numerous societies back this up.  

This is where the bourgeois "human nature" argument falls to bits, it takes no regard of the mass of historical evidence that proves "human nature" is not fixed by absolute boundries.

They lack dialetical thinking.

We simply need to be freed from wage slavary!

You must remember that labouring in say 150 years time (or sooner) or whenever ;) will be completely different to how it is now, no longer the torture it is now, we won't need to be forced into doing it or face starvation, we'll do it because we want to do it!

They would progress productivity, technology etc, simply as it would allow them to produce more, quicker and easier.  Capitalism does it so it can extract more surplus value.  We do it so we can spend more time sleeping. ;)

Comradely, Paul Smith.

[csepel]

we must always remember that there is no an abstract overhistorical productivy. efficiency in capitalism cannot be easily compared with efficiency of other social societies.

first of all, efficiency in capitalism something like social efficiency doesn't exist. every producer has it efficiency. and if we put the single efficiencies togheter we can discover that they do not sum but on the contrary are harmful each other.
for example you can have a factory that produces very efficiently cars, another factory that produces very efficiently tires but the tires are not made for the cars, so even if the single factories are very efficient, the overall efficiency is very low.

secondly, efficiency deals with the relations between input and output. well, there are a lot of input the capitalist doesn't pay for. consider two identic factories: one drops its toxic waste in a river, the other processes them and make them non toxic. which is the more efficient factory? capitalistic speaking, the first one (it can sell the product at a lesser cost), but socially speaking the second one.

thirdly, under capitalism there are entire branches of production very efficient but completely useless on a social level (financial industry, military spending, etc.). I think that more than 30% of the workforce in the advanced economies is now employed in these sectors. the statistics consider these sectors to be very productive and profitable. but this is a nonsense, they waste the surplus value produced by the true productive sectors of the economy. they are no more productive than a prostitute or a clown.

therefore, when considering the statistics about capitalism efficiency we must be very careful not to fall in their propaganda.

[redjordi]

Hi GD,

You are right in a sense when you say that under capitalism competition between different capitalist firms drives the productive forces forward, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. [...] Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air

However, the free market which characterised the early stages of capitalism has long ceased to exist and has been replaced by monopoly capitalism. Free competition between different capitalis entrerprises has been severely limited by the existence of big monopolies which control most of trade and industry. And this rather than having a progressive effect on the revolutionising of production has a reactionary one. If Microsoft dominates most of the world market for computer software there is hardly any incentive for innovation. In fact most Microsoft products are thrown into the market in an unfinished form and people have not much option but to buy them (open source software is limited to a small minority in the consumer software end of things).

Capitalism in fact has ceased to be progressive long time ago, in the sense that the conditions of social production created by it have long gone beyond the private appropiation pattern inherent in capitalism.

The second part of your question is how can technological progress be maintained under socialism without the accelerating effects of competition. That is actually a very important question. And the answer is that only workers' democracy, that is the democratic participation of working people in the running of the economy at all levels can guarantee that. In fact the collapse of the Soviet Union is a negative demonstration of this. The bureaucratic planning of the economy by a bunch of central plan bureaucrats in Moscow became more and more of a fetter over the development of the productive forces.

At the beginning of the SU, when it was a relatively straight froward task of developing heavy industry, bureaucratic planning could cope more or less well. Rates of growth and technological development were very fast (indeed much faster than any capitalis economy at any time in history). However, when the task became more complex, that is the production of hundreds of thousands of consumer goods, bureaucratic planning proved completely unable to deal with it.

Only the democratic participation of the workers themselves in the planning of the economy, and thus in the distribution of surplus value created, would provide the kind of incentive that would maintain (and even speed up) technological advance.

[Grave Disorder]

Yeah, I see your point about modern capitalism rapidly becoming stagnant in some areas, although I don't agree that it is quite so sluggis as you said, or at least not yet. As for your point about democratic worker participation and reward, that's pretty much my view- decentralised planning of the economy rather than the centralised one which is so evidently disastrous.

[redjordi]

GD, I never said anything about de-centralised planning as opposed to centralised planning.

What I was talking about is workers' control and democratic planning of the economy.

Parts of it will have to be centralised (like the railway system, the postal system, air traffic, etc) and some other bits of planning will be done at local or regional level.

[Grave Disorder]

Parts will have to be centralised, but to prevent abuse of government power those parts must be kept minimal and performed by a democratically elected authority. Basically whatever cannot be performed by individual (democratic, obviously) unions should be performed by a council of these unions.
 As for worker's control and democratic planning, I thought that was decentralisation- if the power lies with the worker it does not lie with a dictator or representative "democratic" government.

[Paul Smith]

Centralisation and democracy aren't opposites.

Power could be "centralised" onto a single man, he'd have to be a very busy man, but the masses could get rid of him at a stroke.  So how much "power" does he really have?

The ways to combat a growing bureaucratic parasite onto the state are well documented, and I'm sure have been repeated many times on these boards.

What you are proposing is breaking production down into isolated units that can't talk to each other efficiently which would lead to disaster.

The steal manufacturer, having no idea how much the car manufacturer needs and so on, you get the point.  Wasteful, even more so then capitalism.

The economy of the USSR was not held back because it was centralised, it was held back because it wasn't democratic.

There's a world of difference.

[Grave Disorder]

It began as democratic, but the democracy was rapidly removed by the *centralised* dictatorship when it proved inconvenient roughly three months after the October revolution. After that rights were continually eroded. I don't trust the members of a centralised government not to form a new ruling class, and it seems that history is on my side here.
 The unions would be bodies run by councils of all members and as such incapable of oppression against the worker unless the worker voted to be oppressed and lose his democratic rights; not likely. The State itself would be controlled by elected officials who would be unable to do anything without union approval (ie, the approval of the people); the elected officials themselves would ensure that the leadership of the unions did not betray the people.
 Planning could be worked out between unions as it is in a capitalism; if a car factory needs steel they place a contract with the steel industry. The market economy combined with equitable distribution of profits and ownership by the proletariat of the means of production would reslt in a prodctive, efficient economy which would ensure a good living standard for all participants and produce enough surplus to allow the government to provide welfare and use Keynesian regulation of the market, keeping employment as high as possible.

[redjordi]

My god, you ARE confussed!

I do recommend that you read Lenin's State and Revolution  and then we can come back and discuss these questions. This is just because if you are criticising a particular conception you should at least first study it.

If you do not like Lenin, then read what Marx had to say about the Paris Comune (which he, unlike you, consider as a model for socialist democracy):

"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class.... The police, which until then had been the instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen's wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves.... Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the instruments of physical force of the old government, the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual suppression, the power of the priests.... The judicial functionaries lost that sham independence... they were thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable."

This is exactly the model we are basing ourselves upon.

Just a few notes to show you how confussed you are:

the elected officials themselves would ensure that the leadership of the unions did not betray the people

you have just argued against an elected government and now you are telling us that elected officials would ensure no betrayal?? It makes no sense.

The market economy combined with equitable distribution of profits and ownership by the proletariat of the means of production

Market economy with ownership by the proletariat of the means of production??? A contradiction in terms, since market economy is precisely based on private ownership of the means of production.

to allow the government to provide welfare and use Keynesian regulation of the market, keeping employment as high as possible.

never mind the fact that you just argued against a central government, Keynesianism is a method used by capitalists to alleviate the crisis of capitalism. So are you saying that under your form of "market socialis" there would still be capitalism and therefore crisis to be regulated???

comradely,

[Grave Disorder]

There would be a market. There would not be Capitalism in the Marxist sense, which I'm guessing is the one you object to, because as all owned the means of prodction all would earn the rewards they had worked for.
 I did not argue against a centralised government, I argued that it's duties should be minimised... admittedly bringing Keynesianism into the equation does give it somewhat more power, I think it's worth it as a method of minimising involuntary unemployment as it would allow the unions to pay workers fairly if the value of their product went down, while not allowing members of those which prospered to gain more wealth
 When did I argue against an elected government? I objected to someone else's view of democracy, if I recall correctly. As for Marx's article on the Paris Commune, it is a considerably more sympathetic account than the one that I read, in which only about 35 of 81 members of the Commune were genuinely working-class. However, I accept that the Commune was a good model for democratic socialism.

[des-esseintes]

Don't all democratic governments inevitably turn into dictatorships? Suppose, and I know this has no foundation in Marxist theory, but bear with me, suppose that a very capable man, living in a Socialist country, one day decides to become autocrat. He maneouvers around in the bureaucracy, passing resolutions that benefit him (inside his alloted bureaucrat time), and slowly building up a clique of supporters through intrigue. He poses as a true socialist all the way, until the time of his coup d'etat. Isn't the slide of democracy into dictatorship as inevitable as that of capitalism into imperialism?

[Grave Disorder]

That's pretty much what Stalin did (with the exception that he wasn't really all that capable), however in a system with a decent number of safeguards it should be impossible unless the populace attach no value to their liberty and equality. And if they don't, then the country is doomed.

[des-esseintes]

But he corrupts the safeguards and demagogically pretends to represent liberty and equality until he is too powerful to be stopped.

[redjordi]

GD, you say:

There would be a market. There would not be Capitalism in the Marxist sense, which I'm guessing is the one you object to, because as all owned the means of prodction all would earn the rewards they had worked for.

One of the points about socialist planning is to do away with the anarchy of capitalist market economy which is extremely wasteful. In what sense would you still have a market in your brand of "market socialism"? Would your "unions of workers" be selling their commodities in the free market competing one against the other for contracts? Planning is the opposite of free market, you cannot have one and the other.

Keynesianism into the equation does give it somewhat more power, I think it's worth it as a method of minimising involuntary unemployment as it would allow the unions to pay workers fairly if the value of their product went down, while not allowing members of those which prospered to gain more wealth

So, how come in your brand of socialism there would still be unemployment??? Democratic planning of the economy would do away completely with unemployment! What is the point about market socialism?