If you think I am talking about someone sitting in some central ministry
making unilateral decisions about what should be produced then you are
wrong about that too. If a planned economy is to meet the human needs of
the masses then the masses have to have some say in it. The kind of
planned economy I am talking about is a democratically planned economy.
Cuba is another good example of that. Alluding back to the question of
leadership, yes, there have to be leaders to carry out the decisions and
to organize the production, but the people organized into the Committees
for the Defense of the Revolution discuss what is needed and how it
needs to be made and pass their conclusions on to the next layer of
decision making.
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after
death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst
out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how
wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous
something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 11/17/2018 10:27 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
It is a mixed economy. That is, certain aspects are planned, but certain aspects are not.
If you believe our economy is anything like the kind of planned economy Roger is talking about, I think you are not understanding what he means by that.
Nobody is sitting in some central ministry somewhere and deciding how many boxes of cereal should be produced.
Nobody is sitting in some central ministry somewhere and deciding how many cars should be produced.
I could go on with a few million more examples, but I think it is clear enough.
Our economy is not planned in anything like the way Roger is thinking of.
Evan
*From:* Miriam Vieni <mailto:miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Sent:* Saturday, November 17, 2018 10:14 PM
*To:* blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Subject:* [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Evan,
From everything I read, we have a planned economy. It is planned and structured to benefit the wealthy. Just read a bit about how the IMF deals with developing countries. Look at our tax structure. Look at how the international banking system works. Think about all those meetings like the G 7, G 20, Davos, etc. Look at the world population or even, just at the US population, at the percentage of people whose health, housing, nutritional, and educational needs are met. The economic inequality isn’t accidental. The fact that you feel that you are part of a sector of humanity whose needs are met, doesn’t mean that our economic system is working properly or that it is unplanned.
Miriam
*From:* blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> *On Behalf Of *Evan Reese
*Sent:* Saturday, November 17, 2018 9:27 PM
*To:* blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
So far at least, despite all of its shortcomings, and there are many, the unplanned economy has done quite a lot better than any planned ones I’ve heard about.
Perhaps, at some future date, with sufficiently powerful computers, a planned economy might work. But I would have a hard time trusting the people in charge of the computers doing the planning.
Evan
*From:*Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC) <mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Sent:*Saturday, November 17, 2018 8:53 PM
*To:*blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Subject:*[blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Well, I don't think this author quite understands what Marx was all about and he really goes wrong when he equates Stalinism with communism as if there is no other choice, but he still hits on a few things that can be agreed on. I have answered you claims that communism could not work by pointing out that for the majority of time that humans existed it was the only economic model, but primitive communism is still not something that we would want to return to. Even though prehistoric people participated in a communist economy they didn't know it. They had no concept of economy and one thing they did not do was plan their economy unless you count something like storing up food for the winter. Capitalism is not a planned economy either. Oh, the federal reserve may fiddle with the interest rates or tax policy may be changed with claims of definite effects, but the real effects are not even close to the effects claimed in the rhetoric. What we need is an economy planned with human needs in mind and without profit as a motive. Marx, lenin and others have had a lot to say about how that should be done, but it is unquestionable that they did not have computers. Computers have become a lot more powerful than they used to be and are becoming even more powerful. In the past economic planners could use pencil and paper to make calculations and then came adding machines and then came computers which are primitive by today's standards. By the way, I remember reading a book from the NLS called Stonehenge Explained. Without digressing too much into what it was all about I will just say that the author used what he considered an extremely advanced computer to make calculations about the rocks that make up Stonehenge. He raved about that computer that he used in the early sixties that took up a whole building and that he had to apply for time on and had to wait for months. Most of us now have home desktop computers that are many times more powerful than that one. So when doing economic planning we really should take advantage of whatever tools that we have available to us and I am sure that these computers can make that planning many times more efficient than Marx or Lenin ever imagined. One of Lenin's more famous quotations was, "Soviet power and electrification equals communism." I doubt that he literally believed that. It was more of a political slogan meant to emphasize the importance of bringing electricity to the Russian people. And, like I said, Russia was something of a backward country at the time of the revolution. There were very many areas where no one had ever seen a light bulb and bringing electricity to the masses was a high priority. That has been mostly accomplished. I suppose there might still be s few outposts in the backwoods of the Russian territory that still don't have electricity, but that would be very rare. The essential technology now is the computer. It just could be that a world soviet power combined with the use of computers for an economy that would be geared toward human needs rather than profit would equal communism.
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after
death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst
out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how
wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous
something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 11/12/2018 10:21 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
Roger, I found this while looking for something else. It’s
something I saved and then forgot about. It’s speculative, but
thought you, and perhaps others here, might find some interest in it.
Evan
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122568/what-if-stalin-had-computers
What If Stalin Had Computers?
A new book contemplates the end of capitalism (again)—it's a
nice story, but a terrible plan
ByMalcolm Harris
<http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/malcolm-harris>@bigmeaninternet
<https://twitter.com/bigmeaninternet>
*W*hen will capitalism end? It’s not a new idea, and even the
capitalists suspect it will happen. After all, every other mode of
production has fallen, and capitalism isn’t a steady-state system.
It simply isn’t built to stay the same. As firms incorporate new
technologies, capacity increases per-capita, and jobs change, so
too does the nature of commodities and consumption. It happened
with the assembly line, and it’s happening again with information
technology. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famouslypredicted
<http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>these trends
would reduce everyone’s daily toil to part-time by now, while Karl
Marx thought the same developments would compel workers to seize
the whole system and abolish wage-labor in general. But the system
still lives.
If the history of postcapitalism so far is a repeating chorus
asking “Are we there yet?”, then the new book from Channel 4
economics editor Paul Mason,/Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our
Future/, is a reassuring “Almost!” from the front seat. Like a
good co-pilot, Mason keeps his eyes on his indicators, and he has
the end in sight. Or at least on his graphs. How the transition
might occur is less important than that it must.
*M*arxist economics is not a vibrant field within the anglophone
academy or public sphere. Even Thomas Piketty’s best selling
import,/Capital in the Twenty-First Century/, didn’t take much
more than a good title from the communists. Mason is an oddity, as
an economics commentator of some stature (at least in the UK,
where he has been an economics/business editor since 2001) who
believes that labor is the source of all value. He spends much of
the first half of/Postcapitalism/redeeming the work of heterodox
Soviet economist Nikolai Kondtratieff, whose model of 50-year
four-phase market cycles is Mason’s preferred historical gauge.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Kondtratieff wave explanation is an intuitive way to look at
200 years of economic history: In Mason’s telling, industrial
capitalism has completed four cycles since 1790, driven by the
interrelated processes of technological innovation, global
expansion, capital investment, and not least by labor struggles.
The story a cycle goes more or less like this: Capitalists
incorporate new productive technology, sharing the proceeds with
workers; profits slow and workers fight with their bosses as firms
try to depress labor costs; when capitalists can’t find any more
savings, they’re forced to incorporate new technology and start
the cycle over. Despite its Soviet origins, mainstream British and
American economists have found the model useful for describing how
capitalism manages to persist.
The problem is we seem to have broken the cycle. Where workers
should have been able to leverage their power for higher living
standards, capital instead outsourced production, smashed unions,
captured the regulators, and expanded money supply by unpegging
the dollar from gold. Mason calls this counter-cyclical move
“neoliberalism,” and it’s a helpful definition for a term
sometimes used carelessly to refer to anything bad and capitalist.
Kondratieff described a dance between capital and labor that was
theoretically sustainable—a heresy that did not go over well with
Stalin, who felt that the proletariat was only days from halting
the waltz.
As it turned out, Stalin was wrong and capital broke up with
labor, not the other way around. Mason calls our current situation
the “long, disrupted wave”: The lights are on, and Kondratieff’s
dance is over. This isn’t the only relationship that’s broken;
capitalist economics is incompatible with information technology,
Mason claims. As the supply of some commodities (like music files)
becomes infinite, price-setting becomes arbitrary and
unsustainable. How do you measure the amount of labor in
replicable file? The adaptable system of production that
Kondratieff saw from the other side is sinking. “The most highly
educated generation in the history of the human race, and the best
connected,” Mason writes, “will not accept a future of high
inequality and stagnant growth.”
/Postcapitalism/really begins here, at the bargaining table with
capital and labor looking for a plan that will settle their
differences once and for all. If the world is headed for imminent
ecological collapse, then to continue on with our current
capitalist mode of production is suicide. Maximizing actors don’t
kill themselves, so the operative question is what to do next. How
can we maintain people’s standards of living while socializing
production, reducing labor, saving the environment, and making the
best use of new technology? Mason has some ideas.
*T*he book really comes into its own when Mason addresses the
possibilities of contemporary planning. He does not go as far as
to endorse “cyber Stalinism” but at the very least poses its
thesis: What if the problem with the Soviet Union was that it was
too early? What if our computer processing power and behavioral
data are developed enough now that central planning could
outperform the market when it comes to the distribution of goods
and services?
If you raised your hand and said this in an American ECON100
class, you’d be laughed out of the room, so Mason as prominent
public employee deserves a lot of credit for bringing it this far
into the English-speaking mainstream. The possible socialized uses
of technology is an exciting can of worms. Using large sets of
behavior and population data, capitalist firms like Amazon and
Google have developed predictive capacities that would make Soviet
cyberneticians weep with joy. Capitalism says that the best use of
this capacity is to sell people stuff, but parts of this process
are so socially unproductive and unnecessary—we don’t just have
clickbait sites, we have third-rate clickbait sites—that it can’t
possibly be the case.
“Imagine if Walmart or Tesco were prepared to publish their
customer data (suitably anonymized) for free,” Mason writes.
“Society would benefit: everybody from farmers to epidemiologists
could mine the data, and make more accurate decisions.” This is
just the beginning; remaking productive machinery in the
collective interest means driving necessary labor down as far as
possible with data analytics and self-management. Why can’t a
meatpacking factory function like a web startup, with room for
autonomy and achievement targets instead of required hours? It’s
fun to imagine how we could do better than capitalism if we all
decided to, especially if no one had to worry about creating and
maintaining false scarcity around info-tech goods.
The best existing example I can think of for the kind of
efficiencies Mason predicts is the difference between Netflix and
Popcorn Time. Netflix is, of course, the $28 billion media
streaming company with over 2000 employees.Popcorn Time
<http://qz.com/344394/hollywood-should-be-very-afraid-of-popcorn-time-the-netflix-for-pirates/>is
a legally shady alternative that streams media torrents over a
clean ad-less interface. It’s a functional and free alternative,
what economists would call a replacement good. Popcorn Time makes
no money, and has a staff of 20 around the world who volunteer
their labor part-time. Netflix is (as a streaming company) a
near-total waste of time. Those 2000-plus workers could be
developing a nutritious Slurpee and designing a distribution
infrastructure. Or babysitting. Hell, they could be lowering the
collective labor burden enough so everyone has time to masturbate
one extra time a year, and it would still be more socially useful
than charging rent for access to digital content.
In Mason’s telling, postcapitalism involves an abundance of
resources, including free time. Without capitalism’s wastefulness,
we can refashion the world to allow human potential and creativity
to blossom. It’s an enjoyable thought experiment, but capitalists
are not looking to make a deal. Given the choice, I have no doubt
that the ownership class will literally abandon the planet Earth
before they surrender capitalism. Bosses no longer negotiate with
organized labor if they can avoid it; they’d rather make a blanket
offer to all workers as individuals: Work and/or starve. Violence
and coercion don’t play much of a role in/Postcapitalism/, but
that’s not true of capitalism. Huge, advanced police forces ensure
this is the deal whether people “accept” it (as Mason says) or not.
Imaginative as it is,/Postcapitalism/is not a revolutionary book.
As Malcolm Xobserved
<http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/message-to-grassroots/>very
clearly of revolution after revolution: “What was it for? Land!
How did they get it? Bloodshed!” Capitalists understand this
principle very well, and their state proxies are well-armed. The
vanguard movements of postcapitalism that Mason identifies—the
global occupy sequence, Brazilian World Cup protesters, fracking
blockaders—have all been forced out of whatever territory they
were able to take temporarily, and that’s with the authorities
exercising significant restraint relative to their capabilities.
Since postcapitalism doesn’t detail the “How?”, it doesn’t have to
answer “How do we kill that many cops?”
There’s a reason Marxists—even heterodox ones—don’t usually
speculate on how to arrange communism: Marxsays not to
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#2a>.
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be
established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust
itself,” he writes with Engels in/The German Ideology/. “We call
communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of
things.” Not even Marx claimed to know what communism will look
like, but he knew it would have to destroy capitalism first.
It’s hard to follow Marx into his beautifully hopeful “will have
been” idea of history without thinking he’s doing some
sword-in-the-stone prophecy, but he nonetheless reveals important
problems with postcapitalism. I cannot imagine the real movement
that could, in retrospect, validate Mason’s version of history.
The true qualities of capitalism, including the weak points where
it finally fails, will only be visible in the shadow of whatever
social force destroys it. The people Mason describes,/at least as
motivated and defined by the historical factors he
describes/(education, connection, stagnant wages), do not seem
willing or able to confront the system at the necessary scale or
with the required intensity. To borrow a perspective from Marx, I
do not believe Mason’s theory of capitalism will have been the case.
The true story of capitalism, like all social forms, will be
written in its ashes. Until then, a theory of historical necessity
and a couple bucks will get you a cup of coffee. Mason criticizes
leftists for being against things that exist instead of for things
that could be, but the position of the cart in relation to the
horse isn’t up for sensible debate. Postcapitalism is still one
revolution away.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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