I actually have more to say on the subject because you originally said that
our economy works better than a planned economy. I don’t read The Economist and
therefore,I’m not thinking within the usual framework of how mainstream
economists think and write. But I’m familiar with it because I hear it on the
news. I certainly hear it on Marketplace on NPR which, by the way is sponsored
by, (yes I know supposedly there are no sponsors), the Koch Brothers). When
economists say that an economy is working well, they’re talking about it
working well for business, for the stock market, for investors. We’re all
supposed to assume that the rest of us will benefit. But we don’t necessarily
benefit. Production is up. Output is up. Profits are up. But the workers don’t
benefit, nor does the general public. The profits are re-invested into the
business but only in financial terms. Stock holders profit. CEO’s profit. The
business doesn’t improve working conditions or service to its customers. Games
are played with its finances. Everything is financialized. Most of us can’t
even understand the intricacies. One of the things I’ve been reading about for
years is how we manufacture money and what that means. It’s complicated.
Apparently, what it means eventually, is that we’re all screwed. It’s like
global warming. The use of fossil fuels is killing us. So, for that matter, is
raising cattle so we can consume all that meat. The raising of cattle produces
even more CO2 than the fossil fuels. But all those corporations are making
money and they’re officers are living well. So we’ll fight wars to keep control
of oil supplies. Oh, and by the way, fighting those wars is also bad for the
environment. So people can be wealthy and live high on the hog now, and to hell
with the future. My point is that talking about economic systems and saying
that our “mixed” economy works better than a “planned” economy, makes no sense
to me. It depends on what you mean by “works better”. And the other thing is
that when you say that, are you actually talking about the economy, or are you
thinking about particular autocratic governments that had, what you define as”a
planned economy”? Just suppose, if Cuba had been treated as a friendly country
after its revolution, if it had been left alone and had set up a socialist
economic system, if the US had had normal economic relations with it, that
planned economy might have done really well. Castro would not have had to be as
authoritarian because he wouldn’t have been under threat of US invasion or his
own assassination. It’s hard to know what a real socialist economy in a truly
democratic country would be like because the western nations have never
permitted such a thing to exist.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 10:28 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
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 <mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
"rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
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
By <http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/malcolm-harris> Malcolm Harris
<https://twitter.com/bigmeaninternet> @bigmeaninternet
When 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 famously
<http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf> predicted 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.
Marxist 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 Postcapitalismredeeming 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.
The 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.
<http://qz.com/344394/hollywood-should-be-very-afraid-of-popcorn-time-the-netflix-for-pirates/>
Popcorn Time 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 X
<http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/message-to-grassroots/>
observed 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: Marx
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#2a>
says not to. “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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