Ask a Red III

[Crezth]

Well, abolition of pricing isn't really possible without the abolition of scarcity, else you just would end up with a bureaucratic distribution nightmare.

How so? I mean, what's the mechanism by which this is seen?

Then it would still be replaced by whatever new social structures would form due to its abolishment.
So what happened if today we would outlaw money? History has one useful example: hyper-inflation. However, those were rather short-term cases with the clear expectation that things would return to normal.

Which example are you thinking of? And to "outlaw money" goes against, in spirit, the substance of this argument. It's not so much that someone stands up and says "oi, no more money on pain of death;" as the paradigm of exchange itself - which includes money - evaporates naturally.

So anarcho-primitivist? Tell me more about how that works.

What are you talking about?

 

[Mouthwash]

What are you talking about?

You evidently reject the division of labor and believe that people should "share" whatever they make. At least, that's the impression I got from your posts. Though I strongly suspect it's just because you don't know what you're talking about.

 

[Lone Wolf]

How so? I mean, what's the mechanism by which this is seen?

Well, let's imagine that you abolish pricing on highly-desired platinum rings. What's the alternative? Free access? That'll turn into nasty fights in a hurry, as there would be more demand then supply. You have to create some controlled distribution system, which implies a bureaucracy for controlling it. I guess it's possible to reply that bureaucracy is a means to an end, and there's nothing wrong with it unless we allow it to turn into an end in itself.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Which example are you thinking of?

Nothing really particular. Germany perhaps. It was maybe no a useful thing to mention.

as the paradigm of exchange itself - which includes money - evaporates naturally.

So without the "paradigm of exchange" we are left with what? People giving and taking, based on...?. If you have scarcity, you have an allocation problem. If it is about a natural evaporation of the paradigm of exchange you need a natural - that is self-governing - social dynamic which solve or shall we say handles the allocation problem and hence makes exchange superfluous. This social dynamic is what would replace the social dynamic of exchange.
And as Mouthwash, I am very curious what that would be.

 

[Lone Wolf]

If you have scarcity, you have an allocation problem.

The argument that it's already possible to eliminate scarcity for basic goods. What about non-basic ones, though?

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I would argue that even basic goods - while not necessarily scarce in their existence - are still inevitably a matter of scarcity. They will have to be produced by people. Whose energy and time is scarce. Resources in their production and distribution will have to be invested, which are scarce. Start with transportation for instance. Hence, they will be a matter of scarcity. What we could do is to simulate that they weren't by taking money of the people by force (taxes) and spending enough so that there is overabundance, free of charge. So we would mandate that we have to invest so much money into it via public channels that in our private affairs it merely appears to be not a matter of scarcity. While in fact, the same allocation problem due to scarcity applies just as much as anywhere else.
It just would be a mechanism which lets us not directly experience the allocation problem, but it would still be there.

 

[Traitorfish]

What do you believe will replace it?

It doesn't seem obvious that you need any one, monolithic form of resource-accounting. Rice is not television is not MP3s, so why treat them as if they were?

You evidently reject the division of labor

What makes you say that?

 

[Mouthwash]

It doesn't seem obvious that you need any one, monolithic form of resource-accounting. Rice is not television is not MP3s, so why treat them as if they were?

Never said we should.

What makes you say that?

As they said, you have an allocation problem for any type of good, even basic necessities. The Soviet Union experienced massive shortages and surpluses of goods, so how do you solve this problem?

 

[Traitorfish]

Never said we should.

No, but von Mises did. Is the point.

As they said, you have an allocation problem for any type of good, even basic necessities. The Soviet Union experienced massive shortages and surpluses of goods, so how do you solve this problem?

Why is it assumed that there is one generalised solution, appropriate to all times, places, and goods?

Me, I think that assumption comes from the logic employed by apologists for capitalism. Capitalism is (per Marx) the organisation of social labour as value, so it necessarily reduces all social production to a single, homogenised abstract, exchange value, and present all social products as packets of value first, and as heterogeneous objects of utility only secondarily. Apologists for capitalism, taking as their axiom that capitalism embodies some universal, tranhistorical rationality, assume that any rational form of social production will likewise hinge on a homogenising abstraction. The possibility of such a reduction can thus be employed as a test to determine whether any given historical system is rational. But if the axiom is not valid, and it's not self-evident that it is, then the test doesn't function, and that line of criticisms becomes void.

But, that's just what I think. What do you think?

 

[Crezth]

You evidently reject the division of labor

How do you mean?

and believe that people should "share" whatever they make.

What does this even mean?

Well, let's imagine that you abolish pricing on highly-desired platinum rings. What's the alternative? Free access? That'll turn into nasty fights in a hurry, as there would be more demand then supply. You have to create some controlled distribution system, which implies a bureaucracy for controlling it. I guess it's possible to reply that bureaucracy is a means to an end, and there's nothing wrong with it unless we allow it to turn into an end in itself.

Well, the alternative to pricing and by extension private property really cannot be described in terms of private property. In order for there to be no exchange, there has to be no property. So you it's not really valid to respond to these criticisms in terms of "who owns what" when, indeed, the entire notion of ownership is what's being questioned.

So without the "paradigm of exchange" we are left with what? People giving and taking, based on...?. If you have scarcity, you have an allocation problem. If it is about a natural evaporation of the paradigm of exchange you need a natural - that is self-governing - social dynamic which solve or shall we say handles the allocation problem and hence makes exchange superfluous. This social dynamic is what would replace the social dynamic of exchange.
And as Mouthwash, I am very curious what that would be.

A valid question, and I confess I don't really have an answer for you. That is to say I don't know what a tradeless, propertyless system would look like. But it's a matter of procedure: if you expect that a system of capitalism cannot survive forever, and if you expect that it's only a matter of time before capitalism is replaced by uncapitalism, then you might suppose that there would have to be an uncapitalist post-capitalism which probably would look like nothing we are familiar with. But as I am neither blessed with clairvoyance nor an abundance of learning on the matter, the best I can do is point out that there's nothing absolute or inevitable about money and exchange.

As they said, you have an allocation problem for any type of good, even basic necessities. The Soviet Union experienced massive shortages and surpluses of goods, so how do you solve this problem?

Why should we worry about what problems the Soviet Union experienced, except for purely academic purposes? This is rather like telling someone "Yes, I understand you want to build automobiles, but don't forget that the Amazon rainforest is very large." You can find a connection with a little creativity, but at best it seems tenuous.

 

[innonimatu]

As they said, you have an allocation problem for any type of good, even basic necessities. The Soviet Union experienced massive shortages and surpluses of goods, so how do you solve this problem?

Every market economy where prices change experiences "massive shortages and surpluses of goods. Price changes are supposed to be reactions to that. That shortages and surprluses are constantly happening is nothing unique to any system.

What the pure market systems proponents claim is that because prices adjust in a way to negate access to the goods in "shortage" to those who can't afford them, well the everything is jolly good! The shortage magically ceases to be a shortage because by definition what is unaffordable is not in a "shortage"! As for surpluses, that is something market systems are indeed very adept at not having. Even whatever was once free, if someone can figure a way to fence it off and sold for a profit by causing artificial scarcity, they will. "Intellectual property" was a child of just such "market thinking".

But let me tell you, the piece you chose from the wiki on the USSR' economy is rather interesting. Let me quite it here:

The Era of Stagnation in the mid-1970s was aggravated by the war in Afghanistan in 1979 and led to a period of economic standstill between 1979 and 1985.

I can think of a great many "market economies" that recently experienced longer periods of stagnation or, as propaganda puts it, "negative growth", that 6 years! Does that mean we are witnessing the final days of those economic organizations? Of it only that were true! It would mean that and end to the "long depression" was on sight, that the power of the financial oligarchy was broken.

The USSR was not going through some terminal economic crisis in the 80s. The USSR was refusing to adopt the financialization model the west adopted, refusing also to embrace the "efficiencies" of the west. It distributed "too much" of its product to its workers, it spend too much on wars (something familiar?), it didn't embrace management with low stocks; JIT; delocalization; debt-financed trade; it didn't cut "inefficiencies" and built a "lean" economy. It other words, it was stuck in what the west had been doing in the 60s while the west was moving to the economic behaviors of the 80s/90s.
Well, we (the "western world") has had a good run for a couple of decades with those things. But, guess what, it is turning out that those models too have downsides and limits, that they too create and accumulate problems. History didn't end after all.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

@Crezth
The funny thing is, to believe what you say does not require to be a disciple of communism, socialism, uncapitalism or what have you. Saying the idea of an "end of history" in the form of capitalism is simply silly and presumptuous. For all we know, that capitalism will not last forever is a very safe bet. Because forever is just an insanely long time and the state of things - due to its complexities and interdependencies - just knows insanely many ways to change in an insanely long time. And it is simply not possible to predict the ways it will or could change, so assuming the unknown seems - in this case uncapitalism - the only reasonable thing to do.
But one can see all that and today still be a happy capitalist. So what does that leave us with except a fun intellectual exercise?

 

[Crezth]

Nothing but a fun intellectual exercise. But it's true that I can't really give you a picture of the future. A moneyless system might be one in which a big computer tells everyone what to do with everything, or it might be a system where nobody tells anyone what to do and yet people manage along just fine. The only point was that there is no particularly compelling reason, from where I stand, to suppose that money and pricing is the only way to do things.

 

[ace99]

Can anyone recommend good books on the Paris Commune and Anarchist Catalonia?

 

[Tahuti]

I'm curious how reds would respond to the idea that Communism implicitly recognizes the homo economicus. While Commies frequently deride the idea of the 'homo economicus' and associate it with Capitalism, Marx did reduce the history of mankind to economic interactions and explained wars in economic terms. And it does seem to me that Communism implies a variant of the 'homo economicus' that operates on a collective scale, in that human societies in a communist society will work towards economic self-interest and all individual humans will work as 'cogs' of the broader society.

 

[Hygro]

Every market economy where prices change experiences "massive shortages and surpluses of goods. Price changes are supposed to be reactions to that. That shortages and surprluses are constantly happening is nothing unique to any system.

What the pure market systems proponents claim is that because prices adjust in a way to negate access to the goods in "shortage" to those who can't afford them, well the everything is jolly good! The shortage magically ceases to be a shortage because by definition what is unaffordable is not in a "shortage"! As for surpluses, that is something market systems are indeed very adept at not having. Even whatever was once free, if someone can figure a way to fence it off and sold for a profit by causing artificial scarcity, they will. "Intellectual property" was a child of just such "market thinking".

But let me tell you, the piece you chose from the wiki on the USSR' economy is rather interesting. Let me quite it here:

I can think of a great many "market economies" that recently experienced longer periods of stagnation or, as propaganda puts it, "negative growth", that 6 years! Does that mean we are witnessing the final days of those economic organizations? Of it only that were true! It would mean that and end to the "long depression" was on sight, that the power of the financial oligarchy was broken.

The USSR was not going through some terminal economic crisis in the 80s. The USSR was refusing to adopt the financialization model the west adopted, refusing also to embrace the "efficiencies" of the west. It distributed "too much" of its product to its workers, it spend too much on wars (something familiar?), it didn't embrace management with low stocks; JIT; delocalization; debt-financed trade; it didn't cut "inefficiencies" and built a "lean" economy. It other words, it was stuck in what the west had been doing in the 60s while the west was moving to the economic behaviors of the 80s/90s.
Well, we (the "western world") has had a good run for a couple of decades with those things. But, guess what, it is turning out that those models too have downsides and limits, that they too create and accumulate problems. History didn't end after all.

Yeah, it doesn't mean price mediation is inherently bad, but it does mean let's not pretend its anything other than it is. "Not a shortage because the system only allows enough people to get it and no one else is qualified". Indeed. I'd never heard it put that way, Inno. I love it. I'm gonna start using that.

 

[aelf]

I'm curious how reds would respond to the idea that Communism implicitly recognizes the homo economicus. While Commies frequently deride the idea of the 'homo economicus' and associate it with Capitalism, Marx did reduce the history of mankind to economic interactions and explained wars in economic terms. And it does seem to me that Communism implies a variant of the 'homo economicus' that operates on a collective scale, in that human societies in a communist society will work towards economic self-interest and all individual humans will work as 'cogs' of the broader society.

This question seems to be born of misconceptions. 'Homo economicus' is not closely connected to materialism, as you seem to think. The former has a number of assumptions that the latter doesn't have - for example, things like rational self-interest (or something similar) and the profit motive.

Also, these days many Marxists would talk about political economy, a rather important concept that, judging from your post, you overlook or are simply unaware of. It entails the notion that resources are not simply distributed through purely economic mechanisms like the market, but that power itself is a currency that determines distribution to a large degree. That is far removed from the idea of 'homo economicus'.

 

[Traitorfish]

I think that, if anything, Marx's project isn't to turn history into economics, it's to turn economics into history. The purpose of Capital is to demonstrate that capitalism is a finite historical system, and not simply the expression of some universal rationality. Marx was very heavily influenced by the historicism of the Hegelians, and was highly sceptical of the mainstream (then and now!) construction of "economics" as a distinct and eternal sphere of human being. Rather, he sees it as irrevocably bound up with everything else in human society, and like everything else as historical and historically limited.

There's also the problem that the strains of Marxism which do tend to economic reductionism tend to have a decidedly structuralist bent, regarding the individual not as self-sufficient atom, but as a function of their social class, so even if we take in that direction we don't see much of H. economicus.

 

[Mouthwash]

Why is it assumed that there is one generalised solution, appropriate to all times, places, and goods?

Me, I think that assumption comes from the logic employed by apologists for capitalism. Capitalism is (per Marx) the organisation of social labour as value, so it necessarily reduces all social production to a single, homogenised abstract, exchange value, and present all social products as packets of value first, and as heterogeneous objects of utility only secondarily. Apologists for capitalism, taking as their axiom that capitalism embodies some universal, tranhistorical rationality, assume that any rational form of social production will likewise hinge on a homogenising abstraction. The possibility of such a reduction can thus be employed as a test to determine whether any given historical system is rational. But if the axiom is not valid, and it's not self-evident that it is, then the test doesn't function, and that line of criticisms becomes void.

But, that's just what I think. What do you think?

You have completely ignored the question and repeated your previous statement. The honorable thing to do now, I think, would be to admit you just don't know any real rebuttal to it.

 

[Ajidica]

Do you intentionaly try to come off as a jerk, or is it just an unfortunate habit?