HELP: Socialism & The Coordination Problem - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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#14140194
I'm going to be defending socialism in an upcoming debate/discussion in a week and a half. I'm hoping that some socialist on this forum can direct me to online resources that deal with the problem of coordinating production absent a market (as articulated by Frederick Hayek and Ludwig von Misess ). Any input on this problem would be appreciated. If you can give me some sense of how this is supposed to work yourself, here on the forum, that would be great too. Full disclosure, I'm not actually a socialist myself, but I'll be doing my best to represent socialism as favorably as possible. I know my opponent (a friend of mine, actually) is going to focus on this problem. Please note that I'm not looking for a critique of capitalism on the grounds of its inefficiencies, but a positive case for non-market coordination of an entire economy.

Thanks!
#14140241
Is there any particular article of mises you mean to address? Then please provide any link for the same.
You can try following articles though:

http://www.cvoice.org/cv3cox.htm

http://theoryandpractice.org.uk/library/how-socialism-can-organise-production-without-money-adam-buick-pieter-lawrence-1984
#14140341
Civil_Debate wrote:I'm going to be defending socialism in an upcoming debate/discussion in a week and a half. I'm hoping that some socialist on this forum can direct me to online resources that deal with the problem of coordinating production absent a market (as articulated by Frederick Hayek and Ludwig von Misess ).


There is no coordination problem under socialism; you mean command economies. Under socialism, people produce what they're willing to produce, consume what has been produced, and if there isn't enough of something made, then people either decide to make more (because they want it) or do without (because it does not interest them). Markets don't improve upon this system, they merely articulate it in concrete terms.

Any input on this problem would be appreciated.


The problem is overstated, and really only relevant if we're assuming that there is some giant national bureaucracy that has to plan everything. Which has virtually nothing to do with socialism at all. After all, a distant central bureaucracy dictating production schedules certainly isn't an example of the workers controlling the means of production.

If you can give me some sense of how this is supposed to work yourself, here on the forum, that would be great too. Full disclosure, I'm not actually a socialist myself, but I'll be doing my best to represent socialism as favorably as possible. I know my opponent (a friend of mine, actually) is going to focus on this problem.


That's a rhetorical problem, not an economic problem. It would be easier to mock his position that capitalism actually solves this problem. Given the current unemployment rate, that should be easy enough. What you should actually be asking for are some good two-line jokes about how capitalism fails to solve the "calculation problem".
#14141099
Civil_Debate wrote:Fuser: Thanks for the two links! I've read the Cox paper and will finish the Buick/Lawrence as soon as I can.

Someone5: Thanks for your input!

I'll post a response and any questions I have once I have finished reading the second paper Fuser recommended.


I can offer you some rhetorical advice on this matter;

A) If possible, don't let your opponent try to define what socialism implies. If the terms have not been agreed upon beforehand, make a proper definition of socialism (roughly defined, socialism is an economic approach where the workers themselves control the means of production--any further specifics would depend on precisely which sort of socialism you intend to argue) in your opening statement. A capitalist will try to define socialism as "government intervention in the economy" and will probably use some indefensible throw-away lines about how government interference is inherently inefficient and such. Don't fall into this trap; not only is that not what socialism is about, it's also fundamentally not true. Trying to directly fight a lie in a debate is pretty pointless--facts are rarely persuasive in this matter. It's better to avoid this pitfall by defining socialism yourself and refusing to let your opponent divert you on a tangent about the efficacy of central economic planning.

If you are actually looking for advice on how to defend central economic planning, asking socialists probably isn't a great way to get that. You're liable to get some responses from anarchists (myself included) that won't help your argument. I will fully admit that the sorts of socialism I advocate have little or nothing to do with central economic planning. If you want advice on that, go read some back issues of the Wall Street Journal or something, because they talk at length about why central planning works. After all, private corporations engage in central economic planning all the time. The same arguments that suggest that corporations operate best when centrally planned apply just as well to the government, and there's plenty of examples in the WSJ and other business journals about how "strong leadership is essential" and such. Just flip it around, because the arguments have just as much merit for governments as they do private corporations.

B) Don't let your opponent make this about the Soviet Union or "other communist countries"; no matter what you say you will not be able to shake the popular caricature of the Soviet Union that is rather common. Believe it or not, it's not really a very accurate model of what a socialist or communist state would look like. Getting bogged down in trying to argue that the Soviet Union wasn't an example of socialism is a pointless fight from a rhetorical standpoint. You will have to waste time and memorize facts for a dubiously effective line of argument that really can be spent in better ways.

C) Trying to discuss the merits of socialism without talking about the problems of capitalism is quite a difficult task. Socialism is a socio-economic perspective largely developed as part of a critique of capitalism, and it's rather fundamentally intended to be a way to resolve the problems with and inherent contradictions of capitalism. You can't really talk about socialism without also talking about capitalism. In the current economic climate, demonstrating some of the more obvious failures of capitalism in your own city should be fairly easy. One of the advantages that the socialist side of a debate has is the virtue of being correct; you can draw from actual concrete examples rather than having to talk about abstract models. It's hard for people to relate to abstract models, but it's easy to talk about how structural issues with capitalist systems lead to widespread unemployment.

If you have a strong anthropological bent, you might also consider discussing hunter-gatherer societies and their inherent socialism. After all, that is essentially direct worker control over the means of production; it is a non-industrial form of socialism, but it's still a form of socialism. It's also kind of hard-wired into human beings from millions of years of evolution; this can be an important line of argument if your opponent trots out a "human nature is fundamentally selfish/corrupt" line of argument. Dangerous, though, people people have sort of a weird view about hunter-gatherer societies that basically follows Hume's assumption that life was nasty, brutish, and short before feudalism. It's not actually true, but that's a hard argument to make in a debate with short time limits. There have been some books lately about "traditional societies" and some advantages of them that might be useful in this line of argument. It is certainly the case that our capitalist economic system has led us to some very unfortunate social habits (like neolocality...).

D) Do remember to criticize government policies when they serve capitalist interests. This is something that people advocating or representing socialist perspectives often fail to do. Socialism is absolutely not synonymous with government control of the economy; it is important to remind people of that. Government policies can and usually do favor capitalists more than labor. Remind people of that. Don't let them forget that the nation-state system is basically a byproduct of capitalism. Don't let them fail to grasp that government intervention in the economy is a basic and unavoidable consequence of capitalism.

E) It is important also to note that there is a massive body of work relating to socialism that isn't by or about Marx. Socialism predates Marx, and Marx himself had numerous important contemporaries that developed very divergent ideas about what socialism meant. Orthodox Marxist Communism is not the only sort of socialism out there. It's not "the most pure example" or the "most extreme example" of a socialist perspective. It's one among many, no more correct than any of the numerous anarchist forms of socialism. That might be useful to note too; that socialism has both authoritarian and libertarian traditions underneath its rather broad umbrella.

Incidentally, there is also a Techncoracy section of the forum that could be of use in trying to understand at least one coherent non-market system of economic planning. It requires kind of a paradigm shift to "get" the Techncoratic model, but it does actually make some sense. They present a system of economic planning that rejects scarcity and instead allocates resources according to abundance and an assumption of abundance rather than an assumption of scarcity. It's kind of a strange way of looking at economic problems, and perhaps not something I would suggest actually trying to directly advocate in a debate. But it can provide you with some insight on how a non-market system might go about allocating resources.

F) The specifics of a socialist system cannot be predicted in advance. A socialist society will develop its own precise form of socialism through the process of class conflict. The tensions and conflicts that lead to a transition to socialism would themselves form the precise structure that a socialist system will feature. Trying to predict exactly what a socialist system will look like beforehand is rather akin to expecting that someone living in, say, England in the 16th century ought to be able to derive the precise form and institutions of capitalism that will exist in the United States in the 21st century. It's not really a reasonable expectation to expect someone to be able to step that far outside their own experiences and assumptions that they can precisely predict what a distant society will look like. An actual transition to socialism would involve a paradigm shift of the sort that societies transitioning from feudalism to capitalism underwent. The end result of that revolution was not reasonably predictable by a serf living in a feudal society, just as the end result of a socialist revolution is not precisely definable by a citizen living in a capitalist nation-state.
Last edited by Someone5 on 03 Jan 2013 21:15, edited 1 time in total.
#14141106
That last post sure was long. Having lived in the real deal commie type "socialism", I'd say one way to tell when demand for an article is not met is the length of the lines forming when they do get to a store. Another would be to have the secret police beat out of people the going black market rate. Another would be to just fucking let people complain about it without sending them to jail for speaking out.
#14141122
Social_Critic wrote:That last post sure was long. Having lived in the real deal commie type "socialism",


Cuba claims to be a socialist state... in roughly the same way that North Korea claims to be democratic. Nation-states lie about lots of things, including motivations and guiding principles. Cuba is an authoritarian dictatorship; hardly an example of workers controlling the means of production.

I'd say one way to tell when demand for an article is not met is the length of the lines forming when they do get to a store.


That works about as well as price systems do. In the case of lines outside the store, allocation is at least somewhat fair (first come, first served), where under a price system much of the population flat out can't afford the product at all so they don't bother to go to the store. You seem to be implying that a market somehow magically makes products more available, but the fact is that all it does is let people know in advance that they can't have something.

Capitalists always like to believe that price signals are the equivalent of economic magic where one person setting a price magically communicate a plethora of information about demand and availability to the consumer and manufacturer. It does not do that, and in all actual market systems there is as much upstream communication by order placement as there is downstream communication by pricing. Hell, markets barely even play a role in pricing most goods and services; only commodities actually get pricing set by markets. Most items you buy are priced according to cost-plus pricing which has precisely nothing to do with what they teach you in macroeconomics.

The CEO of Red Bull once made a rather revealing comment about this (albeit unintentionally). When asked why people ought to pay so much for a Red Bull, despite it being so cheap to manufacture, his response was; "How would they know it was a premium product if it didn't have a premium price?" That sort of pricing (where prices are set in order to segment a market) is way the hell more common than the sorts of markets that economists like to talk about when they discuss price signals, which essentially exists only in raw commodity markets and almost nowhere in finished goods or services.

All you do with price signals is assure that people who make small amounts of money simply cannot get hold of a wide array of goods and services; a problem that is essentially just as bad as demand exceeding supply. In fact, it may well be a more cruel irony that supply of something might exceed demand yet store owners would rather let it expire than provide it to the poor for free.

Another would be to have the secret police beat out of people the going black market rate.


It's kind of hard to imagine a black market in legal goods existing in a society using a technocracy-style sequence of distribution. Any lack of availability would be temporary, and new shipments would precisely meet current demand.

Another would be to just fucking let people complain about it without sending them to jail for speaking out.


Again, your experience in Cuba is relevant only to Cuba.
#14141128
I do wonder sometimes if some of you post from a dorm at Berkeley. It's very simple, there is no way whatsoever to have one of those utopian commie systems where workers control anything. It doesn't happen on planet earth because we are carbon based life forms. Communism is bad life.
#14141152
Social_Critic wrote:I do wonder sometimes if some of you post from a dorm at Berkeley. It's very simple, there is no way whatsoever to have one of those utopian commie systems where workers control anything.


Obviously not.

It doesn't happen on planet earth because we are carbon based life forms.


Which is an indefensible "human nature is corrupt" argument.

Communism is bad life.


Correction: Cuba is bad life.
#14141163
Someone5 wrote:Most items you buy are priced according to cost-plus pricing which has precisely nothing to do with what they teach you in macroeconomics.

It may have nothing to do with macroeconomics, but it's totally consistent with microeconomics. It's a different, simplified, way of looking at the same decision making process and outcome (profit maximization). Rather than saying "measure the demand curve, price the product accordingly to maximize profit, then see if the resulting profit is positive; if not: close the business", you say "set the price so that we make a positive profit, then see if there is enough demand to support it; if not: close the business". The two statements are more-less equivalent economically: they both attempt to approximately maximize profits. Microeconomics models this quite well regardless of the mechanical procedure used.
#14142963
While I believe that true socialism is not the same thing as a command economy, I do have the feeling that all socialists do is cry out for more centralization, more regulation, more government intervention. Basically, they cry out for a command economy.
#14160219
Nunt wrote:While I believe that true socialism is not the same thing as a command economy, I do have the feeling that all socialists do is cry out for more centralization, more regulation, more government intervention. Basically, they cry out for a command economy.


Those people might be more accurately described as social democrats, not socialists.
#14945448
Someone5 wrote:
I can offer you some rhetorical advice on this matter;

A) If possible, don't let your opponent try to define what socialism implies. If the terms have not been agreed upon beforehand, make a proper definition of socialism (roughly defined, socialism is an economic approach where the workers themselves control the means of production--any further specifics would depend on precisely which sort of socialism you intend to argue) in your opening statement. A capitalist will try to define socialism as "government intervention in the economy" and will probably use some indefensible throw-away lines about how government interference is inherently inefficient and such. Don't fall into this trap; not only is that not what socialism is about, it's also fundamentally not true. Trying to directly fight a lie in a debate is pretty pointless--facts are rarely persuasive in this matter. It's better to avoid this pitfall by defining socialism yourself and refusing to let your opponent divert you on a tangent about the efficacy of central economic planning.



This is good advice.


Someone5 wrote:
If you are actually looking for advice on how to defend central economic planning, asking socialists probably isn't a great way to get that. You're liable to get some responses from anarchists (myself included) that won't help your argument. I will fully admit that the sorts of socialism I advocate have little or nothing to do with central economic planning. If you want advice on that, go read some back issues of the Wall Street Journal or something, because they talk at length about why central planning works. After all, private corporations engage in central economic planning all the time. The same arguments that suggest that corporations operate best when centrally planned apply just as well to the government, and there's plenty of examples in the WSJ and other business journals about how "strong leadership is essential" and such. Just flip it around, because the arguments have just as much merit for governments as they do private corporations.



Yup.


Someone5 wrote:
B) Don't let your opponent make this about the Soviet Union or "other communist countries"; no matter what you say you will not be able to shake the popular caricature of the Soviet Union that is rather common. Believe it or not, it's not really a very accurate model of what a socialist or communist state would look like. Getting bogged down in trying to argue that the Soviet Union wasn't an example of socialism is a pointless fight from a rhetorical standpoint. You will have to waste time and memorize facts for a dubiously effective line of argument that really can be spent in better ways.



True.


Someone5 wrote:
C) Trying to discuss the merits of socialism without talking about the problems of capitalism is quite a difficult task. Socialism is a socio-economic perspective largely developed as part of a critique of capitalism, and it's rather fundamentally intended to be a way to resolve the problems with and inherent contradictions of capitalism. You can't really talk about socialism without also talking about capitalism. In the current economic climate, demonstrating some of the more obvious failures of capitalism in your own city should be fairly easy. One of the advantages that the socialist side of a debate has is the virtue of being correct; you can draw from actual concrete examples rather than having to talk about abstract models. It's hard for people to relate to abstract models, but it's easy to talk about how structural issues with capitalist systems lead to widespread unemployment.

If you have a strong anthropological bent, you might also consider discussing hunter-gatherer societies and their inherent socialism. After all, that is essentially direct worker control over the means of production; it is a non-industrial form of socialism, but it's still a form of socialism. It's also kind of hard-wired into human beings from millions of years of evolution; this can be an important line of argument if your opponent trots out a "human nature is fundamentally selfish/corrupt" line of argument. Dangerous, though, people people have sort of a weird view about hunter-gatherer societies that basically follows Hume's assumption that life was nasty, brutish, and short before feudalism. It's not actually true, but that's a hard argument to make in a debate with short time limits. There have been some books lately about "traditional societies" and some advantages of them that might be useful in this line of argument. It is certainly the case that our capitalist economic system has led us to some very unfortunate social habits (like neolocality...).



Yes.


Someone5 wrote:
D) Do remember to criticize government policies when they serve capitalist interests. This is something that people advocating or representing socialist perspectives often fail to do. Socialism is absolutely not synonymous with government control of the economy; it is important to remind people of that. Government policies can and usually do favor capitalists more than labor. Remind people of that. Don't let them forget that the nation-state system is basically a byproduct of capitalism. Don't let them fail to grasp that government intervention in the economy is a basic and unavoidable consequence of capitalism.



Uh-huh.


Someone5 wrote:
E) It is important also to note that there is a massive body of work relating to socialism that isn't by or about Marx. Socialism predates Marx, and Marx himself had numerous important contemporaries that developed very divergent ideas about what socialism meant. Orthodox Marxist Communism is not the only sort of socialism out there. It's not "the most pure example" or the "most extreme example" of a socialist perspective. It's one among many, no more correct than any of the numerous anarchist forms of socialism. That might be useful to note too; that socialism has both authoritarian and libertarian traditions underneath its rather broad umbrella.



I find this dichotomy-by-scale to be something of a *misnomer*, and *contrived*, though -- if the 'socialism' is 'libertarian' then it's *ineffective* by being too localized and limited in geographical scope, or *escapist*, really, rather than being world-revolutionary in mindset and aims.

And if it's 'authoritarian' then it's probably synonymous with *Stalinism*, or runaway elitist bureaucratic control due to being attacked from without (by capitalist-imperialist state forces).

This dichotomy doesn't provide for any kind of potential 'success'-oriented trajectory, such as some degree of centralization, of socialized social production, per-item, and/or workers collective control of a state apparatus for better-positioned class struggle against *bourgeois-state* forces.

This is why the anarchist position sounds so disingenuous, because it critiques *outside itself*, while not discussing its own approach openly or thoroughly.


Someone5 wrote:
Incidentally, there is also a Techncoracy section of the forum that could be of use in trying to understand at least one coherent non-market system of economic planning. It requires kind of a paradigm shift to "get" the Techncoratic model, but it does actually make some sense. They present a system of economic planning that rejects scarcity and instead allocates resources according to abundance and an assumption of abundance rather than an assumption of scarcity. It's kind of a strange way of looking at economic problems, and perhaps not something I would suggest actually trying to directly advocate in a debate. But it can provide you with some insight on how a non-market system might go about allocating resources.



The single biggest problem with technocracy is that it simply separates white-collar work from blue-collar work. It pretends that blue-collar work would be immediately obsolete and unneeded, but if it was still required it would have to be subservient to white-collar, elitist technical management and leadership -- not much different from the way things are done within the existing capitalist status quo.


Someone5 wrote:
F) The specifics of a socialist system cannot be predicted in advance. A socialist society will develop its own precise form of socialism through the process of class conflict. The tensions and conflicts that lead to a transition to socialism would themselves form the precise structure that a socialist system will feature. Trying to predict exactly what a socialist system will look like beforehand is rather akin to expecting that someone living in, say, England in the 16th century ought to be able to derive the precise form and institutions of capitalism that will exist in the United States in the 21st century. It's not really a reasonable expectation to expect someone to be able to step that far outside their own experiences and assumptions that they can precisely predict what a distant society will look like. An actual transition to socialism would involve a paradigm shift of the sort that societies transitioning from feudalism to capitalism underwent. The end result of that revolution was not reasonably predictable by a serf living in a feudal society, just as the end result of a socialist revolution is not precisely definable by a citizen living in a capitalist nation-state.



Maybe *this* is the crux of the anarchist problematic approach to a socialist mode-of-production transition -- that it reckons the transition to be similar to predecessor, class-division-to-class-division world-historical transitions, when in fact the capitalism-to-socialism transition would *eliminate* the class division entirely, once and for all, which would necessarily yield a qualitatively different character, something that the anarchist position has trouble envisioning.

Specifically, the anarchist position is too wary of the formation of a workers state, because it fears that such a workers state would *hang onto power*, a characteristic typical of *any* aspiring ruling class elite from class history, when the entire *purpose* of a vanguard-type workers organization would in fact be to first *disable* and neutralize the ruling class, thus making *itself* obsolete and unneeded, due to the emergent prevailing numbers in the world then enabled and capable of mass-collective self-determination in the absence of any further class divide and subgroup jockeying for state power.

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