Decky wrote:Anyway if you give the working class what they want you do not get democratically run workers co-ops you get this.
This is a little bit of a strawman, since what workers want is good conditions for themselves, and they can then be misled about how to achieve that. Workers want good wages. Nigel Farage tells them that the capital dictators/bourgeoisie will give them good wages if their control is unhindered, so he is basically telling them that they need to not have control in order to have control. Marxists in power tell the same story except that the state is the capital dictator.
Workers need direction in the sense that they need a system that avoids having the question of how to achieve what they want removed from their hands, or abstracted into some distant macro-plan.
Workers are good at knowing what they want on a direct level, because they know their own material desires. If workers are to get what they want out of capital, then they must be the managers of the capital they work at. Nigel Farage and Vladimir Lenin by contrast are fundamentally telling the workers the same thing, despite being on opposite ends of the political spectrum; that they don't need to have power to have power. Neither are interested in putting the direct stakes of workers before their formulation of their needs. The only difference is that Nigel Farage wants to pass the job onto the bourgeoisie, whereas Lenin and Stalin set their government itself to tell workers what they want to have.
The alternative is to have the state create the conditions whereby workers co-operatively make the decisions about their direct material survival without fixed bossism in the name of an owners income, nor fixed bossism in the name of a 19th Century labor value theory filtered through the dictates of a central command class.
KlassWar wrote:The problem is that when you don't have ownership of all by all you can't really do democratic planning of the economy, you're still subject to the market economy and all its failings.
The failings which are caused almost exclusively by monopoly product power which allows price setting, and non-diversification of risk, as well as monopsonistic labor power on the other side which allows wage setting. Common mode failure.
Democratic planning of the economy simply subjects each worker to the sum of all the significantly filtered perceptions of other workers ideas about what every worker everywhere needs, with the final say of a command class. This is incredibly inefficient, since the market already contains this information. All you are doing is letting people decide on things far removed from affecting them, and letting their needs in that location, at that time, be hindered by what the command class thinks is the best aggregate (from the democratic centralism) perception of some sort of universal need, and you are doing this for every industry wage, price, and production quota system. Common mode failure.
It's completely inefficient, not to mention oppressive and misery inducing. It's also pointless since as noted the information is already in the market. The key thing is to prevent market failure by stopping that information content from being reduced by monopolistic micro-management by capital or state.
Marxism fails because it rejects the market, and even as technology develops to make its system more and more possible, it remains every bit as superfluous and oppressive. This is also why it remains a minority philosophy, unlikely to gain support among the mass of liberal workers.