Taking the means of production into public ownership - Page 2 - 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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#14942264
ckaihatsu wrote:While all of this is nominally unobjectionable, I often wonder -- when I see this kind of line -- why certain comrades are content to retain the status quo economics of abstract valuations, and even market-exchanges, as the material-economic system for a transitional-to-post-capitalist society.

I do understand that this whole treatment is most likely meant for the 'socialism'-phase / workers-state transitional period out of capitalist social relations, and so would resemble a workers regime of 'radical reformism' / nationalization / socialization of all economic activity, but I'd like to impress the point that the necessarily-'hands-off' market mechanism should be transcended and laid to rest as quickly as is practically possible, due to its 'realm' of exchange values. This realm of exchange values, if retained, would directly compete alongside the *socialist*-minded politics and sentiment of a societal operation based on *use* values, to supply to all human need.

In other words, even a *workers* state shouldn't be *dependent* on supplies of capital, because the collective -- by definition -- is already in a dominant political position to *de-legitimize* the *use* of capital, and money in general, in favor of discrete 'hands-on' decisions / judgments over any given social matter.

I'm really not convinced that holding onto conventional / traditional economic practices from capitalism would be advantageous to the workers state in any sort of way, at any point in time. It would be better to collectively adopt 'best practices' types of policies to cover most realistic scenarios / situations, so that a commonly understood social norm takes hold, with most decisions then being socio-politically uncontroversial and doable by just about anyone, based on prevailing revolutionary sentiments and mass-supported guidelines.


My thinking is that any new economic orientation must evolve organically out of the existing order, if it is to have any hope of survival. Capitalism (as an -ism) essentially doesn't exist, except as an ex post facto justification. The secret of capitalism's longevity is its viral mutability - once it becomes captured by ideological constraints (as has happened in the US), it ossifies and declines fairly rapidly.

Ideological ossification played a central role in the failure of the Soviet experiment as well. I trace its downfall to Krondstadt and the rejection of actual socialism as counter-revolution/snobbery, etc.
#14944091
quetzalcoatl wrote:
My thinking is that any new economic orientation must evolve organically out of the existing order, if it is to have any hope of survival. Capitalism (as an -ism) essentially doesn't exist, except as an ex post facto justification. The secret of capitalism's longevity is its viral mutability - once it becomes captured by ideological constraints (as has happened in the US), it ossifies and declines fairly rapidly.

Ideological ossification played a central role in the failure of the Soviet experiment as well. I trace its downfall to Krondstadt and the rejection of actual socialism as counter-revolution/snobbery, etc.



Oooop -- just seeing your reply now. Still adjusting to this new board, plus I've been busy lately....

I don't think that capitalism can be reduced to its *ideological* / political prowess -- or lack thereof -- really everyone depends on the *distribution* mechanics of capitalism's system, for life and living. If we're ever to transcend the market function altogether it *has* to be a mass-conscious act, meaning explicit planning for desired outcomes in everyone's common post-class interests.

I've dealt with your latter point at length over at RevLeft, for instance here:


ckaihatsu, at RevLeft wrote:
You're falling into the same trap here as any *bourgeois* / counterrevolutionary critic, in ascribing historical revolutionary 'failure' to the *idea* itself -- another form of ahistorical idealism.

In the case of the October Revolution, for example, the problem of creeping revisionism wasn't due to the idea of Bolshevism itself, etc., but rather was because of *foreign imperialist invasion*:


Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

The Allied intervention was a multi-national military expedition launched during the Russian Civil War in 1918. The stated goals were to help the Czechoslovak Legion, to secure supplies of munitions and armaments in Russian ports, and to re-establish the Eastern Front. After the Bolshevik government withdrew from World War I, the Allies militarily backed the anti-communist White forces in Russia. Allied efforts were hampered by divided objectives, war-weariness from the overall global conflict, and a lack of domestic support. These factors, together with the evacuation of the Czechoslovak Legion, compelled the Allies to withdraw from North Russia and Siberia in 1920, though Japanese forces occupied parts of Siberia until 1922 and the northern half of Sakhalin until 1925.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War


Foreign forces throughout Russia

Numbers of Allied soldiers who were present in the indicated regions of Russia:

600 French and British troops landed in Arkhangelsk[17]
A number of British troops in Vladivostok.
A number of Romanian troops in Bessarabia.
23,351 Greeks, who withdrew after three months (part of I Army Corps under Maj. Gen. Konstantinos Nider, comprising 2nd and 13th Infantry Divisions, in the Crimea, and around Odessa and Kherson)[18]
13,000 Americans (in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions)[14][15]
11,500 Estonians in northwestern Russia[12]
2,500 Italians (in the Arkhangelsk region and Siberia)[19]
2,300 Chinese (in the Vladivostok region)[20]
150 Australians (mostly in the Arkhangelsk regions)[21]
15,000 Japanese soldiers in the Eastern region
4,192 Canadians in Vladivostok, 600 Canadians in Arkhangelsk[22]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... out_Russia



https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2891056



Regarding Kronstadt specifically, I tend to think that much was already in disarray and stagnating by that point, so there were to be no 'winners' in that kind of situation:



Economic background

By 1921, the Bolsheviks were winning the Russian Civil War and foreign troops were beginning to withdraw, yet Bolshevik leaders continued to keep tight control of the economy through the policy of War Communism.[5] After years of economic crises caused by World War I and the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik economy started to collapse.[5] Industrial output had fallen dramatically. It is estimated that the total output of mines and factories in 1921 was 20 percent of the pre-World War I level, with many crucial items suffering an even more drastic decline. Production of cotton, for example, had fallen to 5 percent and iron to 2 percent of the pre-war level, and this coincided with droughts in 1920 and 1921 and the Russian famine of 1921.[6] Discontent grew among the Russian populace, particularly the peasantry, who felt disadvantaged by Communist grain requisitioning (prodrazvyorstka, forced seizure of large portions of the peasants' grain crop used to feed urban dwellers). They resisted by refusing to till their land. In February 1921, more than 100 peasant uprisings took place. The workers in Petrograd were also involved in a series of strikes, caused by the reduction of bread rations by one third over a ten-day period.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt ... background
#14944102
'Capitalism' is neither superior or inferior to any state monopoly in respect of increasing the total asset(capital)value of any society.
An entrepreneur increases his capital through garnering Net profits each year in the business.

Those profits arise from the price mechanism as leveraged on the business's customers.

It's always the end-user customer that is the source of such profits, providing there is demand for the goods or services from which such profits are generated, it's academic as to how they are made.
A business owner with a giant ego may believe that it's he\she that is responsible for such profits, the probability is that is not the case, rather, it's simply the law of supply, demand & price mechanism that is the reason.

'Profit' made, is a direct consequence of price over cost, in other words, any buyer is virtually always paying a premium for whatever is being bought.
You might say(rightly)that all businesses require profits to remain a going concern, that is true, but, as with everything else, there are 'profits' & 'profits'.
It's the level of profits that become issues in an economy, if a main sector utility charges prices way over cost, money ending up as obscene profits in a utility sector companies coffers, affects spending elsewhere in the economy, through reduced demand effects.
In a utility company, government environmental policies for instance, have a direct effect on prices or demand elsewhere in the economy & such effects are multiplied when government policies are applied across all the utility sector.

I believe that the state taking control over utilities is essential for the economic health of any country, but ONLY if it is done as efficiently as can be done in the most efficient private commercial way possible & that can stabilise an economy through bringing price stability.

In the UK, the Labour Party manifesto should reinstate Clause 4, to enable it to aquire the previously nationalised utility companies, AT A COST EQUAL TO THE ORIGINAL FLOTATION RECEIPTS RECEIVED BY THE GOVERNMENT.
It is irrelevant that money has been spent by those companies on infrastructure or investment in new sources of supplies, EVERY SINGLE PENNY SPENT BY THOSE COMPANIES, IS EXTRACTED BY THOSE COMPANIES FROM THE CUSTOMERS THROUGH CHARGES ON THEIR BILLS, THEREFORE THEY SHOULD NOT PROFIT FROM THAT SITUATION WHEN THE GOVERNMENT RE-NATIONALISES THEM.
ANY LONG-TERM LOANS BY THOSE COMPANIES ARE THEN TAKEN ON BY THE TAXPAYER AS THE NEW OWNER OF THE BUSINESSES.
For prosperity to increase or spread in an open, free economy, the government must bring it's power to bear in the matter & make companies pay a proper living wage.

For those companies that don't, then taxation tools must be brought to bear down on such companies in such a way as to impose a heavy cost on them for not complying.
#14944146
ckaihatsu wrote:Regarding Kronstadt specifically, I tend to think that much was already in disarray and stagnating by that point, so there were to be no 'winners' in that kind of situation:


I don't dispute any point about the threat to socialism from the west at that time. But at the same time, it's a constant thread that there will always be some reason to delay "real" socialism. The time is never right, from the point of view of the vanguard.
#14944256
quetzalcoatl wrote:
I don't dispute any point about the threat to socialism from the west at that time. But at the same time, it's a constant thread that there will always be some reason to delay "real" socialism. The time is never right, from the point of view of the vanguard.



If we take the Bolsheviks at the time to have been the 'vanguard' back then, your latter point makes no sense.

Lenin, et al, were using an administrative *hierarchy* at the time, under War Communism, to decisively take the economy off of the market system, which *is*, arguably, an appropriate step in the direction of socialism. I myself happen to think that it was an objectively *appropriate* step, given those particular empirical circumstances, though I certainly would not want to be in that kind of situation myself since the political trajectory was already clearly on the *downslope* by that point, given the aforementioned Western invasions and destruction of the nascent workers state and its economy.



Policies

War communism included the following policies:

1. Nationalization of all industries and the introduction of strict centralized management

2. State control of foreign trade

3. Strict discipline for workers, with strikes forbidden

4. Obligatory labor duty by non-working classes

5. Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surplus (in excess of an absolute minimum) from peasants for centralized distribution among the remaining population

6. Rationing of food and most commodities, with centralized distribution in urban centers

7. Private enterprise banned

8. Military-style control of the railways

Because the Bolshevik government implemented all these measures in a time of civil war, they were far less coherent and coordinated in practice than they might appear on paper. Large areas of Russia remained outside Bolshevik control, and poor communications meant that even those regions loyal to the Bolshevik government often had to act on their own, lacking orders or coordination from Moscow. It has long been debated[by whom?] whether "war communism" represented an actual economic policy in the proper sense of the phrase, or merely a set of measures intended to win the civil war.[1]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism
#14944320
Rancid wrote:
How would the means of production be managed by the public though?

Seems like to date, the only successful way this has been done is to put it in the hands of a very strong and well lead one party state (China)



I'm open to the strategy / approach of 'vanguardism', as I've outlined here:

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/11 ... ost1553100


There's a trade-off *cost*, though -- the more *dependent* the working class is on a substitutionist-type specialized professional administration, the more *broad-based* power and participation it's willing to forfeit in favor of expediency and quick maneuverability, as from a one-party state.

(For example, in my previous post I included Wikipedia's rundown on what War Communism was, and it happened to forbid strikes -- a tradeoff for hierarchical-based decisiveness.)

I developed a custom approach to this question of 'how', and the model framework I created uses a system of daily personal prioritized demands rankings. Here's a relevant section on this topic from my FAQ:



-> Why can't the workers just decide among themselves what is to be produced, and what isn't? Why is there a 'locality' populist-type component that makes proposals and issues labor credits?

The question derived from this issue is 'How can the liberated laborers *know* what unmet human need actually *is*?' If we return to the 'self-regulating system of stock control', we have a functional process that's almost "divine"-like in its existence -- no one knows how it came into existence, and no one knows how to alter it, but on a day-to-day basis it functions well within its circumscribed parameters: Any time something is removed from its shelves for its inherent use-value, its database reflects this change of inventory, and the information is passed along 'upstream' so that production can be initiated to make additional units to send along, to return the shelves to full inventory status. If all post-capitalist liberated labor simply 'signed-off' on this method we could *assume* that it would be adequate for all human need, but we wouldn't *know* it for certain because there's no provision for planning-type, *qualitative* inputs from society's pool of consumers, as for new products, as mentioned previously.

And, on the *socio-political* side of things, how would society know any given 'snapshot', or 'cross-section', of real public sentiment in the body politic, for new *societal* initiatives, for new social policies -- ? In other words, consumption is *not* the same as production, since production can be about *mass* numbers of the same item, while consumption is *necessarily* individualized since only the consumer him- or herself can make the best decision about what they need from society's productivity at any given moment.

The 'communist supply & demand' model that overlaps with the 'labor credits framework' contains a component of 'daily personal prioritization lists', which includes both *material*-type consumer inputs as well as socio-political-type 'initiatives' that can develop through to finalized 'policy packages' for public consideration and locality-aggregated-tallies per rank position (#1, #2, #3, etc.), for public display so that all can see what mass material needs and socio-political sentiment are for any given day, and over time.

The benefit here is that popular 'demand' for any given item, material or social, will be reflected in the *aggregated* lists, and this mass demand will almost-certainly *always* outnumber the group of liberated-laborers that are necessary for the *fulfillment* of that mass-demanded item -- it's a system of valid popular demand that can exert a force of *numbers* onto those who could reasonably fill the work roles for the *realization* of that expressed demand. Liberated labor wouldn't have any *formal* obligation to participate in the highest-ranked, most-popular policy packages, but it would have a *general*, *social* obligation, due to the respective numbers, to *favor* the higher-mass-ranked proposals and policy packages, with its participation for the *realization* of those mass-favored types of social production.



tinyurl.com/labor-credits-faq


https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889317
#14944322
Rancid wrote:How would the means of production be managed by the public though?

Seems like to date, the only successful way this has been done is to put it in the hands of a very strong and well lead one party state (China)


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

Something like this could be done but with modern network technology.
#14944326
Pants-of-dog wrote:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

Something like this could be done but with modern network technology.


That's interesting. Sounds very ahead of its time actually.

Now that I think about it, AI could really help with sort of management.

Do you think Technology will help make communism more and more feasible? I'm starting to think it can.

If that were the case, Karl Marx might have been a time traveler from the future. :eek:
#14944435
Vanguardism had its time and place. The people it nominally served did make impressive concrete advances in terms of material and social well-being. But in the end, a worker is a still a cog in a machine, whether that machine is owned by the state or by a capitalist.

Socialism, unless it means democratic worker control of the workplace, means nothing at all. That doesn't mean the state acting in loco parentis for the worker. It literally means workers own, manage, and reap the benefits of their work. The precise means this can be achieved are open to discussion.
#14944849
Pants-of-dog wrote:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

Something like this could be done but with modern network technology.


While this project was progressive at the time, employing an advanced software and innovative technology, aiming to distribute the control, and involving the workers in production planning; it did however create a hierarchy where:

"...Workers were expected to perform processes and use resources in the ways that had been modelled and planned. Any significant deviation from was to be reported upwards, and corrective directives were to be cascaded downwards."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#System

This model on its own, specially in the long run, is very likely to act to the disadvantage of the workers (the direct Producers). Which considering the inadequacy of human involvement in the entire process; is not really surprising.
Therefore, my understanding is that such system - using the modern technology, of course - could possibly be incorporated into the custom approach 'Labour credit model' explained by 'ckaihatsu' in the earlier post here; to obtain desirable outcome.
Last edited by Stardust on 07 Sep 2018 14:33, edited 1 time in total.
#14944851
quetzalcoatl wrote:Socialism, unless it means democratic worker control of the workplace, means nothing at all. That doesn't mean the state acting in loco parentis for the worker. It literally means workers own, manage, and reap the benefits of their work. The precise means this can be achieved are open to discussion.

How does this "socialism" differ from capitalism? You can do that sort of thing now. Isn't that just a co-op?
#14944859
SolarCross wrote:How does this "socialism" differ from capitalism? You can do that sort of thing now. Isn't that just a co-op?


A legitimate question. Co-ops are indeed a response to the cooperative side of the competitive/cooperative human axis. If you look at the history of the co-op movement in the US, they have been quite ferociously fought at every turn, with methods that bordered on (and often crossed) the borders of legality. Without stronger legal protection, they cannot successfully compete based on their merits.
#14944883
quetzalcoatl wrote:A legitimate question. Co-ops are indeed a response to the cooperative side of the competitive/cooperative human axis. If you look at the history of the co-op movement in the US, they have been quite ferociously fought at every turn, with methods that bordered on (and often crossed) the borders of legality. Without stronger legal protection, they cannot successfully compete based on their merits.


A legitimate question that you didn't answer. Could you cite these incidences of being "ferociously fought at every turn"? There was no such thing in the UK as far as I am aware. Co-ops are at worst a little absurd in the way they are allergic to certain forms of finance otherwise they are entirely harmless; their faults are self-inflicted.
#14944901
quetzalcoatl wrote:
A legitimate question. Co-ops are indeed a response to the cooperative side of the competitive/cooperative human axis. If you look at the history of the co-op movement in the US, they have been quite ferociously fought at every turn, with methods that bordered on (and often crossed) the borders of legality. Without stronger legal protection, they cannot successfully compete based on their merits.



SolarCross wrote:
A legitimate question that you didn't answer. Could you cite these incidences of being "ferociously fought at every turn"? There was no such thing in the UK as far as I am aware. Co-ops are at worst a little absurd in the way they are allergic to certain forms of finance otherwise they are entirely harmless; their faults are self-inflicted.



The point is, in my estimation, what the *bounds* of legality are for any given co-op -- if it's ultimately based on private property, which it is, then it's really the real estate *market* that's determining what can be a co-op, and what cannot.

If a co-op enjoyed the privileges that '[url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood"]corporate personhood[/url]' does today, then a legal right like the right of association -- in the context of a 'co-op personhood' -- could conceivably *override* private-property rights, so as to include all of those who wish to willingly associate within the geographic bounds of the co-op, and *across* co-ops, possibly expanding those boundaries on the basis of this conceivable, legally-prevailing 'co-op personhood'. Private property rights would have to take a *back-seat* any time that *co-op* rights were exercised.
#14944925
ckaihatsu wrote:If a co-op enjoyed the privileges that corporate personhood does today, then a legal right like the right of association -- in the context of a 'co-op personhood' -- could conceivably *override* private-property rights, so as to include all of those who wish to willingly associate within the geographic bounds of the co-op, and *across* co-ops, possibly expanding those boundaries on the basis of this conceivable, legally-prevailing 'co-op personhood'. Private property rights would have to take a *back-seat* any time that *co-op* rights were exercised.


Indeed it would, but as you have pointed out in the first part of your argument; such thing would not happen within the boundaries of the current social system- ultimately being based on private property.

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