This interview with an US professor Richard Wolff explaining “how can you get a PS5 under socialism” a bit like watching libertarians evangelizing the fallacy of perfect information of free market participants,^1 just au rebours. Or maybe it’s not even au rebours, just the same exact fallacy, worded differently?
The postulate of “workers’ councils”, presented here as core part of “socialism” is usually postulated in the “anarcho-syndicalism” package in Europe (in American political parlour everything is “socialism” that is left from Trump).
It’s based on two fundamental assumptions that also happen to be fallacies:
participants of these councils can somehow acquire 100% accurate information about the “social needs” that will be not biased or influenced by any party;
the actual “social needs” are identical or can be somehow averaged in a society composed of individuals that often have dramatically different personal preferences.
A simple example that everyone can ask themselves: some people want to wear green t-shirts, some want orange ones.
How do you average these? You can’t.
A typical real socialism solution: make grey ones, so everyone is pissed off but at least equally pissed off.
A typical regulated free market solution: someone makes green, someone makes orange, someone makes red with “Che” Guevara. Whoever sells most, wins. Surplus is sold at discounted price. Carbon tax curbs possible excess surplus production by internalising the external costs of pollution and CO2 emissions.
@kravietz To be fair same approach can be used under socialism. Just make a bunch of different colors, distribute, adjust the assortment to real demand.
Main problem in my opinion is not that it can't work at all but has extreme administrative overhead and is prone to malpractice.
@kravietz By real demand I mean actual demand seen happening. The core idea can be the same - a variety of products is offered anticipating the demand and then some turn out to be more successful so investments and offers increase and others are less successful so their availability is reduced. At the same time uncovered niches are analyzed and probed. It can still be centralized model.
This is what happens in large organizations when it comes to internal distribution of resources. Nationwide it seems to fail.
I wonder what is so different in capitalistic free market and theoretical socialistic market because core mechanism can be very similar and I think it is actually all about complexity and responsibility. In capitalistic free market you stake your own resources and quite often your attempts are futile as for every successful product there are many failed and resulting in losses. However it is simple and efficient overall. In organizations the same process can be controlled for some time but the losses now become everyone's losses and it becomes increasingly complex plus as long as there are some positions with deciding power these people will use their power to avoid blame for bad decisions and this is when everything spins out of control.
My point is that it is hard to argue with fans of planned economy with "it can't work even theoretically" or "you don't have any market influence" because they know that theoretically it isn't so. Also they'll dismiss arguments like "100% accurate demand information can't be collected/predicted" and "actual needs have to be averaged" as strawman fallacies. They see how their company runs its coffee break room this way and it seems to work. No one will be convinced or even have doubts.
However it fails somewhere else (and these kinds of failures are often seen on smaller scale as well like in companies' management - just less devastating).
This is what happens in large organizations when it comes to internal distribution of resources. Nationwide it seems to fail.
I think this paragraph highlights the key problem here, because from purely technical point what we’re discussing is supply chain management which is a separate science in any large business today, private (e.g. Amazon) or public (e.g. NHS). So we know pretty well how to technically manage complex supply chains.
But the difference is the scope of this supply chain. In case of Amazon and NHS the business goals of each organisation are clearly defined - it’s closed system with quite a unambiguously defined mission statement. You can then just go and design the supply chain optimised to deliver these goals.
But what are “business goals” of the whole country? I don’t think these can be clearly defined in the scope of the whole economy. What logically follows is an inability to define an optimal supply chain behind it, because there’s no reference to optimise for.
For example, you can’t define country-wide fashion trend goals, because they are not driven by any rational reasoning. Social drivers behind fashion are mostly irrational and reflect complex play between individualism and herd instincts. Attempts to do so resulted in forced state-level unification (Maoist Cultural Revolution, North Korea) or rather miserable attempts on averaging fashion based on what is available (real socialism in Poland or USSR).
And I personally believe not only you can’t define these, but you also should not - because this curbs human creativity.
For that, I have another anecdote from communist Poland - my IT professor was working in a some R&D institute in 1980’s and they somehow managed to get a computer (Z80 class I guess). So they started playing with it and in a few months time managed to write a nice computer graphics demo, 1980’s style so probably a rotating line cube or something like that. In any case they were very proud of this achievement.
So when they had a Party commission ritually visiting their institute, they boasted about the computer and the demo, explaining how they see a potential for computer-supported design etc. But the Party officials were not only unimpressed, they shouted at them that they’re wasting time for some nonsense, computers are a bourgeois whim and all design will be forever done using pencil and rules.
Of course, in a few years time the whole system collapsed while computer graphics and computer design became a billions dollars worth industry that now is used everywhere.
So, any form of planning by definition assumes thinking within some existing mental frameworks and the more detailed your plans are, the more outdated they become over time.
That’s the main source of my frustration with the semantic reductionism in the contemporary political discourse 🤦While the actual political life worldwide becomes more complex and evolves, the language we use devolves and becomes more simplistic, down to binary choice between “capitalism” and “socialism” 🤦
In terms of the proverbial PS5, you highlighted the core semantic issue here: can an economic system with public ownership of means of production be called “socialism” if it doesn’t have any central planning and control? In reality, it only depends on what definition you choose and, with around a hundred in circulation, the term loses any informative value.
If we stick to the most widespread 20th century definition - the Soviet one - “socialism” was a stage on the way to “communism” defined as socio-economic system organised per Marxist-Leninist ideology. Marxist economy included the element of “rational planning” to avoid “surplus production” which is why Soviet economy was based on central planning. In reality of course it had nothing to do with “rational” planning and in practice resulted in what Janos Kornai called “economy of shortage”, but that’s what they were sticking to until its collapse in 1989-1991.
So this kind of “Eurasian socialism on the way to communism” was very prescriptive and quite closed system in terms of readiness for evolution or adaptation - as opposed, for example, to Chinese one which managed to perform strategic reforms in 1976 right after Mao’s death (yet it was called “Maoism” in another semantic twist).
Is any other form of “socialism” possible? Now also answering @harce about the cooperatives - the thing is that while they are part of the “socialist” recipe, the cooperatives embedded in a predominantly free market economy are missing the whole remaining part of the recipe. In my opinion it’s misleading to call the whole system “socialist” - it’s just as “socialist” as any capitalist country having public healthcare or schooling, so not really.
The true declarative power of both “socialism” and “capitalism” are only revealed when they are fully unleashed in their postulates. The problem is that while “socialist” postulates form a rather closed and prescriptive system (you have to enforce public ownership of means of production and central planning), the “capitalist” ones are simply limited to “do whatever you like, except don’t do X” (e.g. don’t form monopolies). So it’s IMHO unfair to say “socialism kind of works because public healthcare works well even in capitalist countries” but you can pretty fairly say “legalisation of private trade in 1980’s socialist China and Poland worked pretty well”.
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