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.
