artificialfish

It is not, by definition, socialism. Socialism has other elements. Marx did not think it was socialism. He thought political economy also likely made it impossible, because it didn’t abolish capitalism. Socialism is the global abolition of capitalism in all its forms, capitalism being the private ownership of the means of production (a group of workers still privately owns a factory, its private unless its public), via all means it might re-emerge, it’s not a spectrum of redistribution of wealth or government intervention.

Marx’s critique of political economy says you can’t have a half capitalist half socialist system like that. If there is any form of money or profit it will pool. It will become political power. It will oppress the socialist tendencies, and just like you see in America, it will privatize them over time. It will eventually destroy any gains you made socializing the economy.

Capitalism is a centralizing/monopolizing force, and under Marxism the goal is to benefit from that centralization materially, simply bring it under the dictatorship of the proletariat. There are so many passages in Marx and Engels about “economic anarchy” (describing free markets, not anarchism) vs the prosperity that comes from central planning, the nationalization of the imperialist monopolies.

I just don’t think you’ve read anything. I’m not even that read and I know this shit.

“The entire body of workers have a say in the process of central planning” - you can have a democratic system where you vote on planning, true, but it’s hardly non-authoritarian. Imagine if our democracy decided all the material goods you could consume and all the work you must do? Would you be satisfied? No, because democracy at its best is slow, ineffective, and ultimately authoritarian. It’s how you do things when you have no other choice, not how you want to live, eat, and breathe each day of your life. Democracy is not freedom. Anarchy is freedom. It’s only benefit is its not literal fascism.

You are a Bernstein-esq social democrat with Proudhon-esq mutualist and cooperativist elements. Not a Marxist. Not a socialist under any modern use of the term.

I think you are the one who fundamentally misunderstands Marx’s critique of capitalism if that is all you think capitalism is.

Sure there is a contradiction between the classes, in the form of their conflicting interests, but there is also a contradiction in commodity production itself, in the materialist superstructure that makes up the concepts of money, wage, profit, etc. The ultimate goal of socialism is to do away with the value-form. Because the value form produces a contradiction between the exchange value and the use value of a product. Things are exchange values of each other under Marxist theory if they both contain the same socially necessary labor time. However, not all things which contain the same socially necessary labor time are necessarily of the same use value, indeed use value is not a quantitative metric but a qualitative one, and is the actually useful metric for human flourishing contained in an item. Diamonds and Uranium might both take the same labor time to get out of the ground, but how much of each do we need? Socialism ultimately hopes to provide people with use values, things they need, not simply trade things of equal labor values. If you don’t handle this you get into crises of overproduction.

The second contradiction in cooperativism (again these are textbook Marxist critiques not things I pulled out of my ass, you can actually search for the word cooperativism in Marx’s work, that’s what he calls it) is that workers still participate in a race to the bottom competing on working conditions. Two firms both make X. They each compete each other down in their profits until the profit is near 0, that is the tendency of profit to fall. Now how do they outcompete each other? On wages. On hours. On safety standards. Etc. one corporation willing to work harder, for less, less safely, will outcompete the other. That’s what he means when he says the workers become their own capitalists, and thus their own oppressors. They will democratically choose this even as a cooperative, because the system of capitalism oppresses them to do so, else they are outcompeted and go out of business.

So no, I understand this material. You do not.

I mean it’s cool that this has become internet popular, but you go out into the world and socialist means Marxist. I did that, went to socialist groups, etc, socialist means Marxist. There are just lots of different kinds of Marxists.

It’s just that that’s not socialism either. You’re no true scotsmaning existing socialism, and idealizing not-socialism. You’re a social democrat, a cooperativist, maybe a mutualist, which is the right thing to be. You seek to manage contradictions, you don’t idealize their synthesis.

A workers cooperative is using a socialist mode of production to organize and run a private business.

Marx didn’t think so. You still produce commodities for the purpose of profit. You just become your own capitalist.

I made this a separate comment because it’s so common and also so absurd. Richard Wolff is wrong about this. A socialist mode of production where workers produce commodities for profit 🤣

I don’t see psychology, sociology etc. as something separate to nature.

Yes that’s what I said. Re separating “nature” and “biosphere”

unrealistic abstractions as excuses for oppression and extractivism.

The formalization of things into oppression and extractivist categories is also a system of morals and also contains absurdities. Of course we need to extract food from our environment, and of course we need to oppress oppressors, just for example.

You didn’t provide what the contradictions of the socialist mode of production are. You gave critiques of planned economy and authoritarianism.

I… did… what? The critiques were in the form of contradictory forces: central planning (seeks to centralize power) and democracy (seeks to distribute power), those who work “according to their ability” (incentive to minimize work) those who receive “according to their need” (incentive to maximize receipt of goods) (contradiction comes from the added premise max work -> max goods). These are as contradictory as the class differences between capitalist and worker, even moreso since they are contradictions between the worker and himself. Society and itself.

This is about philosophy, not a critique of marxian economics or dielectical materialism

Which are we talking about again? Philosophy or Marxism? Wait, Marxism and dialectical materialism are philosophies. Wait, Deleuze comments on them. Wait… wtf are you talking about?

I think you are talking about cooperativism. That’s a form of capitalism. Again, it would be great to have a multipolar world where we could try that out. But it doesn’t not have contradictions, it just has new ones. Every politicial system has dialectical contradictions, and we simply flow from old ones to new ones as material conditions change. I recommend reading the deluzian criticism of dialectics.

I actually did a really deep dive into cybernetics, like the actual math involved, which I’m qualified to analyze. It unfortunately would still require a lot of research to get right, and even at the levels of compute we have today it might not be enough. One simply needs to consider the number of types of screws which are necessary to actually fulfill the global demand, and their interchangeability depending on a thousand factors of production, to see the problem. Ultimately, reducing their value to a quantity and optimizing on that quantity based on supply and demand is really easy, compared to some kind of actual graph flow optimization problem based on final product use-demand. The level of democracy at the end would be incredibly complex too, and let’s face it, democracy is not very efficient nor does it even really well reflect the modal persons preferences in a society, let alone representing minority interests.

Ultimately you need a system that can interact with each individuals specific needs and wants (demand), interact with each individual’s abilities, interests, and capacity for labor (supply), even pushing them a bit (incentives), and then balance that interaction with all intermediate necessities to balance the equation, not simply aggregate the averages and expect it to normalize. And even then, think how manipulative, surveillance, and controlling that is.

By nature in this case what I assume you mean is the biosphere. What I mean by nature includes psychology, sociology, political science, etc. I do not believe that humans have a primary duty towards the biosphere, that is not what I mean when I say “human systems fit nature into a box”. Humans try to fit themselves into boxes. They are “homo economicus” completely devoid of feeling or passion, purely game theoretic rational actors. Or humans are primitive communists forced into a modern world, altruists of the highest degree except under capitalism. Or humans are tabula rasa, whatever they are socialized to be they become, or whatever material conditions force them to be they become. Or humans are children of god, or one with nature, or whatever. None of these things are true, yet we build systems assuming they are. They each only approach some truth, and then we watch as contradictions emerge and destroy one formalism of nature via its own absurdity.