ladybug
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Sorry to reply over a month later!! I’ve been distracted by various responsibiliities in my life and this discussion slipped to the back of my mind. Thanks Robin, DJP, and Gnome for responding! Once again Robin you have provided a thoughtful and helpful response. A moneyless system finally seems plausible to me. What changed it for me was learning that it is the workers “on the ground” who make the decisions regarding how to allocate resources when they’re scarce, which orders to fill and which to delay or fill only partly, etc. I had been assuming such decisions would be made by the entire community (neighborhood, or municipality, or region, etc.) and this just seemed to unwieldly, too many meetings for us all to sit through to make all these production decisions that would come up day to day. But if these decisions are scattered across various workplaces, then it becomes manageable. DJP, I agree with you that we should be eroding the boundaries between workplace and community. That’s why I made the assumption (noted above) that the community would be involved in these decisions of how to allocate scarce resources. But I don’t think this would be possible because it would be too many meetings. So although no seperation between workplace and community is the ideal, I don’t think it can be met totally in every case, and some boundary will need to remain. But there definitely needs to be more community input/control in workplaces, such as for environmental standards, product health and safety, etc. Gnome, you crack me up! I’m glad you’re warming to me and it’s likewise. The SPGB must use you and your charming ways to recruit new members. But I don’t live in Britain so wouldn’t make much sense for me to join. Plus I’m not convinced about SPGB’s electoral strategy. I don’t entirely dismiss it either, as I think it might be possible, but I put more faith in revolution.
Gnome, thanks for the support! (why are your smiley faces here soooo cute? That alone makes this forum better than all the others. ) ALB, I have moved from parecon to other ideas but I think even if I had not that isn’t reason for that person to have been condescending. 99.9% of people don’t see eye to eye with our ideas and I think we have to be patient and respectful or it will give people just one more reason to dismiss us. Easier said then done of course and I’ve been not so nice before myself! Thanks again Robin! I think that Hobson quote is a bit over my head but I look forward to your post on the ECA forum to hopefully get a better understanding. The first half of your post makes sense to me. Just a follow up question, though…You said: “It makes a lot of sense in such cases to allocate such inputs to high priority end uses first and foremost and then to other end uses lower down your ranking system. As I said this is a matter best left to the intuitive judgment of individuals on the ground ; there is no need for society to formulate some kind of elaborate and explicit hierarchy of end uses and it would it would be absurd even to attempt that.” By “individuals on the ground”, who are you talking about? My guess is you’re talking about the workers in the workplace that produces the good in question. They would have orders/requests from various other worker collectives and they would sort through the various orders/requests and decide which was most important using their own common sense and consideration of a hierarchy of needs. So for example if I work at a steel plant and we have too many orders/requests to meet them all, we sort through them and decide to fulfill the order for the train manufacturer 100% and for car manufacturing only 80% because we decided that public transit should trump individual transit. Is that it? Or by “individuals on the ground” were you thinking of something broader?
Hello again! Thanks to everyone for your contribution to this discussion AND for being so friendly. Some weeks ago I had emailed the SPGB with this exact question, almost word for word, and the particular member who replied was sorta mean to me, as if I was either stupid or insincere in my socialism for having any doubts about a moneyless system. (I don’t take this as a reflection on the SPGB as a whole… of the comrades I know personally, some can also be kind of mean when dealing with disagreements.) I was a little worried about the responses I’d get so it felt great to be treated so comradely here! Special thank you to Robin who clearly put a lot of time into his response. I must admit that my belief that the issues I highlighted would be a problem has not changed… but I will continue to think it over, and maybe reread this thread in a week or two. There are various things which I am now convinced of (and feel strongly about) which I used to reject. Sometimes it takes the mind a while to adapt to new ideas. And sometimes, even after much time, the mind decides the new ideas aren’t worth adapting to. Time will tell what will be the case here… meanwhile I’m keeping an open mind. In any case, I do feel a LITTLE bit less worried about these problems… I still think they will be problems but perhaps not as giant as I’ve been suspecting. (Although whether the problems would be tiny or disastrous, I don’t think we can predict.) Gnome, yes I have read several articles by the SPGB. They have an excellent library and have contributed positively to my political knowledge. DJP, thanks for the video link. I don’t have time to watch it right now but I have put it on my “to watch” list.
Wow, it worked on my second try! I was able to post the thing I had wanted to. I didn’t even change anything …. except to change the images of emoticons like this for the standard old school emoticons like this
…. don’t know why that should make a difference. Well sorry for wasting your time with the above message, I would delete it but I don’t know how.
