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DJP wrote:

Gog, If you and some friends want to get together and grow some fruit and veg and share the produce then fine, go ahead be my guest.But if you think this is a magic path to socialism you are wrong.The fact is at some point the question of state power will have to be met and that is why it is necessary to organise politically.

 But it is not an Either-Or thing is it?  I do wish people would stop thinking in these black or white terms.  Gog has a valid point. Equally valid is your point about the need to organise politically. These things can be seen as complementing, rather than detracting from, each other

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Hi Nick Hmmm. I think your analysis is a bit too pat for my liking.  Did the rulers of soviet state capitalism require belief in the existence of  a god in order to hold down the Russian working class?  Nope. Not at all. To the contrary, this was an “atheistic state”.  Are we therefore to deduce that atheism leads us unerringly towards state capitalism?   Of course not. And it’s not just state capitalism – there are some ardent atheists who strongly support the free market.  Indeed, here are one or two ex members of the SPGB I can think of here. Their atheism did not prevent them from arriving at this unedifying way of looking at the world. Ditto religion.  Some religions are fiercely critical of the establishment and mainstream religion. If anything this works to undermine capitalist hegemony rather than reinforce it. I think a more nuanced approach to the religious question is called for – one which firmly separates metaphysical or ontological materialism from historical materialism.  That latter is the only thing that really counts as far as the socialist case is concerned and religious individuals are demonstrably capable of thinking in historical materialist terms – every bit as much as non religious individuals  – notwithstanding their religious beliefs. Isn’t that all that really matters in the end? Cheers Robin

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ALB wrote:

Anthropolgy has certainly moved on since 1877!  One of the best books seeking to vindicate the idea of social evolution (which for a while some anthropologists denied) from a position sympathetic to Lewis Henry Morgan is The Evolution of Culture by Leslie A White that first came out in 1959.

 I think the issue of social evolutionism in anthropological circles is an interesting one and not quite cut and dried,   Back in the 19th century Sir James Frazer wrote an influential book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion  (1890) which posited a so called ” primitive mind” which he portrayed as superstitious and irrational  and which he contrasted with the modern scientific rational mind.   This was representative of a kind of ethnocentric essentialistic approach to what earlier in the 18th century was called “the Problem of the Savage”.  In the  Medieval era you has this cosmological notion of a Great Chain of Being  (actually it goes back to the Ancient Greeks)  in  which human beings were seen as intermediate between the  animal world and the angels by virtue of possessing a soul. In the early modern era,  European explorers, on  first encountering the “Savage”, were  struck by  the great differences between these so called primitive cultures and modern European societies.  Hence “the Problem of the Savage” – how to accommodate the Savage within this overall hierarchical schema when all human beings purportedly occupied the same level  within this Great Chain This problem was effectively “resolved” in the course of the 19th century by the transformation of the old Great Chain idea into the notion of a racial hierarchy  under the influence of  Darwinian evolutionary theory. You can see where this kind of fits in with what I said above about the “primitive mind versus the modern mind”. Point is that quite  a bit of subsequent anthropology was devoted to combating this sort of racist ethnocentrism .  I can remember reading Evans Pritchard’s  Witchcraft , Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) which called into question this whole idea of the primitive mind. EP showed, for instance,  that the very procedures that the Azande adopted to determine witchcraft  – such as the famous chicken oracle –  mimicked scientific methodology e.g. double blind tests  EP was trying to say that it was quite misleading to think of human beings developing – or evolving – from one way of looking at the world into another.  Rationality – and irrationality – in other words are universal human traits  that occur throughout  our historyI note the wikipeda article on Leslie White refers to Franz Boas who was a prominent figure in cultural anthropology and a fierce critic of evolutionary theory.   But as I understand it Boas specifically rejected a teleological version of evolutionary theory  (not evolutionary theory per se) such as was apparently held by Lewis Henry Morgan – the notion that history is a process of “unfolding” and development  through predetermined stages  towards some predetermined end.  This is different  from the idea of evolution by natural selection.  Did not Marx himself welcome the fact that Darwin has banished teleology from the natural sciences? . If so, that sort of makes the relationship between Marx and Morgan a little more problematic than it might first appear

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ladybug wrote:

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?  

 Hi Ladybug It is easier to get at what Hobson is saying about the equimarginal principle if you look at his example  of the painter.  A painter does not chose the proportions of different colours used in the painting  according to the “marginal utility” of each colour.  He or she does not say:  “I like the colour red more than green and will therefore continue using the colour red until the last brushstroke I apply yields the same amount of satisfaction or utility as the last brushstroke using the the colour green”.  Yet this is precisely what Alfred Marshall’s famous equimarginal principle implies – that comparisons are made at the margin so that the numbers of different items in your shopping basket, for example,  are adjusted in a way that ensures the last unit of each item yields the same utility as every other item.  According to Marshall, by doing this we are able to maximise the total utility we obtain across the entire range of items in our shopping basket – by ensuring that the marginal unit of each item is the same for every other item.  In other words,  we would arrive at the most efficient allocation of our  budget  by conforming to this equimarginal principle and this can be demonstrated in a simple graph Hobson’s counterargument is that this is a totally bogus way of looking at things.  The painter in his analogy does not apply different colours by comparing the marginal utility of each colour.  Rather, allocation is made from the “centre” as he put it – that is, from a holistic perspective that looks at the painting as a unity .  Try imagine what the painting would look like if the painter had a marked preference for the colour red.  Most of the painting would be cololured in red so that in the case of landscape painting, say, you might end up with most of the trees being painted in red rather than green!  It only appears that the painting has allocated different  colours according to the equimarginal principle  but this is quite misleading , argued Hobson; it is what is called a  “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” (meaning, “after the fact, therefore before the fact”)  fallacy.  What applies to his painting analogy applies to life in general – we allocate our time and effort according to our core values – from the centre and not at the margin Another early critic of marginalisim – Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen – looked at the matter from a somewhat different perspective. He argued that  the equimaginal principle was only really applicable to goods that met the same basic need – such as the need for food.  Once you start attempting to apply it to consumer goods that satisfy different kinds of needs the principle breaks down completely.  This is because of what he called the principle of irreducibility of needs.  However , for mainstream neoclassical economics it was simply assumed that everything could be boiled down to, or rendered commensurable in terms of , the abstract notion of utility. Thus , the utility of eating a bowl of rice pudding was in principle no different from the utility of riding a horse of playing a game of golf  – the only  difference lying with the amount of utility each of these activities offered the individual There are numerous other criticisms that can be leveled against the whole corpus of marginalist theory.  The key concept of diminishing marginal utility , for example, is highly questionable.  There are many  counterexamples where the exact opposite is the case such as where there is a tipping point involved.  Taking a course of antibiotic pills is an example.  If you stop halfway through the course the “utility” of the last pill would be significantly less than the last pill  if you took all the pills prescribed.  In fact the bacteria might well develop resistance and so you would incur a disutilty by not completing the course prescribed.  There are other kinds of examples that defy the law of diminishing marginal utility such as Giffen goods, Status goods and Inferior goods.  I wont go on about this except to draw your attention to them On your final point , yes.  by ” people on the ground” I mean basically the people  working in the factories or whatever – the people at the coal face so to speak –  who have to make practical day to day decisions.  In the face of multiple demands that exceed the supplies of the available product that is made in the factory  itself. They would have to make on the spot decisions about how to allocate this product among these different demands.  This is what i am getting at.  My point is that for the most part, such things can be left to the basic intuition of the individuals concerned .  You can certainly finetune the decisionmaking process by introducing into the equation other considerations such as frequency of demand amongst the different end uses to which this product would be allocated  as well as whether or not  the or how often the requirements of particular end use had been met in the pastI don’t see any real insurmountable problem with this approach, Bearing in mind we are talking about a society in which a common set of values will prevail  which will tend to be reflected in a fairly consistent pattern of decision making vis a vis resource allocation. Also bear in mind that the producer-consumer distinction would no longer apply, that individuals would not necessarily just work in one particular place of work  and that there would be no special vested interest in commandeering a particular input for one particular purpose at the expense of another Above all , and finally,  bear in mind that this whole notion of a hierarchy of production goals  only comes into play when there is a discernable  discrepancy  between the multiple demands for a particular good, on the one hand, and the available supply of said good on the other. The built in tendency of a socialist production system will always be towards the elimination of such bottlenecks since the existence of buffer stocks is a key indicator  in the management of a self regulating system of stock control.  Moreover,  whenever a bottleneck might arise this does not prevent those lower priority end uses from being  addressed.  This is because it  may well be possible in such cases to resort to technological substitution – substituting a scarce input that is mainly diverted to higher priority end uses for a  more abundant input  that is made available through the self regulating system of stock control. Hope this helps Cheers Robin

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On subject matter why dont you guys get together with Paddy who started up SP projects – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spprojects/?yguid=90109900 – but which has kind of died a death by the look of things.  A great pity methinks.The first supplement for the SS was supposed to be a 2 page supplement  for the SS on primitive communism.  Maybe it could be transferred over to an AV format.  Just thinking aloud Cheers Robin

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On subject matter why dont you guys get together with Paddy who started up SP projects – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spprojects/?yguid=90109900 – but which has kind of died a death by the look of things.  A great pity methinks.The first supplement for the SS was supposed to be a 2 page supplement  for the SS on primitive communism.  Maybe it could be transferred over to an AV format.  Just thinking aloud Cheers Robin

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gnome wrote:

Doesn’t it really come down to the same thing in the end; faced with the circumstances in which Lenin and Bolsheviks found themselves in 1917 wasn’t it inevitable that the pragmatic circumstances would give rise to the ideological reasons?

 Well let me put it differently – did Lenin favour the model of the Party he proposed in WITBD over the model of the Party espoused by the Social Democratic movement in general as a matter of principle and irrespective of circumstances?   I dont think he did or, if he did, not all of the time. Mind you, having said that the Social Democratic parties of  Western Europe were not exactly models of democratic organisation.  They were all leadership-based organisations that fully satisfied Lenin’s  criterion that “no movement can be durable without a stable organisation of leaders to maintain continuity”  (What is to be Done).As to the rest of your post – yes I would not disagree at all with the conclusions you reach.  Leninism in all its varieties remains an obstacle to the achievement of socialism.  My point was a far more narrow one and had to do with specific form or political vehicle which Lenin advocated as a means to acheving his and the Bolshevik’s political ends cheers Robin

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ALB wrote:

I started to read this but I’m afraid I didn’t get very far. As far as I can see the author is trying to rehabilitate Lenin by saying that he wasn’t really a Leninist but someone who favoured an open, democratic party (a leftwing Menshevik then?). I doubt it and it certainly upset other Leninists who insisted that he really did stand for a centralised, hierarchical vanguard party to lead the masses.

  While it certainly is the case that Lenin is rightly known for having stood for a “centralised hierarchical vanguard party to lead the masses” I wonder if the situation isn’t a bit more complicated than this?  After all the Bolsheviks emerged out of the split within the Russian Social Democratic party and so presumably would have had some sympathy for the Social Democratic ideal of a mass open Democratic party along the lines of SD parties in the  West – particularly of course the German SDP.  This is the point that Lars Li makes in his  Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context  (2008) but the oppressive circumstances prevailing in Russia at the time “What is to be Done” was written induced Lenin to favour instead a quite different organisational model based on a small tightly knit body of professional revolutionaries and subject to a rigorously hierarchical command structure.  It was thus for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons that Lenin favoured this model.  What is to be Done (1902) does contain that notorious statement that has often been seized upon as evidence of Lenin’s intrinsic elitism: “We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without”    Hal Draper, in his classic paper The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party” or What They Did to What Is To Be Done?  (1990), asks rhetorically whether it was really the case that Lenin was saying that here that ” the workers cannot come to socialist ideas of themselves, that only bourgeois intellectuals are the carriers of socialist ideas” to which he gives the following answer:”Not exactly. The fact is that Lenin had just read this theory in the most prestigious theoretical organ of Marxism of the whole international socialist movement, the Neue Zeit. It had been put forward in an important article by the leading Marxist authority of the International, Karl Kautsky. And this was why and how it got into WITBD” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htm#section1)There are also direct quotes from Lenin that cast doubt on whether he stood straightforwardly for a kind of centralised conspiratorial Blanquist type organisation as opposed to a broad mass democratic open party.  For instance, in his letter in late 1916 to P.Keivsky he asserts that “socialism can be implemented only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which combines violence against the bourgeoisie, i.e., the minority of the population, with full development of democracy, i.e., the genuinely equal and genuinely universal participation of the entire mass of the population in all state affairs and in all the complex problems of abolishing capitalism” (Proletarskaya Revolutsi Nos. 7 (90), 1929).  Similar sentiments can be found in his more well known work The State and Revolution written in 1917.  Finally of course it should be mentioned that at least in early days of the Bolshevik revolution, the reality did not really conform to model of a tightly knit centralised disciplined party.  Even by early 1918 as  Robert Service notes  in his The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organsational Change, 1917-1923:  “The image of a disciplined hierarchy of party committees was therefore but a thin, artificial veneer which was used by Bolshevik leaders to cover up the cracked surface of the real picture underneath. Cells and suburb committees saw no reason to kow-tow to town committees; nor did town committees feel under compulsion to show any greater respect to their provincial and regional committees than before.” (p. 74). Of course a lot of this might have been due to the huge influx of new members unaccustomed to the ways of the old Bolsheviks I don’t wish to appear in any way to be apologising for Lenin and Leninist politics.  I think there was a strong streak of authoritarianism and elitism in him and in the whole Leninist model of political organisation and this came to the surface in the “organisational metamorphosis” that Service refers to that in due course overtook the Bolsheviks.  And that was not just the result of external circumstances like the Civil war: it was latent in Bolshevism itself. Still, I think this representation of the Leninist outlook needs to be counterbalanced with other representations which at least suggest a superficial dalliance with the idea of an open democratic mass party along the lines of the Western SD parties Robin

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Hi Ladybug I think the problems that you refer to in relation to the fourth aspect of a hypothetical  socialist production system that i touched on in my article  – namely a hierarchy of production goals – are not nearly as grave as they perhaps might appear. They are complications, yes, but they do not add up to an insurmountable obstacle that would bring the system crashing to its knees.  To understand why you need to step back a little to see the bigger picture. As I said to Darren in my post above, you need to have such a hierarchy in order to  prioritise the allocation of inputs in cases where you run into supply bottlenecks. 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.  My working assumption is that people in a socialist society would broadly share the same kind of values and this would be reflected in the decisions they make. It is only in the case of particular community-based projects that I envisage a kind of conscious socially-based commandeering of inputs for a given purpose but even then low priority end uses deprived of inputs in this fashion can still turn to technological substitution as another option The problems that you are alluding boil down to one of  how you proportion a scarce input between various end uses.  I wont go into this in great detail here as I will give a fuller response to this matter in the ECA working group forum on which I see you have  begun posting.Suffice to say this relates to what the neoclassical economist, Marshall, referred to as the “equimarginal principle” – .how to allocate between different lines of  production to ensure that the marginal unit in each case ends up with the same “utility”.  I don’t know if you are familiar with the writings of J A Hobson. In Neoclassical Economics in Britain (1925) he presented  a rather effective demolition job of this Marshallian concept which I think has implications for our discussion here. I quote the relevant section:http://www.marxists.org/archive/hobson/1925/09/neoclass.htmA person adjusting the use of his resources to the demands of a new situation makes a number of delicate adjustments at the margins. But the determinate judgments, of which these delicate adjustments are expressions, are made, not at the margins, but at the center. They are the quantitative implications of the new organic plan he has applied. If we regard him as a creative artist working out a new ideal with the materials at his disposal, we shall get nearer to the true psychological interpretation. A painter in mixing colors to get some particular effect must exercise care to obtain the exactly right proportions. This care will be greatest when in mixing he comes near the limit, and is in danger of putting too much or too little of the several colors into his mixture. A marginal economist, observing him, might pronounce the judgment that he kept adding increments of the different colors until he stopped, and that therefore an exactly equal art value must be attached to the last increment of each color. For if the last brushful of Turkey-red had been found to have less value than the last brushful of green, another would be added, so as to even out the values of the different colors at the margin.Now this, of course, simply means that in every sort of composite plan, economy or harmony, involving the use of different materials, some exact amount of each material is required. In forming such a plan no special thought is directed to the marginal unit of each factor. But in carrying out a change of an existing plan, the process of shifting pieces from the old plan to the new involves a series of operations at the margins. The size of these operations is, however, determined and laid down in the conception of the scheme as a unity. The painter, not knowing exactly how much of each color is required to produce his effect, may try a little too much of this or too little of that, rub out, and begin again until he has it just right.But the idea of imputing any special value to the marginal units, or of regarding the artist as comparing the colors at each margin by some common standard of art value, is alien from the psychology of art. As soon as it is clearly comprehended that the business man, the consumer, and every man pursuing a line of policy or conduct, is acting as an artist, the invalidity of Marginalism will be equally apparent in their cases. 

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DJP wrote:

I’m not sure if it is really possible to rank needs in such a way as you are describing, since ‘use’ is something entirely subjective and it is impossible for individuals (and a society at large) to come up with a priotised list of wants, since these are constantly changing. I think you’ve bought this idea across due to the influence of marginalist economics. (I’ll probably have to say more to explain this better)

 Hi Darren Just noticed your comment above.   I don’t want to put words in your mouth but are you suggesting that a socialist society would be unable to determine whether a luxury yacht, say, was more important than an ambulance?   Agreed, these determinations are subjective but then that is the whole point, isn’t it – its a question of values and values cannot really be measured.  We can say that one thing is more “valuable” than another but we cannot definitively say by how much.  Even von Mises conceded that some things cannot be subject to calculation Talking of which, I think the Austrian School of  economists certainly had a valid point in their debates with the more conventional neoclassical economists on the question of measuring utility.  They opposed the tendency to mathematise economics and held that utility is essentially ordinal rather than cardinal.  Paradoxically perhaps it is the Austrians who are most closely identified with the so called economic calculation argument.  Between their preference for ordinal ranking in respect of utlity and their insistence on market prices as a means of precise economic calculation, there is a huge credibility gap which they were never able to span In my view some kind of hierarchy of production goals is indispensable to socialism. We may argue about the way in which this might be implemented (and Ladybug has made a number of penetrating observations in that regard) but what we cannot reasonably argue against the need for such a hierarchy in the first place.  How for example are you going to decide if two particular end uses, X and Y,  both require 10 units each of input M  (of which there is only 15 units in total)  whether X is going to get 10 and Y, 5,  or whether it should be the other way round?  Or do you split them evenly  between X and Y  (which you may not be able to do if units of M are non-divisible) so that each gets 7 1/2?   But why would that be rational as opposed to some other allocation pattern? This is what I was getting at in an earlier post about so called “marginal rates of substitution”.  Its not that I’ve gone all soft in the head and started to embrace marginalist bourgeois economic mumbo jumbo but these are the sort of difficult questions which we socialists really need to start getting our heads around and coming up with some serious answers in my opinion.   Thinking seriously about how a socialist system of production would operate is not utopian speculation; it is actually vital to the whole business of presenting a credible and convincing alternative to capitalismRobin

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Hi Ladybug As others have noted, your post above is an excellent contribution . It is a model of the kind of constructive criticism that is needed to clarify and develop our ideas. I will be as brief as I can in response Your raise two main points. The first concerns the form of rationing that may be needed in a post capitalist society. I would certainly  entertain the idea that some of rationing may be required  to operate alongside  free access within a dual distribution  model, so to speak.  According to the structural logic of the production system I outlined in the article to which you refer, those goods likely to be subject to rationing would tend be low priority goods at the “luxury end” of the spectrum of goods while those goods likely to be made available on a free distribution  basis would tend, by contrast,  to be essential goods satisfying “basic human needs”.  This follows from the way in which the hierarchy of production goals I referred to would tend to skew the allocation of resources in favour of the latter at the expense of the former  where we have to deal with bottlenecks in  the supply of  such resources. As to the form of rationing I have to say that I am not  particularly enamoured  of the labour vouchers proposal or even a system of credits based on environmental impacts which I think would be administratively unwieldy and would be beset by all sorts of other difficulties – theoretical and practical. I favour instead what I call a compensation model of rationing based on the quality of housing stock.There are two main reasons for preferring this system 1)  Our living accommodation constitutes a hugely important component  of  our quality of life.  Realistically, though,   the legacy of material inequalities in housing we will inherit from capitalism will persist for many years after we have got rid capitalism. Such inequalities are likely to generate unacceptable social tensions and this will need to be acknowledged and addressed. People having to put up with low quality housing will need in some sense to be  “compensated” for this and this accords with a sense of natural justice and basic fairness. 2) We will need, in any case,  to assess the housing stock in our communities with a view to eventually  upgrading and improving  this stock in many cases. This assessment process can be easily tied in with a system of rationing which assigns different levels of priority access to individuals according to the assessed quality of the houses they occupy in terms of a number of criteria e.g. size and overall condition, facilities, proximity to amenities etc.  A prototype for this is to be found in the way housing stock is assessed today by placing individual houses in one of  a number  of bands according to the market value of the property in question for the purposes of  raising local taxes. Naturally the question of marketable value of properties will not arise in a socialist society but the basic approach  could still be used Obviously what I have presented here is just the bare bones of the idea; the meaty details need a lot more thought.  Nevertheless I do think it is an eminently do-able and more administratively straightforward system than , say, Marx’s cumbersome labour voucher scheme. The second point you raise concerns the practicality of some kind of hierarchy of production goals.  You make a number of very telling observations which point to the need for further research and investigation in this area.  I do not wish in any sense to brush under the carpet the criticisms that you make which are perfectly reasonable  and valid  but my first inclination is to urge you to look at what was being proposed in that article in  a more holistic all-rounded fashion.  The four basic components of the production system proposed are1) calculation in kind2) a self regulating system of stock control3) the law of the minimum4) a hierarchy of production goals Your criticisms mainly concern 4).  The point I’m making here and this is a point that has been lost sight of in many criticisms of that article, is that these different components of the system are organically interconnected and do  not function in isolation from each other.  Its is through their  mutual interaction that  a framework of structural constraints comes into being  which will guide production decisions in ways that ensure a rational outcome, in my view.  So its important not to lose sight of the wood for the treesLet  us remind ourselves what purpose a hierarchy of production goals is intended to serve.  It is as I said above, to differentiate between end uses by organising them into some kind of ordinal ranking arrangement in  the event that a particular input  common to all these end uses happens to be in short supply. In that event it is perfectly rational to allocate such an input to high priority ends uses as opposed to low priority end uses Your criticisms basically focus on the nitty gritty details of this allocation process which, as I say, is quite a reasonable thing to do.  However, there are several points that need to be born in mind1)  In this model of a socialist production system the basic orientation of every enterprise would be to produce slightly more than what is demanded – or, in other words, to maintain a buffer stock as part and parcel of a self regulating system of stock control.  Marx,  I believe, said something along the same lines about buffer stocks  though I cannot locate the relevant quote.  The point of so doing would be to accommodate the vicissitudes of fluctuating demand  including of course the possibility of unforeseen emergencies . This is relevant to the question of a  hierarchy of production goals insofar as the latter comes into play only in the event of supply bottlenecks  – where an input is in short supply –  and provides decision makers on the ground, as it were,  with a rough rule of thumb as to how to allocate the input  or resource in question 2) The fact that a resource  bottleneck might occur does not in any case necessarily prevent a low priority good from being produced in the quantities demanded insofar as technological substitution is a possibility.- that is, using some alternative and more abundant input instead . This is the point that I am trying to make –  that this model of a socialist production system is eminently flexible 3) The idea of  a hierarchy of production goals is not a detailed blueprint  that assigns every conceivable  kind of good produced to a specific  place within a strict ordinal ranking.  That would be a preposterous idea yet some of the people who cricised my article implied that that was precisely what I was saying.  Nothing could be further than the truth.  In point of fact what I was simply trying to impress on people was the common sense of some kind of hierarchy of production goals and of the notion  of having to chose between end uses when the occasion demanded this.  I would even go so far as to say that we might  not even need to consciously attend to this and that it would be implicit in a system of socialist values that we would prirotise housing over, say,  luxury yachts. Whats there to argue about here? It is only perhaps  in the case of specific projects democratically decided upon by the community – eg the construction of  a new community school or doctors surgery – that we might be talking of the conscious commandeering of resources for a particular end use at the expense of other end uses.  For the most part I suspect all the detailed decisionmaking about how much of a particular scarce resource  should be devoted to this particular end use as opposed to that can left to individuals on the ground to decide upon, using their own intuition and common sense. I suggest, further, that a system of convergent  values is likely to produce a pattern of outcomes in respect of these  micro level decisions that is broadly consistent and regular. Of course there will be times when X will allocate a particular resource amongst various end uses  that does not fully accord with how Y might view things that but then we would expect that.  No system of production is ever going to be perfect and in any case such decisions will be subject to the scrutiny and influence of others so there will be a tendency  towards “self correction” : If a particular end use that people particularly desire is being starved of inputs then the resultant clamour for changes in the way these inputs  are allocated will mount and exert social pressure on the enterprise in question (which enterprise certainly would have nothing to gain by resisting social pressure in a socialist society). That  is quite apart from the fact that we could 1) increase the supply of the input in question 2) opt for technological substitution But it is really  what happens at the macro-level and in the long run  that ultimately counts in the end – doesnt it? – and I would contend that an integrated system  of production such as is being proposed here  provides for a comprehensive structure of constraints that will guide production in a way that is sufficiently pervasive and potent as to ensure an outcome that broadly conforms to what people  desire and expect.. If people are broadly happy with the system they are not going to jeapordise becuase of a few niggling imperfections But like I said, I’m not trying to brush your criticisms under a carpet of bland generalisations or smooth talk my way out of a tricky theoretical situation.  I don’t have all the answers to you probing questions though,  in my defence, I don’t possess a crystal ball either to enable me to adequately answer them.  All I can do is constantly try  to find ways in which to refine and strengthen the model that has been presented. So if you – or anyone else – have any observations on how this might be done this would be very welcome indeed! Cheers Robin

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Hi Adam,Well, I’ve got the 10th edition of the same book by Samuelson and while he refers to the “dreamworld of perfect competition” (meaning he doesn’t think it at all realistic) he does go on to say that in such a dreamworld “the economist says there would really be no profits at all!”.  Also: “perfectly free entry of numerous competitors; would in a static world of perfect knowledge , bring price down to cost and squeeze out all profits above and beyond competitive wages , interest and rent” (p621-2).  I think this does actually accord with what Steele is saying. He (Steele) is not denying that perfect competition is impossible as far as I can ascertain; He is merely asserting that profits arise from, and are made possible by, the very imperfections that necessarily beset the market economy as it actually works in practice – .imperfections that allow some to outguess the market and others who are not similarly gifted with “entrepreneurial canniness” to fall by the wayside.  Profit is a zero sum game in other wordsIt should also be mentioned that the Misesian perspective that Steele presumably still adheres to is highly critical of Walrasian general equilibrium theory with its completely static view of the economy.If you check out  economic textbooks, a distinction is sometimes made between an accountant’s notion of profit and an economist’s notion of the same. The former boils down to the difference between a firms revenue and its costs. This is not that far removed from our understanding of the term although we would conceptualise profit as a component of surplus value alongside rent and interest.  Steele, and by extension bourgeois economists. would call what we call profit,” interest”My take on all this – though I am not entirely sure of this at all – is that this is an ideologically motivated construct. which entered economic discouse around the time oif the “marginalist revolution”of the late 19th century; to justify the return on capital in terms that denote something positive and beneficial to society as a whole – such as innovativeness and being able to anticipate shifts in market demand, the better to be able to “serve the needs of consumers ” etc etc” This is what this peculiar interpretation of profit is all about isn’t it? It presumes an imperfect market that rewards those who succeed in this market with “profit” . It is a way of highlighting those qualities that supposedly enable you to succeed and for which you “justifiably” reap the rewards of such successin the form of “profit” over and above “interest!Thats a curious thing too. “Interest” is the return on lending money – or liquid capital – and usually by financial institutions such as banks. By relabelling profit as interest this makes no distinction between external sources of funding (i.e.loans from a bank); and the reproduction of capital out of surplus value. Again, one has to ask – is this ideologically motivated to divert attention away from this latter source of capital?

[robbo203]

Hi Darren Well,  Im not talking about super-profits but profits but you might be on to something here…. I first came across this wacky idea in D R Steele’s From Marx to Mises  and wondered then  –  WTF is the  guy on about? How the hell can a business survive in  a competitive market environment  without profit. Unprofitable businesses go down the pan, don’t they?  Well apparently not according to Steele.  What is usually called profit  he calls “interest”.  Profit is something you get over and above interest and you get it by  outguessing the market and thereby benefiting society by an “unusually percipient  of lucky allocation  of resources”  (p420).  In a perfectly competitive market  – which as  you suggest is wholly unrealistic  – the opportunity for doing that disappears and hence also profit.  So profit according to this logic only arises in an imperfect or distorted market and the alleged benefits to society that such a profit entails which makes it sound  like Steele should be advocating imperfect and distorted markets it profit is so advantageous and beneficial to society… Where did this particular usage originate from? And what lies behind it I wonder? I know it crops up in Mises  but I think it also appears in  Walrus’ writings.  Does anyone have any ideas? Cheers R

[robbo203]

There is quite a bit of this around – so called market anarchism,  Some of these free market anti capitalists get quite offended if you accidently call them anarchocapitalists. Ive been having a crack at them over on libcom recently. One guy pointed me in the direction of a mutualist blog and the mutualist journal. I have come across Kevin Carsons stuff at mutualist.org before.  A curious mix of ideas.  For instance Carsons sees merit in both the LTV and the subjective theory of value as well. and seeks to combine them.  He’s quite hot on Marxian primitive accumulation theory too  and at times sounds like a Marxist in his condemnation of capitalism.  I wonder if the SPGB has done any stuff on modern day Mutualism a la Carsons and the Left Libertariuan crowd – as opposed to Proudhon

[robbo203]

Darren
Well, no not quite – SPOPEN  is for party members only.  WORLDINCOMMON, on the other hand, is for anyone who perceives themselves to be part of the non-market anti-statist sector including, of course, WSM folk. I suppose the equivalent of SPOPEN would be the COMMONER forum which is the internal forum of the World in Common Group and only members of the group are on this particular forum.  Incidentally, WSM members are of course welcome to join the group which is in no sense a political party in competition with the WSM. Some people in WiC are active in other organisations and so it should be. WiC is just an unbrella organisation for the broad non market anti statist sector
 
What I was suggesting as one option – no 1 above – was to change the terms of reference of the WSM forum so that it would be similar to the terms of refrence of  the  WORLDINCOMMON forum.  In other words, non WSMers could continue  on it but not people outside the non market anti statist sector. Thats one option . The other is to keep the WSM forum as a completely open forum. If thats what you want to do then i have suggested some  ways in which to deal with the problem of the anarcho capitalists on the forum
 
Ray
 
As I understand it, the WSM does not belong to just the  SPGB  but all the companion parties.  I would imagine it is a good idea to have some overarching fourm of some sort for the entire WSM. The format may be a bit old fashioned, as you suggest but then I remember some months ago urging that WSM forum should  change over to the format used by REVLEFT which I think is vastly superior in so many ways – not least because the sheer number of   facilities available on it . For example you would have your own personal page which allows all sorts of interactions to happen on a one to one basis.  Also special interest groups can be set as well  which could be quite useful e.g. people interested in , say,  Marxian economics or environmental issues could set up subgroups catering for these interests. Have a look at REVLEFT and see what you think..(Of course, its no longer possible to join REVLEFT but thats another matter)
 
Robin

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