TheInnerMoon
Anarchist, Author, All-Around Philosopher
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- They/Them
An excellent response, which shows that you're obviously not involved with the kind of centralist position I was critiquing here. It's not at all incoherent, though it's clear your approach to Marxism is more technically minded than my own, which largely proceeds from the humanities. Still I'll try and see what useful comments I could make on the basis of my own understanding of cybernetics.
The only wild card for a socialist society would be to introduce new models of welfare alongside these vulgar material improvements, of the kind that could not be easily replicated by capitalism. Full employment and shopfloor democracy would be clear examples of that, since that degree of safety and power over their own working conditions is exactly what workers tend to lack under capitalism. Such measures even have a degree of precedent in 20th century state socialist history. I'm most familiar with the Chinese context, from which I get the sense that the PRC was more serious about socialism as an experimental alternative than the comparatively technocratic Soviets, but that also led to the constant social campaigning which could easily turn atrocious. Still, the idea that building socialism doesn't carry its own risks, or that you shouldn't aim to present a different kind of society, ultimately only leads you back to social democracy, and the slow death it's died at the hands of secular stagnation in the (over)developed world.
For those unfamiliar, these are the workings of Marx's Law of Value. From the production side of things, it is is the Law of Value which sees the drawbacks of increasing mechanization fall on the shoulders of ordinary wage laborers, who can never be sure that their day's wage represents a day's labor. I've never been too fond of labor tokens as the means of socialist administration, but there is some compelling literature in that field from actual communists. I've yet to acquaint myself with this source, but I've heard good things about it!
Here's a short primer on the VSM for those interested.
Importantly though, and something which I think the quest should reckon with as it moves forward, is that the Soviet state's concern with accumulation is still self-destructive even without a defined worker-based counterpower. The paradoxical duality of ecological catastrophe and productive abundance, both outgrowths of a profit-driven developmental model, will inevitably lead to a state of secular stagnation. In recent history, I would argue that the capitalist crisis of the 1970s represented a showdown between the public and private demands on the management of production. For those who can't tell, the private concerns won, partly because of their class power, partly because their concerns are easier to organize (if not easier to realize). That kind of divergence of class interests (profit versus people in a vulgar sense) will become more and more apparent in this version of the USSR, especially once the low-hanging fruits of social welfare are taken care of.
This is where I'll leave it for now, other than to say that I'll always be happy to give my two cents on how this quest could unfold. For those who want to read into some of the ideas I've raised here, I've actually come across some great contemporary communist writings on the problems of socially managed production. Here are two of those sources.
This is a classic dispute between state socialists and leftcoms/anarchists, though I don't think it's a question which can be neatly resolved either way, mostly because "material improvement" is already a point of social and political dispute. In a Soviet context, the problem was not just that the Americans could reliably provide its workers with more cars and tv dinners, but that the Soviets themselves had token those amenities to be the measure of Plenty. To some extent, I think it's a trivial observation that no 20th century socialism could outcompete capitalists in the capital accumulation department, since even capitalists are willing to resort to Keynesianism and the welfare state in order to guarantee the social reproduction of an industrializing society.
The only wild card for a socialist society would be to introduce new models of welfare alongside these vulgar material improvements, of the kind that could not be easily replicated by capitalism. Full employment and shopfloor democracy would be clear examples of that, since that degree of safety and power over their own working conditions is exactly what workers tend to lack under capitalism. Such measures even have a degree of precedent in 20th century state socialist history. I'm most familiar with the Chinese context, from which I get the sense that the PRC was more serious about socialism as an experimental alternative than the comparatively technocratic Soviets, but that also led to the constant social campaigning which could easily turn atrocious. Still, the idea that building socialism doesn't carry its own risks, or that you shouldn't aim to present a different kind of society, ultimately only leads you back to social democracy, and the slow death it's died at the hands of secular stagnation in the (over)developed world.
Two points here: my proffered model of socialist transition is only 'communitarian' compared to the historical record of state socialism (and even then, certain aspects of 1920s Soviet life or 1960s Chinese life provide real examples of communitarian life in those contexts). My larger point is not that we should 'decentralize' for its own sake, since that says more about where decisions are made than how they are made, but that different domains of life are already practiced at different levels of organization, and that it's not obvious that each should be maximally central decentral. For instance, the Soviets after Stalin never made any serious attempt to 'abolish the family', which means that the quotidian aspects of social reproduction still took place at a 'local' and 'decentralized' level. Nobody would call that a triumph of Soviet anti-authoritarianism though, since the family is a potential locus of many kinds of patriarchal oppression. That's all I'm saying, really, that both within the economic sphere and without it, differing concerns compel different levels of collective organization.
You are evidently more of a marginalist than I am when explaining the nature of capitalist pricing. While I'm not a full labor value theorist, I'd hold that most firms still operate by a relatively simple "cost plus" model of pricing, and that cost is primarily driven by the need to socially reproduce labor. Workers need to eat, sleep, and be educated, which is why capitalist would prefer that there be as few of them as possible, especially the skilled ones. This is a big part of why capitalism is such a unique historical epoch. The mere presence of currencies or markets is not a sufficient cause for the mass accumulation of capital to get going, but the capitalist's concern with minimizing socially necessary labor time is. If socialism reproduces that need, it can produce a lot of good and necessary things, but only by specific standards (minimizing necessary labor time) in specific departments (industrial commodity production). Any need more complicated than that, and there are many of them in the broader social domain, are overridden by this central compulsion.
For those unfamiliar, these are the workings of Marx's Law of Value. From the production side of things, it is is the Law of Value which sees the drawbacks of increasing mechanization fall on the shoulders of ordinary wage laborers, who can never be sure that their day's wage represents a day's labor. I've never been too fond of labor tokens as the means of socialist administration, but there is some compelling literature in that field from actual communists. I've yet to acquaint myself with this source, but I've heard good things about it!
Which is why Bordiga says that "the hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that the firm has a boss." (Can't believe I'd agree with him, lol) Even a market socialist economy of pure cooperatives would be beholden to the laws of capitalist inter-firm competition, with all the great and terrifying effects that would have. Hell, I'd argue that seizing the means on the level of the firm is the low-hanging fruit of socialist transition!
This is part of what I was trying to get at with my explanation of Ashby's Law, as it is the principle which in organizational terms demands a division of managerial labor. Only a very complex processor could unilaterally respond to an equally complex input signal. This is also why I take a great interest in Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, as it attempts to lay out the division of labor which all effective organizations implicitly follow. It's a useful diagnostic tool for seeing why and where certain organizations fall apart, and also points to the fact that decentralized decisions are not necesarily democratic ones, and vice-versa. Just as importantly, it points to the fact that many decisions within firms are not as top-down as they appear, and that the autonomy of lower organs is often necessary to keep the whole enterprise coherent.
Here's a short primer on the VSM for those interested.
The "anarchy of production" argument is a potent explanation of the cyclical crises in capitalism, but I don't think it's as good at explaining the chronic tendency towards faltering interest and profit rates as something based in ecological factors or the Law of Value. I would recommend this blog for those interested in orienting themselves on Marxist Crisis Theory, even if I have my own quibbles with the latter.
Here we come to the heart of the matter, and something which I fear neither of us will be able to solve for absolutely. If we did so, we could start the revolution tomorrow! In the context of this quest, whatever model emerges, it would have to derive from concerns that are outside of the part-state apparatus, since it does not suffer the downsides of non-social production. It would take autonomous working-class organization to bring such issues to the fore. Such formations are not entirely absent in real state socialist history; from my Chinese experience, I can point to certain marginal groupings in the Cultural Revolution, the Democracy Wall, or the worker components of the Tiananmen protests. The Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring also contained such elements, though again they were secondary to more cleanly political and civil concerns.
Importantly though, and something which I think the quest should reckon with as it moves forward, is that the Soviet state's concern with accumulation is still self-destructive even without a defined worker-based counterpower. The paradoxical duality of ecological catastrophe and productive abundance, both outgrowths of a profit-driven developmental model, will inevitably lead to a state of secular stagnation. In recent history, I would argue that the capitalist crisis of the 1970s represented a showdown between the public and private demands on the management of production. For those who can't tell, the private concerns won, partly because of their class power, partly because their concerns are easier to organize (if not easier to realize). That kind of divergence of class interests (profit versus people in a vulgar sense) will become more and more apparent in this version of the USSR, especially once the low-hanging fruits of social welfare are taken care of.
This is where I'll leave it for now, other than to say that I'll always be happy to give my two cents on how this quest could unfold. For those who want to read into some of the ideas I've raised here, I've actually come across some great contemporary communist writings on the problems of socially managed production. Here are two of those sources.
, it would be bad for it to be flooded away among the comment there
