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McCarthies everywhere
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Blatantly untrue. The state controls the monetary policy and can restrict capitalism through lack of available currency. No force is needed. Barter opens up communal valuations of labor to set a price for a person's time based on what they can personally contribute. Want to hire someone to rewire your house? Better have equivalent skills or time to compensate the electrician.
Capitalism has conditioned people to think that violence is the only alternative to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money
Would you mind explaining how any state could prevent this? Whenever money became worthless, people resorted to using something else as a currency. Want someone to rewire your house? That's 5 liters of gasoline / 20 cigarettes / whatever.
That's money too.
If you go by the definition of money : "The primary functions which distinguish money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment." (Wikipedia, but it's a workable definition).
It's a medium of exchange, because people can use them to buy things. It's a unit of account, because it will be used as a metric for economic calculation (ie accounting). It's a store of value too, because people don't have to spend it at a particular time. And the "standard of deferred payment" part is also fulfilled, as it quantify the work-time debt society (or simply a company) owe to a worker.
I honestly fail to see what difference you are trying to make.
Meh, this distinction seems largely artificial to me. Modern fiat money is already created and destroyed through use of debt, and I hardly think that's what communists think of. And a strict "non-transferability" would beg the question of why would the "productive forces" (companies, cooperatives, or whatever) try to do produce things if they can't accumulate value based on consumers spending preferences (which is an issue which happened in the USSR).
Even worse : if vouchers don't fulfill the roles people want, you're still going to have a kind of informal money (gasoline, tobacco, seashells, etc... as said above), just with vouchers in parallel.
That being said, I never had much respect for Marx' political theories, so I would totally understand if you wanted to drop the point.
In that case, that means that the only workable economic system for Marx is a centrally planned economy (which, from what I know, is not the position of the majority of communists). Otherwise, you're going to have severe information transfer/cooperation issues at the system boundaries. Which is already historically what happened in the USSR and most strict application of central planning. And unless I'm mistaken, they still had money.
As for Marx... It's more that I read a subset of Marx works, found too many issues within the theories themselves, and honestly don't have unlimited time to see if he corrects it in some other works. And despite looking a bit for it in other forms (including discussion with some very left-leaning friends), I never found any answer I found really satisfactory.
And to be honest, I understand why you assume this is a propaganda issue : communist/socialist/anarchist theories are largely misrepresented in common discourse. That being said, don't make the mistake of believing that all critics don't know what they're talking about. Or even that mainstream theories are immune to this type of misrepresentation (because they most certainly are not).
My bad, that may have sounded a bit agressive. I just mean that I know people on Lemmy tends to have very... polarized opinions of the political literacy of other people they disagree with, and I know that I'm not immune to that either. That's more to show my position on this than to point out something you did specifically.
Yep, that exactly my point. Money is kind of central to a complex economy, and the USSR had issues even while still using it.
You may want to look at the opinion of someone like Paul Krugman on that. He makes some interesting parallels in the rapid industrialization of countries like South Korea or Japan and what happened in the USSR before, using the difference between intensive and extensive growth. For him, the gist of it is that authoritarian control of the economy can provide impressive extensive growth (put people to work, mechanize agriculture, provide basic education, infrastructure, etc...), but that once you reach a somewhat prosperous but intermediary state, you need to switch to intensive growth (creating more output value for less inputs) to get to the "next stage", so to speak. He also argues that South Korea and Japan did this, while the USSR never managed and that's why from the 60's onward the economic prosperity of the USSR entered a long period of stagnation.
I mostly disagree with the extreme reductionism of historical materialism, which affirm that the whole of history is the history of the possession of the means of production. That mean that while I understand that the bourgeoisie/proletariat dichotomy as a useful heuristic about social analysis, I don't belive it is necessarily the most useful one in all cases. From there, the notion of the superiority of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" becomes very shaky, so the political theory of action all goes downhill from there. And globally, the whole problem of Economic Calculation make the whole theory of the working of communism I extremely difficult to solve (but to the credit of Marx, this problem would only emerge due to a better understand of market-based economics, half a century later).
Well, I think we'll have disagree here : you take on the calculation problem is the opposite of both my theorical framework and practical experience of industry (I work as an Electrical Engineer).
You can try to predict the demand of course, but the prediction is always fairly different from reality. Often, it's workable. Sometimes it's not.
But to be honest, the Economic Calculation Problem is ill-named, because from a Signal Processing persepctive, it's not really a processing power problem. No, the problem is in the Signal-to-noise ratio of the signals used to do these calculation.
Ultimately, if you have a very noisy signal (and economic signals are incredibly noisy), there's really not much you can do with just more processing power. And I have good reason to believe (based on Psycho-social understanding) that the way these signals are transmitted in Centrally Planned system (socialist or not), are particularly noisy themselves. Much more than prices-and-market based systems.
That being said, I don't think we'll see eye to eye here. Thanks for the discussion tho, it is always interesting to hear how other people think.