Watching your videos makes me genuinely happy for the future. We can do stuff like this, we have all the tools to do it, and one day we will get there. Thanks for everything you do and inspiring hope in me during really dark times
I agree, but it's also so damn frustrating that the technology to do this was only a few decades ahead of the Soviet Union when it could have made the difference between the USSR still being here today. And ironically the corruption and black markets that eventually led the system to its decline get blamed on the concept of planning, when it was the gradual backslide into capitalism because of an absence of the computing power necessary which caused this. Yes, it is absolutely possible to have Marx's conception of communism in the future but we are already a lot closer than we thought by the sound of it only to have the bolder roll all the way back down the hill and right over us...
@@DinoCism If U.S. power declines to the point they can no longer hold back the economy of the DPRK, we will likely see the potential of a planned system demonstrated within our lifetime.
DemocraticSocialist01 Read "Towards a New socialism" man, as Mr Paul says they talk about it there. Also is a brilliant book any Communist should read IMO
I don't know if you heard about this, but do you know about the studies of systematic heuristic in the GDR? Sadly, there is only a Wiki article in German: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematische_Heuristik This was tought at the "Akademie der marxistisch-leninistischen Organisationswissenschaft" (AMLO) which was founded in 1969 but then later dismantled under Honecker. During the NÖS (New Economic System) it was attempted to intensify cybernetics and hermeneutics to rationalize planning, automate plants and increase productivity. During that time, there was a big "cybernetics boom", lots of Sci-Fi movies were made and people had quite a pioneer spirit about a cybernetic future (which, of course, changed when Honecker took over and abandoned this path to rather focus on the availability of consumer items financed with foreign loans). Basically the idea of systematic heuristics is to scientifically rationalize problem-solving and decision-making with maximum efficiency in management and planning. It was supposed to educate Marxist-Leninist planers and managers to raise productivity and reduce the length of the work day. I think some of the research from that time is still being used today in engineering management.
16:15 This is what apologetes of the market, especially libertarians think money is good for. It signals everybody what to do. They do not want to understand what surplus value and profit are. They come from somewhere, but certainly not from exploitation. Someone pays them, but nobody knows who that someone is. If they actually bothered to read Marx, they should find the individualism they are looking for and what they conceive of the market.
Apologete of the market here. We do understand both. On the other hand, we argue, Marxists never understood Bohm-Bawerk's critique of Marx's theory of exploitation. Even under Labour Theory of Value, it can be shown there's no exploitation "by neccesity". Bohm-Bawerk's shows first that workers don't want to wait up for the final fruit of their labour to be sold, they agree on payments in installments. Marx never bothered to ponder on relation of value to time (it's demonstrably true we value number of goods or money now more than the same in the future) and that's first fault in that theory - to do away with all interest on things altogether, despite it being justified by value in time. Second - capitalists do a lot of other things which explain their profits - like bearing the burden of any financial losses (while workers must have their checks guaranteed under current law system), finding ways to sell things (entrepreneurship), paying for capital amortisation - not to mention "lending" workers the capital to make their work more efficient. Lending the capital can be likened to comrades in communism, some of which created shovels which other use, while they have free time. They "save" their labour in time to be used by others productively. In other words, even under labour theory of value the capitalist directly contributes to others' work just by landing capital they got by working themselves. (let's just assume the theoretical perspective here and not go into disputes about capitalists whose starting capital doesn't derive from their work or risktaking - just the theoretical perspective that can prove communists wrong about profit and exploitation, even under LTV) Third and finally, but outside of labour theory of value - Bohm-Bawerk explained why value must, of neccesity, be subjective, hence no "objective" surplus value can exist. It can be tangenially likened to how Marx himself noticed the "socially neccesary labour time" ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_necessary_labour_time) and the pricing system itself, which is an "objective" measure of how everyone collectively values things at a moment. Or in other words - my two hours of work at the computer can be worth $40 of "surplus value" (some part of which the capitalist will take for himself) , but only because currently such labour is worth so much. This is only an info how much everyone else is willing to pay, not a particular individual. So to sum up, TL;DR there exist several explanations for profit: - difference in value in time and willingness of the workers to be paid in installments, rather than waiting for product to be sold - willingness of the workers to be paid regardless of whether the company achieves positive financial balance or not - the capitalist participating (doing work) in many companies, including entrepreneurship - finding and negotating profitable things to do for the workers' labour to be productive for the consumers - costs neccesary to run work (amortisation) - lending the workers capital to work on, improving their efficiency, and indirectly contributing to fruits of their labour with capital that is "work postponed / saved up in time", in essence What is more, the ratio of net profit margin the capitalists achieve in their industry directly relates to how capital- or labour-intense is. They tend to have lower profit margins in trades and verticals where workers' labour is intense, and greater in those where their capital contributes more.
@Luke "Half of your argument is literally “without the slave owners, the slaves wouldn’t have jobs!” " I fail to see the analogy. Slaves are forced to to the job (not just "any job") for their master, and have to cope with whatever they are given. Free workers choose whatever jobs are available to them. They don't just cope with what is given, if their skills are high in demand and low in supply, they get more. The more labour-intensive job is, the greater cut they get and capitalist's margin is lower, but of course labourers tend to like capital-intensive jobs more because they pay more thanks to capital making their labour more productive. "The problem is that those who don’t own the means of production in society have no choice but to rent themselves" Well yes, either that or they would have to sustain themselves living off land or being productive in any other way and selling their product / services to others. "who does and is inevitably stealing from them." You haven't proven that which is the whole thing we're arguing about in the first place. "This means, no matter what, not from lack of trying" That's false of course. Many people prefer their stable full-time jobs and consuming the entirety of their savings now or in the future to saving up and putting their money constantly to productive use, plus taking the risks and time connected with entrepreneurship. That some people prefer it that way and the others try to establish businesses is a mutually beneficial state. "The ability to own the means of production is largely based on gambling (...)" Another assumption without any proof. Please come back if you're willing to discuss further why theft is inevitable with capital-holders using rented labour and why supposedly acquiring means of production is based on "gamble". Plus, you haven't really addressed any of the points I have mentioned why exactly labourers get just a part of full fruits of labour.
@Luke "The capitalists profit is the surplus value of the workers! (...) Value comes from labour" Okay, a lot to decipher and explain here. Surplus value is a concept from Labour Theory of Value (LTV), which tries to explain value of commodities, services, capital goods, but inadvertly also tries to claim what is 'just price' for them. That is nonsense, because what a healthy economy really needs is value ascribed by people themselves (Subjective Theory of Value, STV), which coordinates what goods, services and so on are more urgently needed, so that the market produces them. It's the labourers who should specialize in what work is needed and satisfy consumers' needs, not the other way round. Economy needs them produced according to supply and demand, not some concept of what is a "fair" price for given labour. It's not even clear from Marx's writings, he has never finished explaining the "socially neccesary labour time" ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_necessary_labour_time ) to produce certain goods or services, which is a concept that would inadvertly bring him, though in a roundabout way, to the same conclusion market prices bring us - economy needs subjective valuation by people, prices to which they respond by either purchasing or forfeiting (abandonning) purchase, if they think they would pay for something too much. Things are bought and sold, if enough things are sold and someone makes a profit that's good - if not, their business is inefficient or not needed. That way prices coordinate the market and there's no other way around this, see th-cam.com/video/zkPGfTEZ_r4/w-d-xo.html This brings us to the economic calculation problem, which troubles socialism. With no prices for capital goods, which cannot be held or sold, there's no way to properly assign prices to them, and as a consequence, prices for consumer goods will be distorted too. This cannot be done away with any planning because you simply lack information from the consumers themselves. Trying to to this in any other fashion (by querying consumers with polls or whathever, or by "predicting" demand for heterogenic goods with computers) lacks all the benefits prices enable - decentralized knowledge about items, their uses and their valuation by market agents, faster-than-planner's feedback and so on. As I wrote, you cannot do this away with computers, even now - it would simply take too much computational power to "simulate" even an approximated economy for goods, their uses, how urgent they be, not to mentioned that "heterogenic" goods problem; the market always updates itself for novelty, goods and services that are better than old, and cannot be likened in quality and value (price). "You may make profit by building a factory, not owning one. You may make profit by working, not by owning." But, even if you assume it's all about labour and hold to LTV, you're wrong here too. If I create a shovel it's my labour it exists thanks to, and in consequence, I should own it, as I would do with any other fruit of labour. I may sell it, but also rent it. Capital goods can be likened to labour saved up to enchance productiveness of further labour. There's no reason, no argument you give here, why I shouldn't own something I built myself. Now, back to profits, "Where does all that money come from? Nowhere!?? Every dollar someone makes without working someone worked without making a dollar! Please tell me where it comes from. (...)" If I had already worked and created a shovel, I did indeed work; now renting this shovel for others for use is still them using my labour. This is nothing different than a brigade of smith specialists in socialism creating shovels, and then receiving income and free time when their comrades work with them, though the exact details can differ due to how socialists (or you, like you do above) and people in market economies see profitign from their work over time, by renting it. Second, capital requires funds for depreciation; I won't allow to use my showel just for free, it has at least to be maintained. Thirdly, when you use it, I cannot - so there's the next argument for profits. In essence, capitalist's profits are much less than you claim, they are turnover minus all the costs including worker's wages, neccesary equipment, capital depreciation, risk-taking and on the other hand, guaranteeing those workers' pensions paid in installments, every month. "The higher up the ladder you start, the higher you will finish." That's not all that true, a lot of wealthy are self-earned, and a lot of fortunes are wasted. People think large scale effects brings them immunity, but that's absurd; in fact bigger businesses can be more wasteful and managed worse. "Our society is set up in such a way that wealth grows exponentially." That is not true either, progressive taxation on some ways of making money available for the wealthy cause total tax rate on nearly everyone to become more or less flat. We all give to the society in lots of ways. "Capitalism restricts good education for those born wealthy. Otherwise, you’re in debt." If you allow free higher education for everyone else like in where I live (Poland, was once striving for socialism you know), the only thing you get is inflation of higher education diplomas, them becoming worth less overall, equating everyone to lowest common denominator. Primary education should get better instead and teach people things increasingly more needed for computer era we have now, but higher education should primarily serve those most inclined to study and able. In fact, at least where I live, more people with skills at good vocational schools should graduate, schools are too focused on less neccesary knowledge, don't teach critical thinking as much as facts and memorizing, and as a result even lower their standards at higher education.
@Luke "Voting with your dollar is not democratic because, who has the money? The wealthy have more votes. Markets only reflect the interests of the wealthy." Of course not; you claimed yourself there's not a lot wealthy people, so even if they get more votes they are still in minority, as a group. They may have lots of value in stocks, investments and what not, but their income isn't much greater than what a bigger collective earns. So there's a great misconception among left-leaning audience on this - wealth does not equal income, plus most of wealth isn't readily available to be withdrawn and spent, it's, in fact, almost always put to good use. In US in particular, those big companies get tax exeptions, but only if they invest in something, put their money to productive use, and workers' wages are an option too in fact; IRS gives some tax relief for increasing employees wages. "Even then, who on earth has time to research every product and every companies hands the product went through before purchasing it?" You don't have to. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance When available options are good enough you stick to them. The government should mostly coordinate that companies don't claim fake info and nonsense about their products nor sell things that harm people. All the other info gets around in one way or another - decentralized collective of people get all the types of websites, 3rd party apps and what not, to inform the others about products. "The capitalists don’t really know how much or what to produce." They do, the profits they see thanks to the price system shows if they're effective or not. They may be guessing when starting up a business, but those surviving gradually establish a working model of what's needed for them to produce. "They guess and shove ads down our throats." Ads are only so effective you know, you cannot throw money at advertising and expect to only get more and more, their usefulness is limited as are most things. Here's another interesting economic concept for you, from the same economic school that thought of STV - law of diminishing marginal utility: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility#Diminishing_marginal_utility The more you spend or use something, the less benefits it provides you, with every additional unit. Take it from me, I work in advertising. I wouldn't work here even if it was profitable to do so (instead opting to do some economics job I guess?) if I didn't believe it works and is needed. And I know it does because I can see directly see how online ads translate to sales and even have measures of this being profitable, measures of those sales not happening if not for ads spend; up to a certain point I mentioned above, with diminishing marginal utility. It's likewise not very intelligent to bombard people with said ads too much because they don't like it - the issue solves itself; there's no problem if one is really willing to analyse how tailoring ads not to pester people too much can in fact be beneficial. The companies which don't see that lose, simple. "What about the fabled risk the capitalist takes! That’s the justification for it all right? Isn’t that just.. gambling!? It is. guess what, stocks are gambling, too! Yes, that’s right. Our economic system, which literally determines whether people sleep in a shelter or on the street, is based on gambling!" So guess what - many things in life are about risk-taking, life is not risk-free. And you don't call it gambling, because you conveniently ascribe all that gambling done for you to some evil forces of capitalism. Workers get their pay no matter what, even if capitalist gets to default, bankrupt, which you notice yourself. Stocks is another funny subject, which you clearly seem not to understand. In order to finance expansion of business, handle investments and what not, companies seek support from investors. Stocks are also a way to address the problems of risk too. For instance, forward contracts for agricultural products like grains, vegetables and so on secure profits for farmers - allowing them to sell risk-free at certain price. The financial system is the heart of coordinating markets at grand scale, showing everyone else what people and companies are doing (requiring them to report on their efficiency, so making the market more trustworthy), making profitable businesses flourish and gaining more capital. The only ones gambling are people who invest in them, and it is THEIR money which they gamble, not yours, so I don't even get where this "gambling" argument comes from, if it doesn't even directly harm you in provable way. "Remember, only about 10% of the population can own the means of production at once!" And where do you get that information from? Looks like completelly "loose" fact with no supporting context or measure whatsoever. "This means, inevitably 90% of the population, no matter what, 90% of the population has no choice but to obey a master or starve to death!" No, as I said, they can try living for sustenance at farms or whatever. But instead they choose the benefits of the division of labour ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour ) and living in better economic conditions. "This is what socialism says. Capitalists make profit because they own things. Not because they do anything." Well, then your definition of socialism is even dumber than what Marx claimed. To own things you need to save enough to get them, either by creating them yourself or by trading with someone else.
Using war time examples is pretty terrible given how people under those conditions underwent horrifying living conditions with constant shortages. Tough to look at any of the central planning from war time countries in either world war as some sort of useful and efficient model. They were only found useful for centralizing war coordination with industry in addition to military forces. Not strictly efficient or effective.
@@mikemurray2027 Not really. As I said, war planning is useful for coordinating industry for a war effort. Success and failure of this policy is determined by winning the war, which is against another nation undergoing similar coordination. Anyone in the armed services can tell you how miserably inefficient and callous that system is. It considers the opportunity costs of alternative uses of those resources to be secondary, with some justification as winning or losing the war could be disastrous. This benefit of clear goals goes out the window when the question of resource allocation goes to education vs healthcare vs housing vs production finance vs industrial goods vs consumer goods vs developing cities vs developing rural communities. Investing resources in one of these more means the other will not be getting that investment. This is why during a war everything else gets so shitty, because investing in all those other things becomes secondary, and all of them suffer because of the allocation of resources. Trying to replicate that sounds like you would just be inflating the investment in some projects at the expense of other projects.
Sorry. Not getting your point. Why is there a lack of investment resources available for the things we need in peace time? Or are you saying that because we can't do it all at the same time, we shouldn't do any of it?
What do you think of this Multilevel Democratic Iterative Coordination (MDIC) model of socialism proposed in this short writing by David Laibman? Is it at all compatible with labour-value accounting, especially the concept of “Socialist Reproduction Prices” in the planned sector?
Yes absolutely, I have been thinking of the same! Make some kind of model or even game that would calculate the economies of, say UK in 1930/40/50s but in terms of labor values not money, but in that same Capitalist framework. Observers would actually see the effects of the Neoliberal economic model in full effect and see that it's completely corresponds with real history. Kind of like very accurate economical simulation game. If only I knew how to program AND had all the economic data of that time...
Great video, although I myself am not keen on the idea of a vast network of pneumatic tubes to deliver products. A system that uses drones and new/existing transportation infrastructure seems more practical.
Please talk about total war economies, as they are centralized and planned economies worth learning from. Alfred Millard in “War, Economy, and Society” is an excellent start!
So I take it under a system of labour certificates and communal planning (if that is what it could be called) purchasing power would always correlate pretty directly with productivity? Since increasing productivity would reduce the socially-necessary labour time to produce commodities, which in turn would lower the labour value of each respective commodity. The result being that more goods could be delivered for the same amount of work.
The state would have to either set up new projects from the start giveing them a lobour budget or socialist entrepreneurship could allow collectives of workers to apply for new projects to be started to produce new inventions.
@@thephoenix756 You need to grasp that I am talking about communism not private enterprise. In a communist system, new enterprises are set up using public resources when it is decided that there is public need for them. In the USSR in the Stalin period this was essentially done by grants of resources to the enterprises on the scale specified by the plan.
@@paulcockshott8733 Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to me -- despite my ignorance. I did some more research and I see now that my question was incredibly ignorant and that I didn't grasp the extent of the gulf between the system you've described and the current capitalistic system we have now. This is possibly another stupid question and I apologise in advance: How do citizens of this socialist State you detail travel internationally and spend time overseas without money?
A lot of people are fearful that a cashless society would have too much potential for 'big brother' to restrict freedoms. Social issues like drug policy are important to address.
In a socialist economy medicines are provided free on a medical prescription. In the absence of a commodity market the motivation for both the illegal opiate and the legal opioid (Oxcontin) pushing is removed.
@@RobinEvans1234 In the absence of circulating currency, it becomes very difficult for a black market in drugs to operate. It would have to operate by barter, and no capitalist enterprise can work on barter.
As far as I can see as long as there is a demand for something there is motivation to sell it, and any object can become currency to be used on a black market. There is a range of drugs, many of which recreational users would consider less harmful on society than alcohol for example. Plenty of people would be scared of the prospect of you being correct in the ability of the state to repress any market. The question the millions of people who see drug laws as draconian in capitalist society would be asking is, "how draconian will drug laws be in the sort of cashless society Paul Cockshott advocates?" Our opposition will utilize this issue in their propaganda.
@INSTALL GENTOO To clarify, it's a component, but not sufficient to establish communism. For example, there were slave societies without currency, where value planning and it's distribution was managed by a chief or king, and no private trades could occur. This is an example of a society with no currency and trade, but would not count as communism due to lack of worker owner of means of production, democracy, etc. etc.
+xenoblad Also hierarchy, communism is predominantly about abolishing hierarchy, with a king in place that's really just a controlled economy, socialism at best. +Paul Cockshott Marx said a lot he was either misinformed about or has become outdated.
The monetary value system is arbitrary and abstract and while containing its own internal consistency mathematically to some degree, it is fundamentally based on arbitrary, abstract and exploitative functions such as profit and debt for example. These functions of profit and debt are artefacts of the monetary system itself and do not represent real functions of physical reality. The entire monetary system arbitrarily forces all values into one value system, losing all specific real values to this one abstract general value.
It is based on subjective values. These are arbitrary because people's individual values are arbitrary. Hence, all goods, including money, are heterogeneous in value and traded around based on individual preferences.
@Jack W Monetary values are completely made up and bare no material relation to labour value and use value. A scientist doesn't measure market fluctuations in an objects weight value for example, that would be absurd. Economics is not a measure that scientists could ever use to measure material reality. Monetary mathematics arbitrarily misrepresents actual value in favour of those with the most capital.
@PRAXOLOGY PRAXOLOGY Indeed and in page 28 of capital marx states that 'the exchange of commodites is an act evidently characterised by a total abstraction from use value' Exchange value (ie money) is abstracted from not only use value, but labour value and resource value also. Within this abstraction is the divorce from material reality and its misrepresentation in monetary value. 'As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value. If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract. Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are - Values. We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value. But if we abstract from their use value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed.'
off-topic note: "Von", in the context of German and German surnames, is pronounced as "Fon", as in German, the letter "V" is pronounced as an F, and the sound V would make in English, for example, is replaced with the letter "W". So, Vorteil (advantage) is pronounced like "Fortile", whereas Wand (wall) is pronounced like "Vand".
What role does worker self-management play in this system? Would workers be subject to punishment by the State for failing to meet quotas? Would workers be liable to being transferred without consent to different occupations by the state? Would the plan allow for new cooperatives to pioneer technologies counter to the state? Is this democratic state governed by a randomly pulled assembly? How do you maintain both macro and micro democracy?
It has to work by work collectives being given labour budgets in terms of person hours available for projects that they contract to undertake. If the collective persistently falls short of the social mean for similar projects some workers would have to be transfered to more productive collectives. The important point is that individuals are not employed by enterprises, they have to have employment contracts with some higher body. Just what that higher bod was could vary. It could be the City, it could be their labour syndicate, so that when a particular collective has its labour budget reduced, the individual does not loose their job. If an old hospital is proven to be innefficient and have poor health outcomes for example, staff may be allocated to a newbuilt one.
A solid answer, that makes sense. This seems analogous to the Mondragon Corporations policy of retraining and shifting worker-members between cooperatives depending on Labour demand, as opposed to firing them. This is the system that the workers themselves decided upon. Perhaps whole industries could be under one umbrella, or perhaps many industries in an area would be more utile, especially if an entire industry were in need of being cut back. To be clear though, the management and day to day operations of these productive units would be based upon worker suffrage and either or both direct voting on policy or election of managers? Or would management be appointed by the appropriate randomly selected assembly? This is a bit of an aside, but who has greater authority? The team of planners whose proposal was selected by the people or the Assembly composed of the people? How do they interact? It’s sorry for all the bothering, but I’m trying to write a general constitution based upon your principals as well as my own. It’s a long road to communism here in the US, but I suppose the coming disaster will expedite that.
Finally. Now I can actually tell people computing labour value of an entire economy is as hard as mergesort. This is actually mind blowing. Can you please refer to your paper? What is the space complexity?
Doesn't Marx state that the value of skilled labour is some factor of the value of unskilled labour? If this is the case, should not those working in skilled professions be entitled to a greater quantity of goods?
the argument is probably that skilled labour needs more investment than unskilled labour, i.e. you need to study to become a doctor. however, that does only entitle you to a greater quantity of goods in capitalism, as you have to pay for your education yourself. in a socialist economy, the whole society would "invest" in you becoming a doctor, so why should you, the doctor, the individual become more than someone else? this is just a short explanation, in Towards A New Socialism he outlined a more detailed explanation
No because they recieve their bonus pay while theyre getting paid to be trained and educated in school. By the time they are trained professionals, society has already shouldered the burdon of paying those skilled laborers extra.
@@LibertarianLeninistRants There is a whole list of assumptions built into this narrative. Yeah sure we agree capitalism sucks, and the LTV is far superior to STV. However as Steve Keen shows, Marx has started to deviate later on from a purely Ricardian/Smithian LTV into a more dialectical theory of value (Use value vs exchange value), and he highlights the role of energy, machinery in the creation of value. Shaykhs famous result which confirms the LTV confirms it only up to 85% and you must remember that this is a thesis that takes entire sectors of the economy and average millions of prices out by their integrated labor. What a lot of Marxists discount is that 15% comes from something OTHER than labor on average, so what is it? And how do you account for wild deviations of certain commodities/services from the LTV before it gets averaged out in a neat result?
So how would the people's bank function? There is no money but individual certificates or books of account that record the labour time worked and imply the functional purchasing power for an individual there from. Would people be allowed to share their labour power to buy more labor consuming products? If a microwave cost 5 labour hours could I and a friend each pay 2.5 labor hours and purchase it? The exchange of 1 labour hour worked grants 1 labour hour of purchasing power is interesting. It makes sense intuitively, and the functionality of preventing individual surplus accumulation from money system or notes is also interesting and terribly needed, but say I want to buy a car, or any product that required lots of labour hours to make. A car is 1000 labour hours(assuming labour hours accumulate from the very beginning of production i.e. material extraction from the earth and assembly of the car, this number could be greater), and based off my consumption habits I only have 200 labour hours saved, would I be able to get a loan from the people's bank for the rest, for I imagine the people's state retains a surplus of a sort, a limited abundance at the very least? Obviously this sounds odd. How does the people's state retain a surplus if people are paid the value of their labour in full? Is there a tax then? That would make sense in so far as to pay for operations; maintain an army, distribute and produce goods, etc.. But let's say I want funding for a project. Let's say I have developed a plan to enable man to peer into a black hole, and record information from beyond it's unbreachable barrier? Will I request funding from the state, or do I need to accumulate the excess labour hours by a co-operative sharing of a group of people? But what if it costs 1,00,000 labour hours, and not even the thousand individuals I gathered to work with me have enough combined labour hours to pay for the project? Does it come to a vote? Can people all around the country contribute their labour hours for specific projects to reach adequate funding goals?
It is difficult to imagine the society as a whole providing for the extensions of our desires. Perhaps this is just my own limited imagination, and being used to a society of barriers created by private merchants lol.
You had this discussion/panel with Francis Spufford a while ago. In contrast to the idea of optimal pricing, that he mainly focuses on in Red Plenty, what you are proposing is similar to what Glushkov wanted to do. If I remember correctly you say so yourself. In the book there's this conversation between fictional characters, where the cybernetics student enthusiastically explains to the female geneticist, how optimal pricing is better than directly controlling the allocation of material goods, because it gives the individual enterprises more freedom. I have a question regarding your advocacy of the latter, which is one of the main topics of this video, so I thought this comment would fit in here nicely. In his Jacobin article "The Red and the Black" Seth Ackerman argues that the inefficient allocation of ressources wasn't actually a problem for the Soviet Union. I can't really judge the scientific validity of the papers he cites, but so far the case he's making seems convincing to me. While I think his argument has some merit, that central planning would stifle innovation, because you can't just buy additional materials to try something new, but have to request them (probably with detailed reasoning why you want them, maybe compareable to applying for research grants today). This ties in nicely with the argument made by the fictional character (or should one say Spufford?) in Red Plenty, as mentioned above. At the least there seems to be evidence that inefficient allocation of resources wasn't that much of a problem for the command economies. It seems the activity of the planners resulted in a quite useable heuristic for solving the problem they were tasked with. But then one has to conclude that a different cause for the poor performance of the planned economies existed. This of course that not mean that a planned economy could not benefit hugely from a cybernetic approach like the one you propose, because of all the extra output generated by more efficient allocation. But it would not necessarily be competitive compared to a capitalist economy in the long run, if there's another "defect" instead. What do you think about the Ackerman article and the arguments against central planning he presents? How do you judge the scientific evidence he relies on? Maybe you already know the papers?
Right or wrong about using labour values in an economy, do you think that the best people to run many production units are individuals with a flair for innovation and enterprise, who should be given a totally free hand and a financial incentive? In addition, to mimic the successes of capitalist technological growth, do you think that there should be ways that people with new ideas can set up production, again with a totally free hand and financial incentive?
If I took 4 hours to make a table that only shouldn't have taken 1 hour, do i get paid for 4 hours? Also, after the state withers away, how do we distribute resources? Is it a gift economy at that point?
No, Marx is very clear on this, labour value is determined by the mean amount of labour that is socially necessary to produce something. To the extent that the contribution of the individual worker is measurable he says that a shift to a labour time certificate system would mean that fast workers would get paid more than slow ones.
I'm not sure about tubes. They seem a bit restrictive. Old fashion vehicle delivery with electric cars might be ideal. Maybe drones or self driving cars could be used as well. I guess there could be more then one solution to that.
How would this work with unique products? Suppose I need to get a cake for my niece's birthday. Obviously the amount of invested labor-time is going to vary according to my specifications. Is this a problem?
You do not need exact labour pricing for every cake, all you need is that the sum of labour used directly and indirectly in the bakery adds up to the sum of labour posted on all the cakes as their selling value
Hey Paul, can you do a video on WHY a socialist society needs input/output planning and labor-time credits at all? What problems does your system solve? What exactly is wrong with money wages in a socialist economy? Whats wrong with planning the income distribution and democratically deciding the reward system with money wages?
He addresses what you are asking about in this video on the limits of market socialism: th-cam.com/video/urDzRJ91_jY/w-d-xo.html My understanding is that while money is necessary in the transition from socialism to capitalism after that point it recreates the capitalist dynamics. In that video they used an animation graphic which modelled that process and talked about how that happened within the Soviet Union. Basically as long as you are using money there is always a tendency to find yourself back where you began with plain old capitalist inequality. I mean, I guess if you are fine with the system we have now with all the profit seeking, exploitation and instability the answer would be: there is no problem.
When the planning authorities raise or lower the price of some good, then the amount of labor-tokens paid for it will not equal the amount of labor-tokens that a worker receives for producing it, right? Could that have any bad consequences, like inflation or deflation?
Correct. In general the price of other goods has to be raised to compensate and ensure the total issue of labour tokens equals the total cancelled in purchases.
@@paulcockshott8733 Thanks for your reply! I assume the other goods' prices that are raised in response are not chosen are random but are goods whose prices are below their values? Is it assumed that on average there will always be such goods?
@@GodlessPhilosopher The overall adjustment process we propose in our book is to raise the markup on goods in short supply and reduce it on overproduced ones, but to do this relative to a mean ratio of price to value that ensures that all labour tokens are spent in the period they are issued.
Thank you for your nice work. If I understood it a bit, it would give a lot of power to the planners, hence the direct democracy. What would happen with labour that isn't worth planning on a big scale? Like if some one has one apple tree and would invest the labour to harvest the apples? That labour would not be credited or would it? Would this not end any some personal scale labour? Would there only be apple trees on the collective, since having one in your own garden would only constitute uncreditable labour? Or would there be no personal (property) garden with personal (property) apple tree? Would this make everything standardized? A small region with particular plants would just not be planned if a big central planner central decides it? Is it possible to have multiple 'central planners' and plannen exchange between sub-planners?
Hi Dr. Cockshott, I had a question regarding this whole system. Since we already have large swaths of computing power being poured into cryptocurrencies, which has an environmental impact from constantly needing to replace hardware. Would it not be the case that cyber communism also has similar side effects?
Planning is not a problem in Cuba, but diversification. There are much more brutal western sanctions in North Korea, but they are well diversified and much more modern than Cuba.
(Handivote) Sounds like an interesting university project. Do you or your students have any video that talks about it? Edit: Nevermind, I think I found it. It's not named in the title, but you talk about it as a part of a lecture on direct democracy.
The planning using labour time is not practical. What if the T-Shirt was produce in an hour but takes 3 hours to deliver to the store. You need to sell it at 4 hours labour time because the delivery guy also need to get paid. That doesn't include the fuel cost for the delivery van and the energy cost of the sewing machine. If the delivery was delay due to traffic jam, you will need to sell it at X hour of labour time and become unaffordable to many people.
There's a few things I'm confused with. You suggest that direct democracy via electronic voting could be used for deciding different plans for the economy. But electronic voting is notoriously weak to any determined hackers wanting to manipulate results, so wouldn't it be potentially very dangerous to plan that way? My second question is how does the system account for clerical errors and mistakes? What happens if, for example, a town needs 100 pounds of iron to be produced, but the planners accidentally miss a zero, and so they only get 10? How can it be assured that planners would even have the best interests at heart for the regions they oversee planning for?
I think it sounds interesting, but would there still be a way for pocket money? So when parents want to give their kid something so they can go to the cinema etc.
@@paulcockshott8733 But it wouldn't be a labour for labour exchange. So would that mean that some sort of labour taxation should exist too, according to you? Where people don't get exactly for what they put in on an individual level. Not to mention there would also be common goods like roads for which I am imagining, one's right to access would be independent of the labour he has put in, that is, he wouldn't have to pay for it in anyway.
Then what is this talk about the state whithering way and decentralization occurring on a political and economic level? I thought that was marxism/communism101
@Jack W yes i understand that communism is stateless, and as it dissolves wouldn't decentralization take place? Would central planning be as necessary once the productive forces and relations of production become apt for socialism
In which work did Hayek admit that LTV calculation was possible but not practical? I couldn't find it, and It would prove very useful during arguments with right wing libertarians.
I know this is an old video and maybe no one will see my comment or reply to it but I will write it anyway. The idea about removing the money is to remove the black market as I understand however this discussion misses the possibility of using something else as a means of exchange other than money which can live for a long time, easy to handle, and hold a value. An example of that is prison system cigarettes and noddle bags are used.
things like cigarrettes only become currency if people can not obtain what they need by working and being paid in some form that enables them to get what they want from regular shops.
@@paulcockshott8733 thank you Mr. Paul for your fast reply. Your point is okay but I still have some thoughts in my mind which maybe I can put in hypothetical example. An addict lady needs to buy drugs, she will offer sex to get something the drug dealer wants. After a while they will agree that the drug dealer needs cigarettes. The lady starts charging like 10 packets of cigarettes for her service and exchanging on a rate with the dealer who needs food, and other essintals while he keeps his hour credit to buy a car. After he have amount of that cigarettes, he needs to change it to other products and people starts changing products with him. Maybe you have the launderer who can change ur cigarettes for something else as per working hour. For example if the one working hour can buy u 2 packet of cigarettes, the launderer manages to get u 1 hour worth of products for like 4 packets of cigarettes. Sorry for long comment filled with Alot of typos but really as ur idea is interesting, it triggers many questions
@@greebfewatani And do you think that the Bolivian cartel smuggling the cocaine into the country in submarines will be happy to be paid in Red Star cigarettes instead of dollars? I think not.
@@paulcockshott8733 I meant it as an example but if we are going with the same example and assumed the world consists of money and moneyless states. We can sort the issue of exchange using the following steps 1. The exchange will not happen unless there is a common ground between both parties 2. the cartel understanding the non existence of money may accept the trade for something they need such as guns for example. 3. The dealer will not deal with cartel but with distributors 4. Distributors will arrange the current means of exchange (cigarettes in our example) and can go to the launderer mentioned in previous comment or lend a service of someone we can call him the thug to steal some guns from the armory. In the end of the cartel will need something from the country they can mention during the discussion. My comments is not trolling or away to oppose ur study but imiginary critic which I hope it can enrich the topic.
Well yes but not everybody with a disability is going to be a genius. The question is that how do people who are unable to work, for whatever reason, earn labour credits?
@@joeymarshall2125 Taxation, Paul Cockshott answered this under another comment somewhere in some video. He said that Marx said (if I remember correctly) that the state would have to take some value of labour certificates as taxation to fund programs.
Struggling to understand this flow chart you got here. If they are determining production quotas based on the results of the state marketplace, why would the price be still attached to labor? Isn't it basically linked to consumer demand at this point then? Obviously you have to work to get the labor credits, but that is nothing new to the capitalist or alternative socialist socialist societies that have already existed. From there, how would you determine the prices of the goods? It is easy to get an idea for reducing the cost since nobody is buying them, but raise the price if everyone is buying them? How would you get a price to determine the optimal amount of goods to produce for the quota. For instance, people could hold out on a product and buy it once you reduce the price because they know you will since you need to clear the marketplace of the good. That would suggest to the production quota that the price is in very low demand, but it really isn't - people just know if they wait a week they can get the shirts for 1/10 of the price. Wouldn't that destroy the efficiency of the system entirely? I understand that a computer can just run the numbers once you have the figures, but how do you get the figures in this price structure? The communication for knowing these figures is between a state monopoly that makes up the prices as it goes compared to consumers that will try to get the best price for their labor credits. Unless I am misinterpreting your price structure all together.
My suspicion, based on running simulations, is that prices have to be pretty sticky and close to labour values in most cases. If you allow for rapid fluctuations things would get unstable. But you will need to allow for systematic diversion of price from value if there are non-labour plan constraints. For example if there is a restriction on C02 emissions, then goods releasing lots of carbon dioxide in their production will tend to be in short supply relative to demand if they are sold at their labour content. They will need to be sold at a premium to choke off demand. Also suppose that for dietary reasons the plan constrains the amount of sugar being grown, then again a non-labour constraint enters into the supply of the good and selling confectionary at labour content might lead to the shops being cleared of sweet drinks, and the price would have to be raised.
Alright, I see what you are saying here, but that wasn't the point I was trying to understand. I get that you can change the prices based on trends you want to see happen irrespective of labor value or market demand value for reasons such as health or environmental concerns. I don't see how are you resolving the economic calculation question for planning. The point that there is no price structure being generated by the demands of the people wanting the products. So there is no clear goal for what is needed to be produced or in what quantity things need to be produced. Your flow chart suggests that you determine the quotas based on the prices of the goods being sold at the market, but if it is fixed to the labor value of the good (or more or less stuck to it with tiny deviations), then wouldn't that mean you would be determining the quotas based on the labor value, not the market clearing price? Which would imply that you have no real mechanism for determining the production quota beyond the amount of time that it takes to make the good. That doesn't seem to answer the economic calculation question as far as I understood it. Maybe this is what you were getting at, but was there supposed to be some sort of democratic call for production through online polls or something to help quotas? Though I may be missing something here that you said.
No no need for polls. You start out with a known true labour value. The state retail sector knows whether current rates of sale exceed rates of production. If the planners say that it is not possible to quickly adjust the level of output, the retail sector raises the prices of the goods in deficit and lowers the prices of the goods being overproduced. If it is possible to quickly adjust supply, then simply increase the daily production - for some things this is easy. Suppose you are wanting to adjust production of white bread versus brown bread, this can be done very rapidly without needing price changes.
I don't see how you are working out the quotas if the retail sector can manipulate them. This was kind of my first question regarding what is stopping consumers from just not buying the goods until the retail sector throws them on clearance if they know they will to clear the market. With that in mind, that seems to destroy the mechanism for determining quotas. Some goods can be easily adjusted for production - a few weeks behind or so - but that suggests that it would take months if not years to properly adjust production for more intensive goods. Which by then could completely shift again and it being out of date as it hits the marketplace. This is probably starting to go off on tangents, but I don't see how managing labor here works as well - why would laborers move to different industries for production to meet these shifting quotas. Unless you are suggesting that labor would be centrally planned and controlled as well for productive purposes. I don't know if that sounds like the liberation of labor if that is the case.
Planning is effective provided that there is a well defined set of objectives for the plan. Some of this can come from political decisions - for example to scale down car production and build electric tramways. But others, relating to the mix of consumer goods have to be settled by what people are willing to give up their own time ( as labour vouchers ) in return for. On the issue of speed of response. Some changes will take years. For example when an entirely new technology like telephones came out, it inevitably took many years before everyone could be provided with a phone. But if people did not want phones, if they were not willing to give up some of their time to compensate for the time that was being spent laying phone lines and building exchanges etc, then it would have made sense to slow down or even halt the process. On the topic of allocation of labour, I would say that any society which changes, which is not frozen, has to be able to allocate labour. Historically socialist states had no difficulty incentivising people to move into new industries and out of agriculture. But later, since people were given what amounted to job guarantees, it became harder to restructure the economy. So the issue is how to combine a guarantee that you will never be made unemployed, with the social necessity to re-allocate workers. This is why I think it is a mistake for a socialist economy to make the enterprise the employer. I think some higher level body - a guild, an industrial union or the state as a whole should be the employer. Suppose that it is your industrial union that guarantees you a job, but that the number of people required in individual workplaces fluctuates in response to the plan. The workplaces negotiate with the union as a collective for the labour of its members and the union by some internally agreed process allocates these tasks to its members.
In our book we suggested that competing teams of economists could propose plans that would be voted on. The team whose plan won would be in charge of planning for 5 years.
In practice, how could you systemically distinguish between labour time and socially necessary labour time so as to prevent someone from gaming the labor credits system you describe? How would labor credits actually be distributed to the worker? Excellent presentation, by the way, I'm genuinely curious if you have answers to these potential problems.
We explain in our book that people would have to be paid according to norms based on the average amount of work a person achieves in an hour. This was standard in the USSR. The difference we are saying is that that the norms represent the full value added (before income tax|).
@@HallyVee For sure. Peter Joseph has been a huge influence on me. Although I wish the TZM people wouldn't capitulate when it comes to historical socialism and take a more nuanced view.
If all this labor time represents resources that workers will be getting in exchange for their work, why not express the labor as a resource allowance? In other words, the more labor that goes into producing something, the more resource allowances it is worth and so the unit of value can be expressed in the number of resource allowances that labor can satisfy, whether this involves comparing inputs and outputs or the performance of an output in terms of creating labor (resource allowances) over time.
Functionally it amounts to the same thing. Calling them resource units though will obscure the social relations involved - what resource are the units measuring. Fundamentally they are measuring human time and this should be made evident.
Paul Cockshott a Thanks for your reply. Actually, I meant the resource allowance IS the unit of measurement itself. If we understand a limited resource allowance as a customizable but fixed quantity determined by the scientifically testable biological needs of the individual for optimal health and comfort, we can use that as a calculable number that expresses actual demand. Just because a product requires more labor doesn't mean it has more consumer demand. In other words, both prices and labor time actually reflect something else: consumer preferences and demand for certain resources. Both the prices someone gets for some good or service and the labor time we perform to make a good or service available, both ultimately are about the resources we want to obtain, whether it's through payment for other resources or through the work that directly generates those resources. So why not just determine what is an optimal resource allowance for health and comfort and make that the unit of measurement? The number of times over demand and the labor required to meet demand fulfills one resource allowance is the worth of that product to society compared to other products.
@@michaelcentra2792 _"Just because a product requires more labor doesn't mean it has more consumer demand."_ That's an excellent point, and also brings into question the role of automation in production in general. It seems to be a somewhat conservative / restrictive notion that human labour should be the final determining factor when it comes to a right to resource access. Sounds like "early communism", rather than "endgame communism". IMO I always assumed that the endgame of communism was a maximum degree of access to goods, services and other resources for each individual - regardless of labour - with the limits pegged only by the overall productive capacity of the system (which also takes into account sustainability). Pegging access to labour does not strike me as forward-looking enough, especially when production is likely to be increasingly automated going forward. If there is still important work to be done, it is no stretch to assume that in a system of relative abundance a significant number of people will contribute out of a sense of social duty, as some do now for example when they volunteer their time to develop open source projects for the betterment of society. Forever tying your worth to "labour hours" in this context might actually end up being not just superfluous, but a needless obstacle to achieving true economic justice as a human right, and evolving past social darwinism altogether.
@@xemy1010 I'm on mobile so I can't isolate your comments in quotes but thanks for the reply. But I also think it's important to anticipate automation hence my proposal of a Limited Resource Allowance based on the general human biological requirements for health, comfort and self-management in conjunction with the current level of mass available technological advancements of the day. Access to the LRA is allocated at different rates based of labor time and type but it's final full and universal measurement is not based on labor time but on the aforementioned universal biological requirements. So if robots were to take everyone's place at their jobs, the LRA will still be the same for the out of work population because the work to produce those resources is still being done. Essentially every robot would just be an extension of the human laborer it has replaced.
But wasn't this system built on assumption most of truely important production actually done within specific country (or smaller region of it)? With today's globalization - raising even basic food may require something produced far, far away..... (and in capitalist country, who will play by their rules) ?
And see presently however might be great statistics it could be,it provides non development of majority of population and their un fullfillment in life,uneven consumption of resources,and next development of machine again to make majority of development ill
Depends what you mean about labour being of equal value. This is often a shield for class prejudice. There is an objective sense in which you can say one person performs more labour per hour, and works harder. The Stakanovite movement in the USSR was base on this. If a worker individually exceeded the norms, that is to say the average for the line of work, they were recognised as contributing more labour. And they were paid more since the basic principle was payment according to work done. But people in the west who talk about labour being unequal are no Stakanovs, they are typically members of the professional class, who think that because of their class position they are more valuable than the average worker. This is class prejudice based on the semi monopoly position that specialised skills have in an economy where education is personally expensive. In a socialist country the state pays for education and pays students a stipend, they have no personal cost involved in study. If it has not personally cost them, why should a doctor be paid more than an coal miner? So in the USSR a doctor was paid no more than someone doing a heavy industrial job, but there was no shortage of doctors as a result. The objective factor is that the cost of training a specialised worker has to be added to the value of the products they produce, so if an industry requires, on average, 3 additional years training for its workers, then the socially necessary labour time to produce its output, must include the time of those workers spent being trained. But this is a matter of adjusting the labour content of the product of the industry to include the time spent training its workers, it does not imply that the trained workers get paid more.
There are some occupations that are more unpleasant to work in than others. The work environment is not as pleasant, the risk of being injured during work is higher etc. You're gonna have to pay people more in those types of occupation in order to attract enough people to work in those occupations.
Well in the capitalist world those jobs are not well paid, the better paid a job is, usually the healthier and easier it is. So the idea that you need monetary incentives to fill unpleasant jobs is empirically false. But even if it were true, it would be an immoral approach in the long term. The long-term goal should be to address the safety issues so that the jobs are no longer dangerous.
The calculation problem is not a computational problem, neither a problem of processing information. The "information" necessary for economic calculation is NON-EXISTENT is socialism, because it is a product of exchanging private property. Another problem is that price formation cannot be reduced to direct or indirect labor.
I guess this centrally planned cybersocialism has a few flaws. 1- It doesn't account for the difficulty of allocating limited goods in high demand. Rare artifacts, antiques, precocious metal...etc. Or for example an oil field or a coal mine, how do I value that before any human labor is into it? Clearly it has value, both exchange and use value. Same thing with anything in a state of nature. You must remember that the Shaykh LTV result that you're relying on, is an average aggregate result. It doesn't follow that the LTV is true for every local case or every local sub-industry, this is to equate the macro with the micro. 2- It fails to drive innovation. 3- it fails to account for the fact that machines/energy sources can produce value, in addition to human labor. Check the work of Dr Steve Keen and the field of biophysical economics. 4- its highly fragile to a global failure, if the electric grid fails , or the planners make a mistake, the entire system fails. 5- It seems to assume that value is produced from the demand side only. E.g. Someone wants a particular kind of painting he just asks for it on his cybersocialism app and then a painter paints it for him. Well that's not how art usually works, rather artists produce his work, and the public judges if they want to consume it or not.
cornucopia sounds like a nationalized amazon prime.
yes
yes yes yes yes
Smartphones are certainly a step up from the TV voting originally suggested in TANS.
I try to keep up with available tech
Watching your videos makes me genuinely happy for the future. We can do stuff like this, we have all the tools to do it, and one day we will get there. Thanks for everything you do and inspiring hope in me during really dark times
I agree, but it's also so damn frustrating that the technology to do this was only a few decades ahead of the Soviet Union when it could have made the difference between the USSR still being here today. And ironically the corruption and black markets that eventually led the system to its decline get blamed on the concept of planning, when it was the gradual backslide into capitalism because of an absence of the computing power necessary which caused this. Yes, it is absolutely possible to have Marx's conception of communism in the future but we are already a lot closer than we thought by the sound of it only to have the bolder roll all the way back down the hill and right over us...
@@DinoCism If U.S. power declines to the point they can no longer hold back the economy of the DPRK, we will likely see the potential of a planned system demonstrated within our lifetime.
Are you familiar with Stafford Beer and Project Cybersen?
Yes we discussed Beers work in Towards A New Socialism
DemocraticSocialist01 Read "Towards a New socialism" man, as Mr Paul says they talk about it there.
Also is a brilliant book any Communist should read IMO
pab I have bought it yesterday!
Cool!! it is a really good book
pab It arrived this day and I have read the first few pages this afternoon, my first opinion is, that it is a new hope for the left movement😁
I don't know if you heard about this, but do you know about the studies of systematic heuristic in the GDR? Sadly, there is only a Wiki article in German: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematische_Heuristik
This was tought at the "Akademie der marxistisch-leninistischen Organisationswissenschaft" (AMLO) which was founded in 1969 but then later dismantled under Honecker. During the NÖS (New Economic System) it was attempted to intensify cybernetics and hermeneutics to rationalize planning, automate plants and increase productivity. During that time, there was a big "cybernetics boom", lots of Sci-Fi movies were made and people had quite a pioneer spirit about a cybernetic future (which, of course, changed when Honecker took over and abandoned this path to rather focus on the availability of consumer items financed with foreign loans).
Basically the idea of systematic heuristics is to scientifically rationalize problem-solving and decision-making with maximum efficiency in management and planning. It was supposed to educate Marxist-Leninist planers and managers to raise productivity and reduce the length of the work day. I think some of the research from that time is still being used today in engineering management.
Never heard of it but will look
Thanks. Never underestimate the GDR
Wow. As a Marxist, I have so much to learn about planned economy. The list of books and papers is infinite.
Thanks so much for recording and uploading all these videos. They're so good and informative. Can't wait for new uploads!
thank you these videos are amazing and very appreciated
I love your channel and the niveau of discussion here. Keep up the great work!
16:15 This is what apologetes of the market, especially libertarians think money is good for. It signals everybody what to do. They do not want to understand what surplus value and profit are. They come from somewhere, but certainly not from exploitation. Someone pays them, but nobody knows who that someone is.
If they actually bothered to read Marx, they should find the individualism they are looking for and what they conceive of the market.
Apologete of the market here. We do understand both. On the other hand, we argue, Marxists never understood Bohm-Bawerk's critique of Marx's theory of exploitation.
Even under Labour Theory of Value, it can be shown there's no exploitation "by neccesity". Bohm-Bawerk's shows first that workers don't want to wait up for the final fruit of their labour to be sold, they agree on payments in installments. Marx never bothered to ponder on relation of value to time (it's demonstrably true we value number of goods or money now more than the same in the future) and that's first fault in that theory - to do away with all interest on things altogether, despite it being justified by value in time.
Second - capitalists do a lot of other things which explain their profits - like bearing the burden of any financial losses (while workers must have their checks guaranteed under current law system), finding ways to sell things (entrepreneurship), paying for capital amortisation - not to mention "lending" workers the capital to make their work more efficient.
Lending the capital can be likened to comrades in communism, some of which created shovels which other use, while they have free time. They "save" their labour in time to be used by others productively. In other words, even under labour theory of value the capitalist directly contributes to others' work just by landing capital they got by working themselves. (let's just assume the theoretical perspective here and not go into disputes about capitalists whose starting capital doesn't derive from their work or risktaking - just the theoretical perspective that can prove communists wrong about profit and exploitation, even under LTV)
Third and finally, but outside of labour theory of value - Bohm-Bawerk explained why value must, of neccesity, be subjective, hence no "objective" surplus value can exist.
It can be tangenially likened to how Marx himself noticed the "socially neccesary labour time" ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_necessary_labour_time) and the pricing system itself, which is an "objective" measure of how everyone collectively values things at a moment. Or in other words - my two hours of work at the computer can be worth $40 of "surplus value" (some part of which the capitalist will take for himself) , but only because currently such labour is worth so much. This is only an info how much everyone else is willing to pay, not a particular individual.
So to sum up, TL;DR there exist several explanations for profit:
- difference in value in time and willingness of the workers to be paid in installments, rather than waiting for product to be sold
- willingness of the workers to be paid regardless of whether the company achieves positive financial balance or not
- the capitalist participating (doing work) in many companies, including entrepreneurship - finding and negotating profitable things to do for the workers' labour to be productive for the consumers
- costs neccesary to run work (amortisation)
- lending the workers capital to work on, improving their efficiency, and indirectly contributing to fruits of their labour with capital that is "work postponed / saved up in time", in essence
What is more, the ratio of net profit margin the capitalists achieve in their industry directly relates to how capital- or labour-intense is. They tend to have lower profit margins in trades and verticals where workers' labour is intense, and greater in those where their capital contributes more.
@Luke "Half of your argument is literally “without the slave owners, the slaves wouldn’t have jobs!” "
I fail to see the analogy. Slaves are forced to to the job (not just "any job") for their master, and have to cope with whatever they are given.
Free workers choose whatever jobs are available to them. They don't just cope with what is given, if their skills are high in demand and low in supply, they get more.
The more labour-intensive job is, the greater cut they get and capitalist's margin is lower, but of course labourers tend to like capital-intensive jobs more because they pay more thanks to capital making their labour more productive.
"The problem is that those who don’t own the means of production in society have no choice but to rent themselves"
Well yes, either that or they would have to sustain themselves living off land or being productive in any other way and selling their product / services to others.
"who does and is inevitably stealing from them."
You haven't proven that which is the whole thing we're arguing about in the first place.
"This means, no matter what, not from lack of trying"
That's false of course. Many people prefer their stable full-time jobs and consuming the entirety of their savings now or in the future to saving up and putting their money constantly to productive use, plus taking the risks and time connected with entrepreneurship. That some people prefer it that way and the others try to establish businesses is a mutually beneficial state.
"The ability to own the means of production is largely based on gambling (...)"
Another assumption without any proof. Please come back if you're willing to discuss further why theft is inevitable with capital-holders using rented labour and why supposedly acquiring means of production is based on "gamble". Plus, you haven't really addressed any of the points I have mentioned why exactly labourers get just a part of full fruits of labour.
@Luke "The capitalists profit is the surplus value of the workers! (...)
Value comes from labour"
Okay, a lot to decipher and explain here.
Surplus value is a concept from Labour Theory of Value (LTV),
which tries to explain value of commodities, services, capital goods,
but inadvertly also tries to claim what is 'just price' for them.
That is nonsense, because what a healthy economy really needs is value ascribed by people themselves (Subjective Theory of Value, STV), which coordinates what goods, services and so on are more urgently needed, so that the market produces them. It's the labourers who should specialize in what work is needed and satisfy consumers' needs, not the other way round. Economy needs them produced according to supply and demand, not some concept of what is a "fair" price for given labour.
It's not even clear from Marx's writings, he has never finished explaining the "socially neccesary labour time" ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_necessary_labour_time ) to produce certain goods or services, which is a concept that would inadvertly bring him, though in a roundabout way, to the same conclusion market prices bring us - economy needs subjective valuation by people, prices to which they respond by either purchasing or forfeiting (abandonning) purchase, if they think they would pay for something too much.
Things are bought and sold, if enough things are sold and someone makes a profit that's good - if not, their business is inefficient or not needed. That way prices coordinate the market and there's no other way around this, see th-cam.com/video/zkPGfTEZ_r4/w-d-xo.html
This brings us to the economic calculation problem, which troubles socialism.
With no prices for capital goods, which cannot be held or sold, there's no way to properly assign prices to them, and as a consequence, prices for consumer goods will be distorted too. This cannot be done away with any planning because you simply lack information from the consumers themselves. Trying to to this in any other fashion (by querying consumers with polls or whathever, or by "predicting" demand for heterogenic goods with computers) lacks all the benefits prices enable - decentralized knowledge about items, their uses and their valuation by market agents, faster-than-planner's feedback and so on. As I wrote, you cannot do this away with computers, even now - it would simply take too much computational power to "simulate" even an approximated economy for goods, their uses, how urgent they be, not to mentioned that "heterogenic" goods problem; the market always updates itself for novelty, goods and services that are better than old, and cannot be likened in quality and value (price).
"You may make profit by building a factory, not owning one.
You may make profit by working, not by owning."
But, even if you assume it's all about labour and hold to LTV, you're wrong here too.
If I create a shovel it's my labour it exists thanks to, and in consequence, I should own it, as I would do with any other fruit of labour.
I may sell it, but also rent it.
Capital goods can be likened to labour saved up to enchance productiveness of further labour.
There's no reason, no argument you give here, why I shouldn't own something I built myself.
Now, back to profits,
"Where does all that money come from? Nowhere!?? Every dollar someone makes without working someone worked without making a dollar!
Please tell me where it comes from. (...)"
If I had already worked and created a shovel, I did indeed work; now renting this shovel for others for use is still them using my labour.
This is nothing different than a brigade of smith specialists in socialism creating shovels, and then receiving income and free time when their comrades work with them,
though the exact details can differ due to how socialists (or you, like you do above) and people in market economies see profitign from their work over time, by renting it.
Second, capital requires funds for depreciation; I won't allow to use my showel just for free, it has at least to be maintained.
Thirdly, when you use it, I cannot - so there's the next argument for profits.
In essence, capitalist's profits are much less than you claim, they are turnover minus all the costs including worker's wages, neccesary equipment, capital depreciation, risk-taking and on the other hand, guaranteeing those workers' pensions paid in installments, every month.
"The higher up the ladder you start, the higher you will finish."
That's not all that true, a lot of wealthy are self-earned, and a lot of fortunes are wasted.
People think large scale effects brings them immunity, but that's absurd; in fact bigger businesses can be more wasteful and managed worse.
"Our society is set up in such a way that wealth grows exponentially."
That is not true either, progressive taxation on some ways of making money available for the wealthy cause total tax rate on nearly everyone to become more or less flat.
We all give to the society in lots of ways.
"Capitalism restricts good education for those born wealthy. Otherwise, you’re in debt."
If you allow free higher education for everyone else like in where I live (Poland, was once striving for socialism you know), the only thing you get is inflation of higher education diplomas, them becoming worth less overall, equating everyone to lowest common denominator.
Primary education should get better instead and teach people things increasingly more needed for computer era we have now, but higher education should primarily
serve those most inclined to study and able. In fact, at least where I live, more people with skills at good vocational schools should graduate, schools are too focused on less neccesary knowledge, don't teach critical thinking as much as facts and memorizing, and as a result even lower their standards at higher education.
@Luke "Voting with your dollar is not democratic because, who has the money? The wealthy have more votes. Markets only reflect the interests of the wealthy."
Of course not; you claimed yourself there's not a lot wealthy people, so even if they get more votes they are still in minority, as a group. They may have lots of value in stocks, investments and what not, but their income isn't much greater than what a bigger collective earns. So there's a great misconception among left-leaning audience on this - wealth does not equal income, plus most of wealth isn't readily available to be withdrawn and spent, it's, in fact, almost always put to good use.
In US in particular, those big companies get tax exeptions, but only if they invest in something, put their money to productive use, and workers' wages are an option too in fact;
IRS gives some tax relief for increasing employees wages.
"Even then, who on earth has time to research every product and every companies hands the product went through before purchasing it?"
You don't have to.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
When available options are good enough you stick to them. The government should mostly coordinate that companies don't claim fake info and nonsense about their products nor sell things that harm people. All the other info gets around in one way or another - decentralized collective of people get all the types of websites, 3rd party apps and what not, to inform the others about products.
"The capitalists don’t really know how much or what to produce."
They do, the profits they see thanks to the price system shows if they're effective or not.
They may be guessing when starting up a business, but those surviving gradually establish a working model of what's needed for them to produce.
"They guess and shove ads down our throats."
Ads are only so effective you know, you cannot throw money at advertising and expect to only get more and more, their usefulness is limited as are most things. Here's another interesting economic concept for you, from the same economic school that thought of STV - law of diminishing marginal utility:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility#Diminishing_marginal_utility
The more you spend or use something, the less benefits it provides you, with every additional unit.
Take it from me, I work in advertising. I wouldn't work here even if it was profitable to do so (instead opting to do some economics job I guess?) if I didn't believe it works and is needed. And I know it does because I can see directly see how online ads translate to sales and even have measures of this being profitable, measures of those sales not happening if not for ads spend; up to a certain point I mentioned above, with diminishing marginal utility.
It's likewise not very intelligent to bombard people with said ads too much because they don't like it - the issue solves itself; there's no problem if one is really willing to analyse how tailoring ads not to pester people too much can in fact be beneficial. The companies which don't see that lose, simple.
"What about the fabled risk the capitalist takes! That’s the justification for it all right? Isn’t that just.. gambling!? It is.
guess what, stocks are gambling, too! Yes, that’s right. Our economic system, which literally determines whether people sleep in a shelter or on the street, is based on gambling!"
So guess what - many things in life are about risk-taking, life is not risk-free. And you don't call it gambling, because you conveniently ascribe all that gambling done for you to some evil forces of capitalism. Workers get their pay no matter what, even if capitalist gets to default, bankrupt, which you notice yourself.
Stocks is another funny subject, which you clearly seem not to understand. In order to finance expansion of business, handle investments and what not, companies seek support from investors. Stocks are also a way to address the problems of risk too. For instance, forward contracts for agricultural products like grains, vegetables and so on secure profits for farmers - allowing them to sell risk-free at certain price.
The financial system is the heart of coordinating markets at grand scale, showing everyone else what people and companies are doing (requiring them to report on their efficiency, so making the market more trustworthy), making profitable businesses flourish and gaining more capital. The only ones gambling are people who invest in them, and it is THEIR money which they gamble, not yours, so I don't even get where this "gambling" argument comes from, if it doesn't even directly harm you in provable way.
"Remember, only about 10% of the population can own the means of production at once!"
And where do you get that information from? Looks like completelly "loose" fact with no supporting context or measure whatsoever.
"This means, inevitably 90% of the population, no matter what, 90% of the population has no choice but to obey a master or starve to death!"
No, as I said, they can try living for sustenance at farms or whatever.
But instead they choose the benefits of the division of labour ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour ) and living in better economic conditions.
"This is what socialism says. Capitalists make profit because they own things. Not because they do anything."
Well, then your definition of socialism is even dumber than what Marx claimed. To own things you need to save enough to get them, either by creating them yourself or by trading with someone else.
@@aleksanderrozbiewski3801 Well done, you utterly humiliated him.
Neurath: We could possibly use planning during war-time as a example to follow for socialist systems
Von Mises, Hayek: *autistic screeching*
Using war time examples is pretty terrible given how people under those conditions underwent horrifying living conditions with constant shortages.
Tough to look at any of the central planning from war time countries in either world war as some sort of useful and efficient model. They were only found useful for centralizing war coordination with industry in addition to military forces. Not strictly efficient or effective.
@@JasonSmith-eo2hu On the contrary, it is easy to see how much better it would work without a blooming big war going on to mess things up!
@@mikemurray2027 Not really.
As I said, war planning is useful for coordinating industry for a war effort. Success and failure of this policy is determined by winning the war, which is against another nation undergoing similar coordination. Anyone in the armed services can tell you how miserably inefficient and callous that system is.
It considers the opportunity costs of alternative uses of those resources to be secondary, with some justification as winning or losing the war could be disastrous. This benefit of clear goals goes out the window when the question of resource allocation goes to education vs healthcare vs housing vs production finance vs industrial goods vs consumer goods vs developing cities vs developing rural communities. Investing resources in one of these more means the other will not be getting that investment.
This is why during a war everything else gets so shitty, because investing in all those other things becomes secondary, and all of them suffer because of the allocation of resources. Trying to replicate that sounds like you would just be inflating the investment in some projects at the expense of other projects.
Sorry. Not getting your point. Why is there a lack of investment resources available for the things we need in peace time?
Or are you saying that because we can't do it all at the same time, we shouldn't do any of it?
What do you think of this Multilevel Democratic Iterative Coordination (MDIC) model of socialism proposed in this short writing by David Laibman?
Is it at all compatible with labour-value accounting, especially the concept of “Socialist Reproduction Prices” in the planned sector?
You'd have to solve millions of equations which is impractical (excuses for not being able to do math) OMG, this is great.
Someone should make a game/working model of this idea. It's very interesting.
Yes absolutely, I have been thinking of the same!
Make some kind of model or even game that would calculate the economies of, say UK in 1930/40/50s but in terms of labor values not money, but in that same Capitalist framework. Observers would actually see the effects of the Neoliberal economic model in full effect and see that it's completely corresponds with real history. Kind of like very accurate economical simulation game.
If only I knew how to program AND had all the economic data of that time...
Great video, although I myself am not keen on the idea of a vast network of pneumatic tubes to deliver products. A system that uses drones and new/existing transportation infrastructure seems more practical.
Cyber Socialism NOW! I need those TUBES!
Please talk about total war economies, as they are centralized and planned economies worth learning from. Alfred Millard in “War, Economy, and Society” is an excellent start!
So I take it under a system of labour certificates and communal planning (if that is what it could be called) purchasing power would always correlate pretty directly with productivity? Since increasing productivity would reduce the socially-necessary labour time to produce commodities, which in turn would lower the labour value of each respective commodity. The result being that more goods could be delivered for the same amount of work.
Yes, over decades goods would appear to get cheaper according to what the classical economists called the invariable standard of value, human time.
@@paulcockshott8733 would this result in food shortages and blackmarkets? Similar to food subsidise markets in Socialist Contries?
@@jcomrade4363 no. The black markets arise when administered prices conflict with real values
I too want steampunk-style pneumatic tube communism. As ever, fascinating talk.
It would be silly to go to the store yourself, just send your card in along with your order through the pneumatic tube ;)
How new branches of production are established in this model?
The state would have to either set up new projects from the start giveing them a lobour budget or socialist entrepreneurship could allow collectives of workers to apply for new projects to be started to produce new inventions.
@@paulcockshott8733 should this budget needs to be planned in advance?
@@paulcockshott8733
Why would someone go to the trouble of establishing an enterprise if vouchers can't be accrued?
@@thephoenix756 You need to grasp that I am talking about communism not private enterprise. In a communist system, new enterprises are set up using public resources when it is decided that there is public need for them. In the USSR in the Stalin period this was essentially done by grants of resources to the enterprises on the scale specified by the plan.
@@paulcockshott8733
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to me -- despite my ignorance.
I did some more research and I see now that my question was incredibly ignorant and that I didn't grasp the extent of the gulf between the system you've described and the current capitalistic system we have now.
This is possibly another stupid question and I apologise in advance:
How do citizens of this socialist State you detail travel internationally and spend time overseas without money?
Outstanding presentation!
What do you think of the Twin Oaks community in the US as being an example of a labor credit system in practice?
A lot of people are fearful that a cashless society would have too much potential for 'big brother' to restrict freedoms.
Social issues like drug policy are important to address.
In a socialist economy medicines are provided free on a medical prescription. In the absence of a commodity market the motivation for both the illegal opiate and the legal opioid (Oxcontin) pushing is removed.
That this motivation is removed in the absence of a commodity market sounds like a flawed assumption to me.
@@RobinEvans1234 In the absence of circulating currency, it becomes very difficult for a black market in drugs to operate. It would have to operate by barter, and no capitalist enterprise can work on barter.
As far as I can see as long as there is a demand for something there is motivation to sell it, and any object can become currency to be used on a black market.
There is a range of drugs, many of which recreational users would consider less harmful on society than alcohol for example. Plenty of people would be scared of the prospect of you being correct in the ability of the state to repress any market.
The question the millions of people who see drug laws as draconian in capitalist society would be asking is, "how draconian will drug laws be in the sort of cashless society Paul Cockshott advocates?"
Our opposition will utilize this issue in their propaganda.
Mr. Cockshott what do you think about the concept of abolishing currency in total?
+INSTALL GENTOO
That's a very gross oversimplification. "Isn't fascism just authoritarianism. Isn't capitalism just a free market."
Yes we are advocating abolishing currency
@INSTALL GENTOO
To clarify, it's a component, but not sufficient to establish communism. For example, there were slave societies without currency, where value planning and it's distribution was managed by a chief or king, and no private trades could occur. This is an example of a society with no currency and trade, but would not count as communism due to lack of worker owner of means of production, democracy, etc. etc.
I think Marx refers to Inca society as communist, but would have to check that
+xenoblad
Also hierarchy, communism is predominantly about abolishing hierarchy, with a king in place that's really just a controlled economy, socialism at best.
+Paul Cockshott
Marx said a lot he was either misinformed about or has become outdated.
The monetary value system is arbitrary and abstract and while containing its own internal consistency mathematically to some degree, it is fundamentally based on arbitrary, abstract and exploitative functions such as profit and debt for example.
These functions of profit and debt are artefacts of the monetary system itself and do not represent real functions of physical reality.
The entire monetary system arbitrarily forces all values into one value system, losing all specific real values to this one abstract general value.
It is based on subjective values. These are arbitrary because people's individual values are arbitrary. Hence, all goods, including money, are heterogeneous in value and traded around based on individual preferences.
@Jack W Monetary values are completely made up and bare no material relation to labour value and use value.
A scientist doesn't measure market fluctuations in an objects weight value for example, that would be absurd. Economics is not a measure that scientists could ever use to measure material reality. Monetary mathematics arbitrarily misrepresents actual value in favour of those with the most capital.
@PRAXOLOGY PRAXOLOGY Indeed and in page 28 of capital marx states that 'the exchange of commodites is an act evidently characterised by a total abstraction from use value'
Exchange value (ie money) is abstracted from not only use value, but labour value and resource value also.
Within this abstraction is the divorce from material reality and its misrepresentation in monetary value.
'As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.
If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.
Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are - Values.
We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value. But if we abstract from their use value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed.'
off-topic note: "Von", in the context of German and German surnames, is pronounced as "Fon", as in German, the letter "V" is pronounced as an F, and the sound V would make in English, for example, is replaced with the letter "W". So, Vorteil (advantage) is pronounced like "Fortile", whereas Wand (wall) is pronounced like "Vand".
What role does worker self-management play in this system? Would workers be subject to punishment by the State for failing to meet quotas? Would workers be liable to being transferred without consent to different occupations by the state? Would the plan allow for new cooperatives to pioneer technologies counter to the state? Is this democratic state governed by a randomly pulled assembly? How do you maintain both macro and micro democracy?
It has to work by work collectives being given labour budgets in terms of person hours available for projects that they contract to undertake. If the collective persistently falls short of the social mean for similar projects some workers would have to be transfered to more productive collectives. The important point is that individuals are not employed by enterprises, they have to have employment contracts with some higher body. Just what that higher bod was could vary. It could be the City, it could be their labour syndicate, so that when a particular collective has its labour budget reduced, the individual does not loose their job. If an old hospital is proven to be innefficient and have poor health outcomes for example, staff may be allocated to a newbuilt one.
A solid answer, that makes sense. This seems analogous to the Mondragon Corporations policy of retraining and shifting worker-members between cooperatives depending on Labour demand, as opposed to firing them. This is the system that the workers themselves decided upon. Perhaps whole industries could be under one umbrella, or perhaps many industries in an area would be more utile, especially if an entire industry were in need of being cut back. To be clear though, the management and day to day operations of these productive units would be based upon worker suffrage and either or both direct voting on policy or election of managers? Or would management be appointed by the appropriate randomly selected assembly?
This is a bit of an aside, but who has greater authority? The team of planners whose proposal was selected by the people or the Assembly composed of the people? How do they interact?
It’s sorry for all the bothering, but I’m trying to write a general constitution based upon your principals as well as my own. It’s a long road to communism here in the US, but I suppose the coming disaster will expedite that.
2:55 Gosplan be like: imma do it anyway
Finally. Now I can actually tell people computing labour value of an entire economy is as hard as mergesort. This is actually mind blowing. Can you please refer to your paper? What is the space complexity?
This is the original paper from the 1990s www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/plan_with_AIT.pdf
i have a question. what’s stopping people from using an informal means of monetary circulation to subvert the ban on private transfers?
I don't think there would be any reason to do that, given that the items would already be at the labour cost in shops
Doesn't Marx state that the value of skilled labour is some factor of the value of unskilled labour? If this is the case, should not those working in skilled professions be entitled to a greater quantity of goods?
A factor of what?
the argument is probably that skilled labour needs more investment than unskilled labour, i.e. you need to study to become a doctor. however, that does only entitle you to a greater quantity of goods in capitalism, as you have to pay for your education yourself. in a socialist economy, the whole society would "invest" in you becoming a doctor, so why should you, the doctor, the individual become more than someone else?
this is just a short explanation, in Towards A New Socialism he outlined a more detailed explanation
No because they recieve their bonus pay while theyre getting paid to be trained and educated in school. By the time they are trained professionals, society has already shouldered the burdon of paying those skilled laborers extra.
@@fellowtraveler2251 Yes !
@@LibertarianLeninistRants There is a whole list of assumptions built into this narrative. Yeah sure we agree capitalism sucks, and the LTV is far superior to STV. However as Steve Keen shows, Marx has started to deviate later on from a purely Ricardian/Smithian LTV into a more dialectical theory of value (Use value vs exchange value), and he highlights the role of energy, machinery in the creation of value. Shaykhs famous result which confirms the LTV confirms it only up to 85% and you must remember that this is a thesis that takes entire sectors of the economy and average millions of prices out by their integrated labor. What a lot of Marxists discount is that 15% comes from something OTHER than labor on average, so what is it? And how do you account for wild deviations of certain commodities/services from the LTV before it gets averaged out in a neat result?
So how would the people's bank function? There is no money but individual certificates or books of account that record the labour time worked and imply the functional purchasing power for an individual there from. Would people be allowed to share their labour power to buy more labor consuming products? If a microwave cost 5 labour hours could I and a friend each pay 2.5 labor hours and purchase it? The exchange of 1 labour hour worked grants 1 labour hour of purchasing power is interesting. It makes sense intuitively, and the functionality of preventing individual surplus accumulation from money system or notes is also interesting and terribly needed, but say I want to buy a car, or any product that required lots of labour hours to make. A car is 1000 labour hours(assuming labour hours accumulate from the very beginning of production i.e. material extraction from the earth and assembly of the car, this number could be greater), and based off my consumption habits I only have 200 labour hours saved, would I be able to get a loan from the people's bank for the rest, for I imagine the people's state retains a surplus of a sort, a limited abundance at the very least? Obviously this sounds odd. How does the people's state retain a surplus if people are paid the value of their labour in full? Is there a tax then? That would make sense in so far as to pay for operations; maintain an army, distribute and produce goods, etc.. But let's say I want funding for a project. Let's say I have developed a plan to enable man to peer into a black hole, and record information from beyond it's unbreachable barrier? Will I request funding from the state, or do I need to accumulate the excess labour hours by a co-operative sharing of a group of people? But what if it costs 1,00,000 labour hours, and not even the thousand individuals I gathered to work with me have enough combined labour hours to pay for the project? Does it come to a vote? Can people all around the country contribute their labour hours for specific projects to reach adequate funding goals?
It is difficult to imagine the society as a whole providing for the extensions of our desires. Perhaps this is just my own limited imagination, and being used to a society of barriers created by private merchants lol.
I don't think there is many products that would be so expensive
Brilliant video!
You had this discussion/panel with Francis Spufford a while ago. In contrast to the idea of optimal pricing, that he mainly focuses on in Red Plenty, what you are proposing is similar to what Glushkov wanted to do. If I remember correctly you say so yourself. In the book there's this conversation between fictional characters, where the cybernetics student enthusiastically explains to the female geneticist, how optimal pricing is better than directly controlling the allocation of material goods, because it gives the individual enterprises more freedom. I have a question regarding your advocacy of the latter, which is one of the main topics of this video, so I thought this comment would fit in here nicely.
In his Jacobin article "The Red and the Black" Seth Ackerman argues that the inefficient allocation of ressources wasn't actually a problem for the Soviet Union. I can't really judge the scientific validity of the papers he cites, but so far the case he's making seems convincing to me. While I think his argument has some merit, that central planning would stifle innovation, because you can't just buy additional materials to try something new, but have to request them (probably with detailed reasoning why you want them, maybe compareable to applying for research grants today). This ties in nicely with the argument made by the fictional character (or should one say Spufford?) in Red Plenty, as mentioned above.
At the least there seems to be evidence that inefficient allocation of resources wasn't that much of a problem for the command economies. It seems the activity of the planners resulted in a quite useable heuristic for solving the problem they were tasked with. But then one has to conclude that a different cause for the poor performance of the planned economies existed. This of course that not mean that a planned economy could not benefit hugely from a cybernetic approach like the one you propose, because of all the extra output generated by more efficient allocation. But it would not necessarily be competitive compared to a capitalist economy in the long run, if there's another "defect" instead.
What do you think about the Ackerman article and the arguments against central planning he presents? How do you judge the scientific evidence he relies on? Maybe you already know the papers?
I wrote a reply to Ackerman, but the great gods alone know where it has got to
Aw man, I would be really interested to read that.
Right or wrong about using labour values in an economy, do you think that the best people to run many production units are individuals with a flair for innovation and enterprise, who should be given a totally free hand and a financial incentive? In addition, to mimic the successes of capitalist technological growth, do you think that there should be ways that people with new ideas can set up production, again with a totally free hand and financial incentive?
My thoughts exactly
The silence is deafening
If I took 4 hours to make a table that only shouldn't have taken 1 hour, do i get paid for 4 hours? Also, after the state withers away, how do we distribute resources? Is it a gift economy at that point?
No, Marx is very clear on this, labour value is determined by the mean amount of labour that is socially necessary to produce something. To the extent that the contribution of the individual worker is measurable he says that a shift to a labour time certificate system would mean that fast workers would get paid more than slow ones.
Did you study how Amazon (the company) works?
I'm not sure about tubes. They seem a bit restrictive. Old fashion vehicle delivery with electric cars might be ideal.
Maybe drones or self driving cars could be used as well. I guess there could be more then one solution to that.
I am not necessarily advocating the tubes now, just showing what people thought of in the past.
How would this work with unique products? Suppose I need to get a cake for my niece's birthday. Obviously the amount of invested labor-time is going to vary according to my specifications. Is this a problem?
You do not need exact labour pricing for every cake, all you need is that the sum of labour used directly and indirectly in the bakery adds up to the sum of labour posted on all the cakes as their selling value
@@paulcockshott8733 But how would the bakers be paid, in a money-less society, for a one-off cake?
@@yorkshiremgtow1773 The bakers would be credited an hour per hour worked whatever cakes or pastries they were making.
@@paulcockshott8733 Regardless of ingredients used, or time in the oven?
@@yorkshiremgtow1773 of course. That was not thebwork of the bakers but of the farrmers millworkers etc
Hey Paul, can you do a video on WHY a socialist society needs input/output planning and labor-time credits at all? What problems does your system solve? What exactly is wrong with money wages in a socialist economy? Whats wrong with planning the income distribution and democratically deciding the reward system with money wages?
He addresses what you are asking about in this video on the limits of market socialism:
th-cam.com/video/urDzRJ91_jY/w-d-xo.html
My understanding is that while money is necessary in the transition from socialism to capitalism after that point it recreates the capitalist dynamics. In that video they used an animation graphic which modelled that process and talked about how that happened within the Soviet Union. Basically as long as you are using money there is always a tendency to find yourself back where you began with plain old capitalist inequality. I mean, I guess if you are fine with the system we have now with all the profit seeking, exploitation and instability the answer would be: there is no problem.
When the planning authorities raise or lower the price of some good, then the amount of labor-tokens paid for it will not equal the amount of labor-tokens that a worker receives for producing it, right? Could that have any bad consequences, like inflation or deflation?
Correct. In general the price of other goods has to be raised to compensate and ensure the total issue of labour tokens equals the total cancelled in purchases.
@@paulcockshott8733 Thanks for your reply! I assume the other goods' prices that are raised in response are not chosen are random but are goods whose prices are below their values? Is it assumed that on average there will always be such goods?
@@GodlessPhilosopher The overall adjustment process we propose in our book is to raise the markup on goods in short supply and reduce it on overproduced ones, but to do this relative to a mean ratio of price to value that ensures that all labour tokens are spent in the period they are issued.
@@paulcockshott8733 thanks so much for clarifying!
Thank you for your nice work. If I understood it a bit, it would give a lot of power to the planners, hence the direct democracy. What would happen with labour that isn't worth planning on a big scale? Like if some one has one apple tree and would invest the labour to harvest the apples? That labour would not be credited or would it? Would this not end any some personal scale labour? Would there only be apple trees on the collective, since having one in your own garden would only constitute uncreditable labour? Or would there be no personal (property) garden with personal (property) apple tree? Would this make everything standardized? A small region with particular plants would just not be planned if a big central planner central decides it? Is it possible to have multiple 'central planners' and plannen exchange between sub-planners?
You are alowed to have personal property, even small private property. Nobody cares about a litle bit of plants in your garden
If there are no transfers between personal accounts you are preventing exchange of used products.
Hi Dr. Cockshott, I had a question regarding this whole system. Since we already have large swaths of computing power being poured into cryptocurrencies, which has an environmental impact from constantly needing to replace hardware. Would it not be the case that cyber communism also has similar side effects?
Compared to the waste of bitcoin economic planning would use much less resource
Paul, at 12:14, you mention about making investments, but how is this possible without money?
Could OGAS have solved the 60's problem? At least partially?
Have you ever been invited to help Cuba with planning?
Planning is not a problem in Cuba, but diversification. There are much more brutal western sanctions in North Korea, but they are well diversified and much more modern than Cuba.
(Handivote) Sounds like an interesting university project. Do you or your students have any video that talks about it?
Edit: Nevermind, I think I found it. It's not named in the title, but you talk about it as a part of a lecture on direct democracy.
Would there be taxes with this system?
The planning using labour time is not practical. What if the T-Shirt was produce in an hour but takes 3 hours to deliver to the store. You need to sell it at 4 hours labour time because the delivery guy also need to get paid. That doesn't include the fuel cost for the delivery van and the energy cost of the sewing machine. If the delivery was delay due to traffic jam, you will need to sell it at X hour of labour time and become unaffordable to many people.
When computing labour values you include labour used for transport
There's a few things I'm confused with. You suggest that direct democracy via electronic voting could be used for deciding different plans for the economy. But electronic voting is notoriously weak to any determined hackers wanting to manipulate results, so wouldn't it be potentially very dangerous to plan that way?
My second question is how does the system account for clerical errors and mistakes? What happens if, for example, a town needs 100 pounds of iron to be produced, but the planners accidentally miss a zero, and so they only get 10? How can it be assured that planners would even have the best interests at heart for the regions they oversee planning for?
The planners would have the best interests at heart because they are democratically elected and will be recalled if they fuck up.
I think it sounds interesting, but would there still be a way for pocket money? So when parents want to give their kid something so they can go to the cinema etc.
In our book we propose that kids get labour tokens for doing school work.
@@paulcockshott8733 But it wouldn't be a labour for labour exchange. So would that mean that some sort of labour taxation should exist too, according to you? Where people don't get exactly for what they put in on an individual level. Not to mention there would also be common goods like roads for which I am imagining, one's right to access would be independent of the labour he has put in, that is, he wouldn't have to pay for it in anyway.
Aren't centralized planned economies only necessary for early stage of socialism still dealing with the global market economy?
No they are a necessary feature. The only two alternatives are planning or the market and the latter strengthens capitalist elements
Then what is this talk about the state whithering way and decentralization occurring on a political and economic level? I thought that was marxism/communism101
@Jack W yes i understand that communism is stateless, and as it dissolves wouldn't decentralization take place? Would central planning be as necessary once the productive forces and relations of production become apt for socialism
In which work did Hayek admit that LTV calculation was possible but not practical? I couldn't find it, and It would prove very useful during arguments with right wing libertarians.
It was Mises not Hayek who admitted that
@@paulcockshott8733 oh sorry I said Hayek, I meant Mises. I couldn't find it for Mises
@@felixlipski3956 page 159, Socialism by Mises
I'm confused, if money is highly correlated to labor why not just used money as a proxy?
Because money allows buying and selling at a profit and disguises the exploitation of workers
I know this is an old video and maybe no one will see my comment or reply to it but I will write it anyway.
The idea about removing the money is to remove the black market as I understand however this discussion misses the possibility of using something else as a means of exchange other than money which can live for a long time, easy to handle, and hold a value.
An example of that is prison system cigarettes and noddle bags are used.
things like cigarrettes only become currency if people can not obtain what they need by working and being paid in some form that enables them to get what they want from regular shops.
@@paulcockshott8733 thank you Mr. Paul for your fast reply.
Your point is okay but I still have some thoughts in my mind which maybe I can put in hypothetical example.
An addict lady needs to buy drugs, she will offer sex to get something the drug dealer wants. After a while they will agree that the drug dealer needs cigarettes.
The lady starts charging like 10 packets of cigarettes for her service and exchanging on a rate with the dealer who needs food, and other essintals while he keeps his hour credit to buy a car.
After he have amount of that cigarettes, he needs to change it to other products and people starts changing products with him.
Maybe you have the launderer who can change ur cigarettes for something else as per working hour. For example if the one working hour can buy u 2 packet of cigarettes, the launderer manages to get u 1 hour worth of products for like 4 packets of cigarettes.
Sorry for long comment filled with Alot of typos but really as ur idea is interesting, it triggers many questions
@@greebfewatani And do you think that the Bolivian cartel smuggling the cocaine into the country in submarines will be happy to be paid in Red Star cigarettes instead of dollars? I think not.
@@paulcockshott8733 I meant it as an example but if we are going with the same example and assumed the world consists of money and moneyless states. We can sort the issue of exchange using the following steps
1. The exchange will not happen unless there is a common ground between both parties
2. the cartel understanding the non existence of money may accept the trade for something they need such as guns for example.
3. The dealer will not deal with cartel but with distributors
4. Distributors will arrange the current means of exchange (cigarettes in our example) and can go to the launderer mentioned in previous comment or lend a service of someone we can call him the thug to steal some guns from the armory.
In the end of the cartel will need something from the country they can mention during the discussion.
My comments is not trolling or away to oppose ur study but imiginary critic which I hope it can enrich the topic.
@@paulcockshott8733 Funny answer :-)
If acquiring goods is based on labour what about people who are unable to work? People with disabilities for example?
Stephen Hawking contributed rather nicely given his disability don't you think?
Well yes but not everybody with a disability is going to be a genius. The question is that how do people who are unable to work, for whatever reason, earn labour credits?
@@joeymarshall2125 Taxation, Paul Cockshott answered this under another comment somewhere in some video. He said that Marx said (if I remember correctly) that the state would have to take some value of labour certificates as taxation to fund programs.
But you looks like quite a good man
I hope you would leave something like "Management of Marxist economy" for us
Seems fusion energy & automation will be needed
Struggling to understand this flow chart you got here.
If they are determining production quotas based on the results of the state marketplace, why would the price be still attached to labor? Isn't it basically linked to consumer demand at this point then? Obviously you have to work to get the labor credits, but that is nothing new to the capitalist or alternative socialist socialist societies that have already existed.
From there, how would you determine the prices of the goods? It is easy to get an idea for reducing the cost since nobody is buying them, but raise the price if everyone is buying them? How would you get a price to determine the optimal amount of goods to produce for the quota. For instance, people could hold out on a product and buy it once you reduce the price because they know you will since you need to clear the marketplace of the good. That would suggest to the production quota that the price is in very low demand, but it really isn't - people just know if they wait a week they can get the shirts for 1/10 of the price. Wouldn't that destroy the efficiency of the system entirely?
I understand that a computer can just run the numbers once you have the figures, but how do you get the figures in this price structure? The communication for knowing these figures is between a state monopoly that makes up the prices as it goes compared to consumers that will try to get the best price for their labor credits.
Unless I am misinterpreting your price structure all together.
My suspicion, based on running simulations, is that prices have to be pretty sticky and close to labour values in most cases. If you allow for rapid fluctuations things would get unstable. But you will need to allow for systematic diversion of price from value if there are non-labour plan constraints. For example if there is a restriction on C02 emissions, then goods releasing lots of carbon dioxide in their production will tend to be in short supply relative to demand if they are sold at their labour content. They will need to be sold at a premium to choke off demand. Also suppose that for dietary reasons the plan constrains the amount of sugar being grown, then again a non-labour constraint enters into the supply of the good and selling confectionary at labour content might lead to the shops being cleared of sweet drinks, and the price would have to be raised.
Alright, I see what you are saying here, but that wasn't the point I was trying to understand. I get that you can change the prices based on trends you want to see happen irrespective of labor value or market demand value for reasons such as health or environmental concerns.
I don't see how are you resolving the economic calculation question for planning. The point that there is no price structure being generated by the demands of the people wanting the products. So there is no clear goal for what is needed to be produced or in what quantity things need to be produced. Your flow chart suggests that you determine the quotas based on the prices of the goods being sold at the market, but if it is fixed to the labor value of the good (or more or less stuck to it with tiny deviations), then wouldn't that mean you would be determining the quotas based on the labor value, not the market clearing price?
Which would imply that you have no real mechanism for determining the production quota beyond the amount of time that it takes to make the good. That doesn't seem to answer the economic calculation question as far as I understood it.
Maybe this is what you were getting at, but was there supposed to be some sort of democratic call for production through online polls or something to help quotas?
Though I may be missing something here that you said.
No no need for polls. You start out with a known true labour value. The state retail sector knows whether current rates of sale exceed rates of production. If the planners say that it is not possible to quickly adjust the level of output, the retail sector raises the prices of the goods in deficit and lowers the prices of the goods being overproduced. If it is possible to quickly adjust supply, then simply increase the daily production - for some things this is easy. Suppose you are wanting to adjust production of white bread versus brown bread, this can be done very rapidly without needing price changes.
I don't see how you are working out the quotas if the retail sector can manipulate them. This was kind of my first question regarding what is stopping consumers from just not buying the goods until the retail sector throws them on clearance if they know they will to clear the market. With that in mind, that seems to destroy the mechanism for determining quotas.
Some goods can be easily adjusted for production - a few weeks behind or so - but that suggests that it would take months if not years to properly adjust production for more intensive goods. Which by then could completely shift again and it being out of date as it hits the marketplace.
This is probably starting to go off on tangents, but I don't see how managing labor here works as well - why would laborers move to different industries for production to meet these shifting quotas. Unless you are suggesting that labor would be centrally planned and controlled as well for productive purposes. I don't know if that sounds like the liberation of labor if that is the case.
Planning is effective provided that there is a well defined set of objectives for the plan. Some of this can come from political decisions - for example to scale down car production and build electric tramways. But others, relating to the mix of consumer goods have to be settled by what people are willing to give up their own time ( as labour vouchers ) in return for.
On the issue of speed of response. Some changes will take years. For example when an entirely new technology like telephones came out, it inevitably took many years before everyone could be provided with a phone. But if people did not want phones, if they were not willing to give up some of their time to compensate for the time that was being spent laying phone lines and building exchanges etc, then it would have made sense to slow down or even halt the process.
On the topic of allocation of labour, I would say that any society which changes, which is not frozen, has to be able to allocate labour. Historically socialist states had no difficulty incentivising people to move into new industries and out of agriculture. But later, since people were given what amounted to job guarantees, it became harder to restructure the economy. So the issue is how to combine a guarantee that you will never be made unemployed, with the social necessity to re-allocate workers.
This is why I think it is a mistake for a socialist economy to make the enterprise the employer. I think some higher level body - a guild, an industrial union or the state as a whole should be the employer. Suppose that it is your industrial union that guarantees you a job, but that the number of people required in individual workplaces fluctuates in response to the plan. The workplaces negotiate with the union as a collective for the labour of its members and the union by some internally agreed process allocates these tasks to its members.
Who are the Planners?
In our book we suggested that competing teams of economists could propose plans that would be voted on. The team whose plan won would be in charge of planning for 5 years.
In practice, how could you systemically distinguish between labour time and socially necessary labour time so as to prevent someone from gaming the labor credits system you describe? How would labor credits actually be distributed to the worker?
Excellent presentation, by the way, I'm genuinely curious if you have answers to these potential problems.
We explain in our book that people would have to be paid according to norms based on the average amount of work a person achieves in an hour. This was standard in the USSR. The difference we are saying is that that the norms represent the full value added (before income tax|).
Love how this is clearly Peter Joseph's economic calculation system.
"its not socialism guyz, i swear!!! Its the idea that matterz bro not the label" :DDD
@@fellowtraveler2251 it's fun to tease :) He did good work though, certainly turned me onto the fight.
@@HallyVee
For sure. Peter Joseph has been a huge influence on me. Although I wish the TZM people wouldn't capitulate when it comes to historical socialism and take a more nuanced view.
If all this labor time represents resources that workers will be getting in exchange for their work, why not express the labor as a resource allowance? In other words, the more labor that goes into producing something, the more resource allowances it is worth and so the unit of value can be expressed in the number of resource allowances that labor can satisfy, whether this involves comparing inputs and outputs or the performance of an output in terms of creating labor (resource allowances) over time.
Functionally it amounts to the same thing. Calling them resource units though will obscure the social relations involved - what resource are the units measuring. Fundamentally they are measuring human time and this should be made evident.
Paul Cockshott a Thanks for your reply.
Actually, I meant the resource allowance IS the unit of measurement itself. If we understand a limited resource allowance as a customizable but fixed quantity determined by the scientifically testable biological needs of the individual for optimal health and comfort, we can use that as a calculable number that expresses actual demand. Just because a product requires more labor doesn't mean it has more consumer demand.
In other words, both prices and labor time actually reflect something else: consumer preferences and demand for certain resources.
Both the prices someone gets for some good or service and the labor time we perform to make a good or service available, both ultimately are about the resources we want to obtain, whether it's through payment for other resources or through the work that directly generates those resources.
So why not just determine what is an optimal resource allowance for health and comfort and make that the unit of measurement?
The number of times over demand and the labor required to meet demand fulfills one resource allowance is the worth of that product to society compared to other products.
@@michaelcentra2792 _"Just because a product requires more labor doesn't mean it has more consumer demand."_
That's an excellent point, and also brings into question the role of automation in production in general. It seems to be a somewhat conservative / restrictive notion that human labour should be the final determining factor when it comes to a right to resource access. Sounds like "early communism", rather than "endgame communism".
IMO I always assumed that the endgame of communism was a maximum degree of access to goods, services and other resources for each individual - regardless of labour - with the limits pegged only by the overall productive capacity of the system (which also takes into account sustainability). Pegging access to labour does not strike me as forward-looking enough, especially when production is likely to be increasingly automated going forward.
If there is still important work to be done, it is no stretch to assume that in a system of relative abundance a significant number of people will contribute out of a sense of social duty, as some do now for example when they volunteer their time to develop open source projects for the betterment of society. Forever tying your worth to "labour hours" in this context might actually end up being not just superfluous, but a needless obstacle to achieving true economic justice as a human right, and evolving past social darwinism altogether.
@@xemy1010 I'm on mobile so I can't isolate your comments in quotes but thanks for the reply.
But I also think it's important to anticipate automation hence my proposal of a Limited Resource Allowance based on the general human biological requirements for health, comfort and self-management in conjunction with the current level of mass available technological advancements of the day.
Access to the LRA is allocated at different rates based of labor time and type but it's final full and universal measurement is not based on labor time but on the aforementioned universal biological requirements.
So if robots were to take everyone's place at their jobs, the LRA will still be the same for the out of work population because the work to produce those resources is still being done. Essentially every robot would just be an extension of the human laborer it has replaced.
@@michaelcentra2792 Makes sense, Michael. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
But wasn't this system built on assumption most of truely important production actually done within specific country (or smaller region of it)? With today's globalization - raising even basic food may require something produced far, far away..... (and in capitalist country, who will play by their rules) ?
And see presently however might be great statistics it could be,it provides non development of majority of population and their un fullfillment in life,uneven consumption of resources,and next development of machine again to make majority of development ill
Doesn' this require that all labor be of equal value? That's not the case.
Depends what you mean about labour being of equal value. This is often a shield for class prejudice. There is an objective sense in which you can say one person performs more labour per hour, and works harder. The Stakanovite movement in the USSR was base on this. If a worker individually exceeded the norms, that is to say the average for the line of work, they were recognised as contributing more labour. And they were paid more since the basic principle was payment according to work done.
But people in the west who talk about labour being unequal are no Stakanovs, they are typically members of the professional class, who think that because of their class position they are more valuable than the average worker. This is class prejudice based on the semi monopoly position that specialised skills have in an economy where education is personally expensive. In a socialist country the state pays for education and pays students a stipend, they have no personal cost involved in study. If it has not personally cost them, why should a doctor be paid more than an coal miner?
So in the USSR a doctor was paid no more than someone doing a heavy industrial job, but there was no shortage of doctors as a result.
The objective factor is that the cost of training a specialised worker has to be added to the value of the products they produce, so if an industry requires, on average, 3 additional years training for its workers, then the socially necessary labour time to produce its output, must include the time of those workers spent being trained. But this is a matter of adjusting the labour content of the product of the industry to include the time spent training its workers, it does not imply that the trained workers get paid more.
There are some occupations that are more unpleasant to work in than others. The work environment is not as pleasant, the risk of being injured during work is higher etc. You're gonna have to pay people more in those types of occupation in order to attract enough people to work in those occupations.
Well in the capitalist world those jobs are not well paid, the better paid a job is, usually the healthier and easier it is. So the idea that you need monetary incentives to fill unpleasant jobs is empirically false. But even if it were true, it would be an immoral approach in the long term. The long-term goal should be to address the safety issues so that the jobs are no longer dangerous.
The calculation problem is not a computational problem, neither a problem of processing information. The "information" necessary for economic calculation is NON-EXISTENT is socialism, because it is a product of exchanging private property.
Another problem is that price formation cannot be reduced to direct or indirect labor.
I guess this centrally planned cybersocialism has a few flaws.
1- It doesn't account for the difficulty of allocating limited goods in high demand. Rare artifacts, antiques, precocious metal...etc. Or for example an oil field or a coal mine, how do I value that before any human labor is into it? Clearly it has value, both exchange and use value. Same thing with anything in a state of nature. You must remember that the Shaykh LTV result that you're relying on, is an average aggregate result. It doesn't follow that the LTV is true for every local case or every local sub-industry, this is to equate the macro with the micro.
2- It fails to drive innovation.
3- it fails to account for the fact that machines/energy sources can produce value, in addition to human labor. Check the work of Dr Steve Keen and the field of biophysical economics.
4- its highly fragile to a global failure, if the electric grid fails , or the planners make a mistake, the entire system fails.
5- It seems to assume that value is produced from the demand side only. E.g. Someone wants a particular kind of painting he just asks for it on his cybersocialism app and then a painter paints it for him. Well that's not how art usually works, rather artists produce his work, and the public judges if they want to consume it or not.