Socialist ends by market means: A history

The battle between the modern 'Left' and 'Right' is pure theater. It’s a false choice designed to keep us arguing over who holds the leash while we remain wage slaves. It would be interesting if some of those individuals could have been more convincing 150 years ago

What he's missing is that scaling started working around 1900, when railroads started consolidating. Railroads were the first businesses that had overwhelming economies of scale. No small co-op could possibly compete. Over the next century, more obstacles to scaling were overcome. Container shipping, freeways, cheap communications, mass market products and advertising, and computers removed the obstacles to scaling businesses up to planetary size.

Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a package, the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete!

Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard.

Gone, gone Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn, Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce. - The Music Man

Who does not have a market? In the USSR people went to markets to buy radishes, just like we do here, except paying with rubles not dollars.

What was different was not the market but the production, or control over production. In the US heirs own the majority of the Fortune 500 and thus control it, their things worked differently.

So why is production not discussed but a market? Or not even a market but a "free" market - I suppose to be in a free market you buy radishes in a market with dollars and not rubles.

The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good, rather than accept selfish gain and leverage it for greater good.

At it's core, socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more. It's annoying because even the most die-hard college campus communist still complains that they did all the work for the group project while pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets. Given the opportunity to chose their group next time, the power players all naturally congeal. And probably talk about how to make society more fair.

> the “equation of capitalism and markets” is a tragic misconception

Must be a big city isolation thing? In rural areas co-ops are a common part of every day life. The internet is provided by a co-op, the store is a co-op, the gas station is a co-op, etc. It is impossible in that environment to not see that shared ownership and markets fit together just fine.

To what degree is marginalism dependent on price as the active force? How can marginal utility be realized without all goods having a market price? What happens when goods are difficult or impossible to price?

To try to dispel the myth of a "coop" being defined as four old hippies sorting groceries in the back room of their run down victorian house in Portland:

The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Often touted as "the worlds largest coop".

Like any large entity, it's had it's share of criticism as well as praise. But in general, works to the advantage of it's workers, not just for shareholder returns.

Cosma Shalizi has a great article on these themes, arrives at similar conclusions https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...

Came to this post hoping to see C4SS mentioned. "Markets not capitalism" is a fantastic read in general and the PDF is freely available / open access.

Someone's look to re-describe anarcho-capitalism?

What's the point of all this naval-gazing? How are Adam Smith and Karl Marx relevant to anything? They're not gods writing gospel. Whatever valid ideas they had can stand on their own. Where's the modelling, simulations, experiments? It sounds like a hobby project for people who spent too much time in liberal arts where they learnt they're not allowed to think for themselves and have to cherry pick ideas from authorities and write a lot of words but in the end create nothing. Excuse me for losing it a bit there.

I love how handy-wavy control attempts get from every direction, instead of addressing the real problem.

Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies.

Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control.

Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.

Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.

Capitalism is the term for the market system popularized by Karl Marx. If socialists want to incorporate markets, I am all for it, since it slips capitalism through the back door. This represents a total classical liberal/libertarian victory over socialist ideologies of the past. The only thing they have kept are slogans and terms.

The key thing modern progressives need to do is cut out their naiive criticisms of economics. The usual gambit is to repeat criticisms of Marx, et al. of classical economics, which mostly amount to charicature and ridicule, and don't even apply to classical economics, let alone modern subjectivist economics.

The so-called left libertarians represented by C4SS are the most pre-eminent and sophisticated of the 'socialist'-oriented political ideologies. But like all socialist types, they cannot free themselves from the dogma that labor is a special kind of factor of production which, as they think, not being exposed to the principles of choice under scarcity, follows different principles governing action and exchange than those which cover all other economic factors of production. Carson takes pains to demonstrate this in his book, but is ultimately unsuccessful.

I find it interesting, perhaps ironic, how much the cause of social ownership of businesses/'means of production' will be advanced by ... Trump, via the 530A a.k.a. Trump Account.

$1000 at a 10% return for 65 years is $490,371

I tried to bookmark this with Karakeep, but the URL ended up being this; https://yourusername.github.io/2100/history/