Joseph Green asked me to give my thoughts on his reply to Ben. So I
did. This is part one, which deals with economics. It's basically a
culmination of the arguments presented in the debate Jacob Richter
and I had along with the discussion between Ben and myself before he
wrote his latest polemic. Here is what I sent to Joseph this morning:

----------------------------------------------------------------------


Hi Joseph,

My reply today must be somewhat limited.


Communist Economy and the "Withering Away" of the State
----------------------------------------------------------------------

In various debates, I often use this quote:

"[…] Only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there
is nobody to be suppressed -- "nobody" in the sense of a class, in
the sense of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the
population. We are not utopians, and do not deny the possibility and
inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the
need to suppress such excesses. But, in the first place, no special
apparatus of suppression is needed for this; this will be done by the
armed people itself […]"

"[…] And secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of
excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social
intercourse, is the exploitation of the masses, their want and their
poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will
inevitably begin to `wither away' […] With their withering away the
state will also wither away."

-- Lenin, from `State and Revolution'

When I brought this up in my debate with Frank, he wrote, "What
Marxist would disagree with that?" And indeed, most Marxists will, on
the surface, readily claim that they take this passage to heart. But
as soon as someone puts forward an idea of what society might look
like when the state has withered away, it is suddenly "anarchism." So
you have to ask yourself: do you really believe that the state can
wither away, and if so, how will it?

The reason for Ben writing the Self-Organizing Moneyless economy was
primarily this one: central planning (or "conscious social planning"
if you will) alone does not solve the problem of commodity production
and the ills that it brings. State-capitalist and/or "socialist"
economy can exist indefinitely if there is no "way out." It will be
important for the workers under workers' rule to begin to experiment
with how run an economy without money, wages, or exchange of any
kind, because this is the only way to "achieve escape velocity." In
short, it must be made clear that central planning, while it may be a
useful tool, does not solve all of the problems of capitalism and the
laws of commodity production will still exist until the workers
successfully learn how to run an economy without exchange. And this
will not happen spontaneously; the workers will have to experiment.

Ben felt it was important to paint a general picture of what a
moneyless economy might look like because for many today, it is
impossible to even fathom an economy that does not use exchange and
does not have a formal authority. It is impossible for many to even
think about a world where workers make decisions and carry out tasks
on the basis of self-organization (i.e. a world where things will
be "done by the armed people itself").

One of the problems I have with your argument is that you do not call
Lenin an anarchist, but when Ben proposes the same thing but in
greater detail, he is an anarchist.

I believe the problem is that you have a fetish with central planning
(or "conscious social planning"). The basis of your argument appears
to be that the reason why capitalism is so bad is because there is no
guiding force from above directing decisions. This is not the case.
The "iron hand" action you described is a result of the laws of
commodity production. The laws of commodity production lead wealth to
be apportioned into a smaller and smaller percentage of the
population so the few control the means of production and
distribution. The "anarchy of production" is a result of the
limitations of the price system (i.e. the "invisible hand")

The problem with central planning_alone_is that it does not fully
eliminate these problems because it does not eliminate the laws of
commodity production. The development of an economy without exchange
(a gift economy) is necessary to solve these issues. But how will
this economy emerge? It will start small, obviously, but as workers
gain more experience, seize more of the means of production, etc.
their experimental moneyless economy will become stronger and larger
until it becomes the basis of the entire economy.

Further, as will be shown now, central planning comes with its own
limitations that make it inefficient, and it (in our opinion) has no
place in a moneyless economy.


Central Planning and the "von Neumann Bottleneck"
------------------------------------------------------------------

The problem that central planning faces is analogous to CPUs in
computers. In a computer, all information has to be sent through the
Central Processing Unit (Central Committee), where it is dealt with
using an algorithm (big central plan). However, since so much
information from so many different locations inside the computer
(economy) have to be filtered through this central unit before
anything can be done, the computer (economy) slows down, or
bottlenecks. This problem in computers is known as the "von Neumann
Bottleneck," and many attempts have been made to correct it over the
years.

Because of the needs of supercomputers that have to take in extremely
vast amounts of information Massively Parallel Processing was
invented. Instead of all information being sent through a CPU, there
are_many_processing units that deal with all of the information
simultaneously, in chunks, so that it all gets done faster. Further,
if something goes wrong with unit A, information can be rerouted to
unit B without too much trouble, which means that the system is
extremely adaptive.

So let's look at how a real-world economy might work. Let's say the
central planning body makes a decision that sounds like a good idea
from above, but is really a shit idea in practice (sure, in a perfect
world, that would never happen, but let's say that it did). When it
was put into practice, the workers would either have to a) deal with
it be stuck with a crappy idea, or b) take their complaint_back_to
the planning body and have them sort it out and make a new decision.
It doesn't matter how democratic this process is; it is still
extremely slow.

On the other hand, let's say there's an economy that takes advantage
of parallelism. Two groups of workers (for the sake of simplicity)
have two different ideas about how best to do something. Often, the
best way to find out which one is better is to test them, so they set
up two parallel production units. Let's set up two scenarios: In the
first, option A ends up sucking, but instead of going to the central
committee to complain, workers just "re-route" to option B. In the
second scenario, both option A and option B look to be both good
ideas, but some kind of terrible catastrophe happens at option A.
Workers, instead of waiting for a central committee to react, can
just "re-route" to option B.

So this type of economy operates in a very similar way to Massively
Parallel Processing in computers. Information is dealt with by
parallel units and if something goes wrong with one, information
is "re-routed" to the other(s).

Do we call this competition? I don't know. I call it parallelism.

But in short, in an advanced moneyless economy, workers will not have
to operate through a central unit to make economic decision, they
will make decisions based on local conditions and on the principle of
self-organization.


Moneyless economy is Moneyless
--------------------------------------------

Just to clarify, you used the word "buy" when describing Ben's
Moneyless Economy. Moneyless economy does not make use of buying,
selling, or exchange of any kind. It makes use of gift economy, where
goods and services are given away for free. This is also the final
stage of economy that has emerged over many, many decades of
transitional economy.


Where Central Planning Finds its Place
-------------------------------------------------

Central planning finds its place in the State-Capitalist and what you
might call "socialist" sectors of the economy. The purpose of central
planning will be to direct a largely capitalist economy (i.e. one
that makes use of commodity production) to benefit the working class
while they experiment with how to create a moneyless economy that
does_not_make use of commodity production.

I will have more to say in a couple of days,; for now, I must go.

-- Alex