Hi Alex,

> Re: Marx on labour-time as socialism

> This is an interesting discussion... I have a question
> about "gift economy" that has been bothering me for a
> while:

I can say a few words here but this is a big topic and I may not
be able to address all of your concerns. But, like any important
question, we can begin with the first steps:

(1) a clear statement of the issue we want to better understand
and
(2) some initial thoughts and maybe a short list of some issues
that may be related

> While I agree that gift economy will probably have to be
> decentralized and make use of parallelism (because what
> happens when people have conflicting ideas about how to
> produce a good?), how is the economy still run like "one
> big factory?"

I don't think the phrase "one big factory" is a very good
description of how a national economy, as a whole, will be run
when the working class runs society.

I don't know if this phrase is by Marx or Engels or Lenin, or the
context--but I don't want to take the time right now to google it
and find the source passage.

Anytime someone makes an effort to summarize something complex in
a few words--it is useful to keep in mind that those few words
are likely, at best, to be an approximation.

And sometimes a few words (depending on context) can be
misleading.

For example, Lenin at one point said that "state power plus
electrification equals communism". But what did that mean and
why then did Lenin say it? I think what Lenin _meant_ was that
if the embryonic workers' state that then existed in Soviet
Russia could maintain power (and avoid being forcibly overthrown
and avoid internal degeneration) long enough for the plan to
bring electrical power to the countryside to be completed--that
the embryonic workers' state would be secure--and that it would
be able to develop and become a mature workers' state--and the
remaining obstacles to the road to communism would not be so
difficult.

The context was that the peasantry (and many workers) were very
dissatisified with the embryonic workers state. The core reason
for the dissatisfaction was the shattered economy. Peasants had
to give up most of their grain and got little or nothing in
return for it--because the Soviet government had little or
nothing to give the peasants in exchange for their grain.

Bringing electricity to the countryside was part of a plan for
economic development that would have given important things to
the peasantry. This would have represented material progress to
the peasants and greatly reduced their dissatisfaction. This was
of decisive importance--because as long as many millions of
peasants wanted to get rid of Soviet power--the Soviet government
would be forced (in order to prevent its overthrow and a
restoration of bourgeois-landloard rule) to restrict the
expression of independent politics and suppress fundamental
democratic rights. And once democratic rights could be
restored--then political forces could be unleashed that could
have prevented the degeneration of the embryonic workers' state.

Of course this is not what happened. By the time electrification
was completed state power had been lost: the ruling party had
degenerated--had been captured by a new bourgeois class.

The phrase "state power plus electrification equals communism"
was an agitational slogan which attempted to summarize this
complex situation into six words that could be popularized.

And anytime a complicated situation in summarized in a few
words--those words are likely to be misunderstood--especially
years later when the context of those words is less clear.

I should add that there are exceptions to this--where a few words
can provide extraordinary clarity. My article on the
self-organizing moneyless gift economy was based on the twelve
word quotation from Marx: "from each according to his ability, to
each according to his need".

In any event, the description of the economy as running like one
big factory could be misleading in many ways. Understood
correctly--it might mean that goods and services are created and
distributed to the right places with little loss or wastage and
with the right things going to the right places at the right
time. These are characteristics of a factory.

On the other hand there is the religious tendency to fetishize
certain words. Those cargo-cultists who make a fetish out of key
phrases may use the phrase "one big factory" to imply that there
is a single plan that runs the entire economy.

We should also note that the Soviet economy in Lenin's time was
considerably simpler that modern economies in the developed
world.

> The problem with Massively Parallel Processing is that
> there's pretty much no communication between the various
> processors in the current schemes. I don't think that a
> parallelistic economy would work if there wasn't some
> sort of coordination, or if the economy wasn't run
> collectively.

Clearly, coordination and collectivity would be necessary.

But this does not mean that this coordination or collectivity
requires a single point of control.

Most of the world uses the metric system. However Boeing
manufactures most of its products using inches. This has worked
(so far) for Boeing.

This illustrates that there may be room for producing units that
do things a different way.

In an future workers' economy without a single point of control
there are likely to be large plans covering major portions of the
economy. These plans would be developed by a collective process.
Independent producing units that strongly disagreed with these
plans would probably simply opt-out of these plans--and subscribe
to (or develop) alternate plans in order to remain useful to
society and to demonstrate that plans based on different
principles may be better.

> While I oppose_central_planning as a goal for various
> reasons, I don't oppose planning in general, as not all
> planning has to be definitely central. When you have to
> ask a planning body for permission to move, then you have
> centralism and I don't think that's ideal.

Agreed.

> But planning as a means of coordinating the economy, if
> it is not micromanagement, and if it does not impede the
> workers' ability to self-organize, is necessary in my
> view, or else the economy looks nothing like "one big
> factory."

Yes, we will need planning.

I think the economy _would_ look like one big factory in the
sense of the right goods and services being created at the right
time and delivered to the right places. And the economy _would
not_ look like one big factory in the sense of being under a
single point of control with all producing units required to make
music under the direction of a single conductor.

> I think it's fairly easy for the economy to be completely
> disorganized and terrible without some sort of
> coordination. I think you hint at this in S.O.M.E. by
> saying that there may be groups that would have authority,
> but it wouldn't be formal authority given to them by some
> central body. But perhaps you could clarify this topic a
> bit.

I am not sure how much I can clarify this. We could consider
some scenario where there are many producing units within an
industry that are unhappy with the overall planning in that
industry and team up to develop their own planning. But making
such a scenario concrete enough to provide clarity might take
time and it might take observations from the dynamics of various
sectors under capitalism. I have a little bit of knowledge of
the development of the software industry. In the software sector
there are competing standards of many sorts: which operating
system do you want to use? Which browser? Which programming
language? Which database software? The different standards
often exist beyond the scale of a single company. Sometimes the
standards are driven by a single company (such as Microsoft)
while othertimes a single company can join a standard and
influence the standard without controlling it (ie: such ans IBM
with Linux).

That's all I have time to say this morning. I promised myself
that I would get out and exercize.

all the best,
Ben