Hello comrades,

I'm trying to understand how a moneyless economy would allocate resources optimally. Here is a silly example to illustrate the specific problem I don't understand.

Let's say that the only vacuum cleaners currently available are corded. A vacuum cleaner company democratically decides to design a cordless stick vacuum cleaner for greater comfort. Consumers are attracted and are starting to choose it over traditional corded vacuum cleaners (for free). Noticing the success of its product, the company produces more of it. Since cordless vacuum cleaners require a lithium battery, more lithium must be extracted from the earth. As we know, lithium is a finite and rare resource. This means a larger portion of the total lithium available is allocated to cordless vacuum cleaners.

The problem is that cordless vacuum cleaners are just a convenience option. People can still clean their homes with traditional battery-less corded vacuum cleaners. But some products strictly require a battery, like electric cars for example (I know hydrogen can be used too but that's just for the sake of the example). To wisely choose the best lithium allocation, we should therefore consider not only the material needs of society (electric cars), but also the adjustable preferences of individuals (cordless vacuum cleaners). We can calculate the total amount of lithium in kilograms needed to produce the electric car batteries we need, but we can't really compare it with the "desirability" of cordless vacuum cleaners. We could say: just reserve the lithium that's strictly required, and use the surplus for convenience enhancements, but we can't predict the total amount we will strictly need ahead of time.

Under capitalism, the rarefaction of lithium is supposed to increase the price of the final product. At some point, consumers will find cordless vacuum cleaners too expensive, stop buying them, and return to traditional corded vacuum cleaners. How would this work in communism without prices? What would stop consumers from grabbing cordless vacuum cleaners until the earth's lithium runs out, when it could have been put to much better use in electric car batteries? And how do we decide when to stop lithium extraction altogether to stop destroying the environment?

I'm not saying that communism doesn't work or capitalism is more efficient, I'm just trying to understand. Some argue that the internal planning systems used in today's large companies could be reused, but I think they are optimized to maximize a single goal, profit, based on prices, so I don't understand how it could work without them.

Of course my example is stupid. There are probably much better uses for lithium than electric cars and cordless vacuum cleaners, and we should probably use as little as possible of finite resources. Nonetheless, the problem already appears in a simplistic economic model with only 2 products. How would it be solved with longer and more complex supply chains, with multiple vacuum cleaner manufacturers, multiple lithium suppliers, where manufacturers would not know the proportion of lithium they consume and lithium extractors would not know the final allocation of lithium in consumer products?

How would it work in centralized vs decentralized economies?

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[–] [S] 5 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Thank you sincerely for your kind understanding, and helping me seeing beyond my bias.

I completely agree with you. I have no doubt that communities will be able to allocate resources to meet their needs. My question was more about how to decide the allocation trade-off between strict requirements, such as housing, food, health care, etc., and comfort or convenience goods, such as premium food, premium bedding, dishwasher, high-end tech devices, beauty products, etc. We could meet all our basic needs with minimal resources, but how will we choose the level of comfort we allow ourselves when it depends on limited resources and could reduce the ability to meet our basic needs in the future?

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

    I completely agree with you. I have no doubt that communities will be able to allocate resources to meet their needs. My question was more about how to decide the allocation trade-off between strict requirements, such as housing, food, health care, etc., and comfort or convenience goods, such as premium food, premium bedding, dishwasher, high-end tech devices, beauty products, etc. We could meet all our basic needs with minimal resources, but how will we choose the level of comfort we allow ourselves when it depends on limited resources and could reduce the ability to meet our basic needs in the future?

    I think this will depend on planning, political disputes, engineering, creativity etc. Like I said, I don't expect a communist society to be a conflictless society. People will make demands, demands will be brought by delegates to higher committees. They will discuss the demands and enact plans based on that. If the demand is not heard, you can expect protests, negotiations, strikes etc, until the demand is settled or until a middle term is achieved. I think in a higher stage of communism, the production will be more decentralized and some solutions will take place according to local characteristics. Without a pressure to sell commodities in an international market to acquire foreign currency, I do think technology and production will also reflect that trend.

    But let's also remind ourselves, this is only idealistic speculation. We need to have a foot in the utopia, but also on the present conditions. Breaking the current financial system and making another one which is democratic (controlled by the worker population, either in a state-owned format or in a credit union format) is essential to making planning possible, and we need this if we want to fight neoliberalism. Our immediate task is to dismantle the neo-liberal financial system, which is at the heart of the imperial core.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

    I understand, thank you.

    Our immediate task is to dismantle the neo-liberal financial system

    Why do you think we don't need a more precise idea of ​​the society we want to build first? Without prior mass consensus on the model to be implemented, how can we ensure that it will not end up with a system as bad or worse than the current one?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    Why do you think we don’t need a more precise idea of ​​the society we want to build first? Without prior mass consensus on the model to be implemented, how can we ensure that it will not end up with a system as bad or worse than the current one?

    this a pretty deep point of contention that marxism has with a lot of the western left, for probably a whole litany of reasons. the two most essential i can think of right now are:

    • the more expertise anyone (or any human organization) has on a topic, the more knowledge you have regarding how to actually acquire expertise. by contrast, the less expertise you have on a topic, the less you know about how to acquire expertise. this is why teachers are so invaluable, but there is no fully-formed communist society to learn from and so we can assume that we know very little (relative to communists hundreds of years from now) regarding what communism will literally look like. imagine a beginner artist trying to comprehend the practices and technique of a master artist before making concrete steps towards improving and becoming a master artist themselves: it would be a fool's errand.

    • the farther things are in the future, the less certain you can be about specific claims or goals. if we are to take the rest of history as a guide, then communism will take hundreds and hundreds of years to successfully develop (possibly more, since resolving all class contradictions just hasn't been done before, so who knows how long it will actually take). even completely ignoring all technological advancement, i don't think anyone from 1000 years ago could have possibly envisioned the basic social relations (wage labor, but also things like globalization) that make up present society.

    with those things in mind, the correct approach is then to take specific, concrete steps in the present to move towards general goals in the future. those general goals should be as specific as possible, though, and this is why marxism focuses so heavily on the resolution of the primary internal contradictions of society, i.e. class, as opposed to the overly general goal of "making society more fair" or other such things that are too susceptible to existing class biases. furthermore, it's important to have quantitative (and therefore objectively measurable) measures of success to ensure that progress is actually moving in the correct direction.

    as far as the political necessity of models in the present, i don't think there needs to be "prior mass consensus on the model to be implemented" in order to qualitatively change society for the better. the masses are not stupid, but they are largely uneducated as well. most people simply care about their quality of life and whether or not it is improving in the short-term, and there's nothing wrong with that. it just so happens that the best models for long-term social success also provide the best models for how to improve people's quality of life in the short-term, too, so long as they can actually be applied. this will become more and more relevant as conditions in the imperial core get worse and worse.

    that's not to say that the question is meaningless or not worth thinking about: i sometimes daydream about what non-patriarchal familial relations will be like and things of the sort. it's just that i recognize it as daydreaming and don't really give it much importance in terms of what should be done now.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    communism will take hundreds and hundreds of years to successfully develop

    This depresses me. We need communism now.

    I agree with you. We can't get it perfect ahead of time, it will most likely be an iterative process of improvement. But if we suddenly dismantle the current system now, my fear is that without broad consensus, however vague, society will divide. People might have concerns, uncertainties, or misunderstandings about the new system that we could have addressed earlier, which could prevent them from cooperating and leave us vulnerable to a counter-offensive or takeovers. This is even more of a major problem if the first country to do so is under significant pressure from other governments.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    No single revolution that happened before had broad consensus. If you need the whole society to become Marxist and reach a consensus of what communism should be like before a revolution, then communism will be unachievable. There wasn't even consensus on capitalism itself before it came to be, capitalism itself taking multiple forms throughout history and still developing to newer forms today. We can have a vague idea of what communism would look like, but never a whole model.

    This is why we stress so much in understanding the current historical main contradictions and think on ways to progress through them. For example, we can't simply abolish money on day one without having a proper system in place to distribute goods, and for having a good system in place we need to implement a simple form, test it, re-assess it, re-implement it, over and over again. The dialectical process is iterative and requires both theoretical analysis and experimentation.

    A practical example, it took years for the Communist party of Russia to transition from the NEP to the central planning under GOSPLAN. Before the NEP we had a set of rationing and requisition policies (known as war communism) which were extremely inefficient and was providing poor output for the Russian economy as a whole. So we had progression from war communism to NEP, and from NEP to 5 year plans centered around GOSPLAN.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    I agree with you, but I still have 2 concerns:

    • If we don't immediately distribute the power after obtaining it, there might be a risk of hijacking
    • If we don't provide a clear enough vision to the masses, could we really convince public opinion to destroy the current system and jump into "the unknown"?
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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)
    • There has always been a vanguard in every revolutionary process. The Jacobins in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks in the USSR, even the CNT in anarchist Spain (even though they deny similarities with the MLs), the Viet Minh in Vietnam, the guerrilla in Cuba. The purpose of the vanguard is to smash the resistance to the revolution and lead the other revolutionary forces. However it's simply false to say that this vanguard has no wide popular support, because without it, it would be impossible for a small group within society to take power from the establishment.

    • We provide a vision, based on principles, in common ideals. What we can't do is to establish all concrete rules of the new society beforehand, this is simply unattainable.

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