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[Reelya]

*clip*

What you call "libertarian socialism" is certainly a worthy ideal, but I would rather get rid of the whole libertarian part.

I think you're conflating it with the modern American usage of "Libertarian" to mean rampant capitalists. But that usage only dates back to the mid 1950's, and only in the USA. Other political usages date back to 1789, and have no connection to the policies of the American Libertarian Party. "Libertarian" in connection with anarchism and grass-roots communist ideas goes back to the 1850s, 100 years before it became connected to capitalism. It also doesn't necessarily mean the same thing if you're in England or other English-speaking countries. A "Libertarian" party in UK or Australia would be more likely to be something like the ACLU, because in the rest of the English world we don't have American-style "Libertarians", at least not by that name. North Korea call themselves the Democratic Republic of Korea. This does not mean that North Korea is defining Democracy for everyone else any more than the USA's modern twist on Libertarianism redefines the word for everyone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-libertarianism#History

I'm imagining your view of what libertarian socialism means is vastly at odds with what 150 years of scholarship says it is, because you're conflating it with a modern political group who appropriated the label within living memory.

[scriver]

I'm a bit of a libertarian myself. I only feed of freedom.

[Helgoland]

"But Money is the real thing in our society! People and ordinary things are transient and illusory, but Money is objective and eternal – it is who you are, and what others are to you. Money is your real self, embrace it!"

I'm fairly certain nobody says that. The only people who say something like that are fetishists, and they reject our fiat currency.

As people keep saying over and over again, the feasible solution is the commune – not a planet-wide, digital marketplace of immaterial goods and services, but a closely knit physical community with enough resources and production capacity to manufacture everything its members could (reasonably) need. An organized, democratic state formed by such self-sufficient units would be an ideal society, in my opinion.

Ah, 'reasonably need' - 'reasonably' being the key phrase here. What's reasonable? Nobody needs an iPhone. Nobody needs a computer, either. You need very very little. I've once heard the idea that that was one of the reasons the DDR's economy failed: Its leaders, having lived most of their lives as dissidents, refugees, revolutionaries, couldn't imagine how anyone could really want more than the DDR had to offer. Spoiler alert: Their idea of 'reasonable' wasn't all too reasonable.
There's another, bigger problem with such an idea though, one which most utopias of this kind overlook: How are you going to manufacture anything with a long production chain, or anything needing resources that do not occur in your area? Take your computer, for example: It was manufactured from oil, rare earths, copper, iron, silicon, and some other stuff in an intricate process spanning the whole globe. I guess the people in your self-sufficient units would have to live without them, then... The same goes for cars, tools, medicine, hell, even bananas. Huh, I keep coming back to the DDR...

[SirQuiamus]

I think you're conflating it with the modern American usage of "Libertarian" to mean rampant capitalists.

I meant what I said. I'm just leery of such words as "anarchism," "decentralization," etc.

The communes should be largely self-governed and independent, but there has to be some kind of centralized system to assure that they don't start fighting each other.

There's another, bigger problem with such an idea though, one which most utopias of this kind overlook: How are you going to manufacture anything with a long production chain, or anything needing resources that do not occur in your area? Take your computer, for example: It was manufactured from oil, rare earths, copper, iron, silicon, and some other stuff in an intricate process spanning the whole globe. I guess the people in your self-sufficient units would have to live without them, then... The same goes for cars, tools, medicine, hell, even bananas. Huh, I keep coming back to the DDR...

It's an outright utopia, to be sure. Setting up an entire production chain, from raw resources to end-products, on a local level? Yes, that's pure science fiction at the moment, but so is every other brand of utopistic speculation.

...but what's speculation and what isn't? – it's all about ideology, really. The present capitalistic discourse determines what is possible and what is mere speculation, and as things stand, all attempts to end commodity fetishism are being declared impossible, without actually testing their feasibility.         

[Reelya]

Setting up an entire production chain, from raw resources to end-products, on a local level?

Who said that? Nobody ever suggested that idea. It is a dumb idea, and arguing against it is a pure straw man because it's not a concept, not a goal, and neither a necessary condition or outcome of decentralized socialist economy. It's about as relevant as saying a specialized shoe company will never take off because you can't eat shoes, hence capitalism will never work.

Marx's socialism was always about pointing out how workers actually already run all the existing systems of production, but they usually get much less remmuneration than a handful of rich "owners" who don't actually do anything to run things themselves. So it's all about changing the management of existing systems, recognizing that it's actually workers who built everything in the first place. Rich people have just been very good at ensuring that most of the productive labor in most countries never get a cut of owning anything. Like in India you work 18 hour days, 6 days a week for 40 years and you just own a pair of shoes and a TV or something. That guy built the system but his children don't get a cut of the profits.

~~~

"Decentralized" means decentralizing management and ownership of existing, well-understood production processes, not redefining those production processes or changing the fundamentals of how resource flow works. So, it proposes some new ideas on management, but the basics of industrial production aren't constrained in any specific way. In other words, Marx does not provide prescriptive ideas about how factories should make things, just about how managers should be selected and how the profits should be divided up.

There's a thing called "trade". In Marx's ideas communes are NOT local town councils. It's definitely not anything related to the idea of local self-sufficiency. Total economic self-sufficiency doesn't come up as a concept, and it doesn't naturally flow from the other ideas. local self-sufficiency harks back to feudalism, which socialists were definitely against.

Marx's idea of communes is a lot closer to worker-owned corporations, and the corporations in an area then come together to agree on higher-level goals and settle disputes. You're still going to be seeing specialization, flow of resources, competition and cooperation within such a system. Since a single commune will be effectively the smallest-grained unit of production, and autonomous, they will still be specialized in the production of a single thing, because that is what creates the most productivity. And just by natural law the most productive communes will grow, the unproductive ones will copy what the productive ones do or disappear. They will still be reliant on trade with other communes to provide all the things they need, and these communes don't have to be in the same region.

Many of the common criticisms against such a system can be shown to fallacious, and not based in any rational assessment of the scenario itself. For example since there is no central wage fixing in this scenario, the common argument that it would make people lazy because you get the same wage no matter what can be shown to be groundless. In fact, decentralized communism is more linear in it's relationship between productivity and profits than capitalism is (which tries to pay you a minimum wage regardless of how productive you are).

[SirQuiamus]

But is trade possible without property and the commodity-form, two practically inseparable concepts? The present discussion started with SG's common-sense remark of property being the root of all evil, and now we're trying to imagine a world completely free of property and immaterial commodities. It's hard to imagine, sadly.     

[Reelya]

SG's remark is in line with the literature. "Property" in the legal sense. It's a very strict and specific usage. It means a single person having eternal ownership of a piece of land. So, when someone says abolition of private property rights, they're refering to specific legal precedents and not the dictionary concept of "property".

It's not hard to imagine what property (land) rights would be like in a socialist system as described. A commune (local corporation) would have basically lease-holder rights to a piece of land or a factory. If they stop using that factory, then it would be pretty much up for grabs for someone else to use it. Compare that to now, where you get empty houses and factories for "tax purposes". Obviously there would be a different set of laws to cover this, and situations that arise. But it wouldn't be fundamentally unworkable or alien to how we do property-usage disputes already.

[Helgoland]

Setting up an entire production chain, from raw resources to end-products, on a local level?

Who said that? Nobody every suggested that idea. It is a dumb idea, and arguing against it is a pure straw man because it's not a concept, not a goal, and neither a necessary condition or outcome of decentralized socialist economy. It's about as relevant as saying a specialized shoe company will never take off because you can't eat shoes, hence capitalism will never work.

Liebelein, quit sptting venom at me (and SirQ, though that probably was unintentional), take a second to read the past few posts, and re-evaluate. Here, I'll help you out:

[...] An organized, democratic state formed by such self-sufficient units would be an ideal society, in my opinion.

[...] How are you going to manufacture anything with a long production chain, or anything needing resources that do not occur in your area?

An organized, democratic state formed by such self-sufficient units

self-sufficient units

So yes, he was indeed suggesting such an idea, no, it was not a strawman of mine, yes, it is a dumb idea (hough I'd choose another word, I guess) - that's what I was trying to show. Decentralized Socialist economy had nothing to do with my post.
And I do know what 'decentralized' means, thankyouverymuch. 'Trade' is also a concpt known to me, and furthermore I'd like to point out that Marx's opinion on these things changed a lot during his lifetime. The Marx of the Parisian Manuscripts (who I guess you're referencing here) has little to do with the Marx of Das Kapital.




However, I'd like to pick up on part of what you said in the rest of your post:

Since a single commune will be effectively the smallest-grained unit of production, and autonomous, they will still be specialized in the production of a single thing, because that is what creates the most productivity. And just by natural law the most productive communes will grow, the unproductive ones will copy what the productive ones do or disappear. They will still be reliant on trade with other communes to provide all the things they need, and these communes don't have to be in the same region.

Many of the common criticisms against such a system can be shown to fallacious, and not based in any rational assessment of the scenario itself. For example since there is no central wage fixing in this scenario, the common argument that it would make people lazy because you get the same wage no matter what can be shown to be groundless. In fact, decentralized communism is more linear in it's relationship between productivity and profits than capitalism is (which tries to pay you a minimum wage regardless of how productive you are).

You appear to do a fair bit of mixing your own ideas with those of Marx here - for example you appear to imply that the 'communes' will still be in competition with each other, that there will still be trade, implying capitalist or quasi-capitalist economic structures because there's still money or barter involved (this was ninja'd by SirQ), and that wages will still be tied to individual productivity. What happened to

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

?

Or am I misunderstanding you entirely and you were in fact not trying to explain Marx's economic vision?

[Reelya]

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The idea behind that historically was that super-abundance will mean many basic needs will be met, and thus not constrained. We already see this with food production in the West. The poorest people can eat more than is good for them. They should eat how much they need, not how much they can afford. So the concept is not that out there.

And we also have this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_each_according_to_his_contribution

To each according to his contribution is a principle of distribution considered to be one of the defining features of socialism. It refers to an arrangement whereby individual compensation is reflective of one's contribution to the social product (total output of the economy) in terms of effort, labor and productivity.

As for competition, since a commune based on a single existing productive enterprise will make a specific thing, it's clear that they will need to swap their excess production for the excess production of other communes. Thus, they will have to negotiate how many shoes are worth an apple or somesuch. Even if a single commune is set up to make everything, one man must be the shoemaker, another the apple farmer, and we're back to the point where we're deciding how many apples the shoemaker gets and how many shoes to distribute. Thus, trade is not a thing you can escape from. You're also going to see some people more productive at making shoes than other people, so some communes will inevitably end up with excess of something-or-other. They're going to want to maximize their labor-value by trading their commune's excess with other communes excess. Hence, you can't ever escape competition and inter-regional trade either. Maybe some communes will refuse to trade, but they will see lower total productivity than communes who work closely with others, hence competition again.

Basically concepts like trading resources at some level will always exist, and thus some concept of relative values must exist. And differences in productivity will always exist, leading to inevitable competition (between individual workers, groups and communes). So it's not really realistic to conceive of any system that somehow transcends these factors.

~~~

Remember, we're not discussing "what Marx said" here, we're discussing "would this idea work in practice". Therefore, it is entirely permissable to bring up logical consequences that arise from an arrangement, on both sides of the issue. The opposing side brings up logical consequences that are not written in Marx's book, and so do I. There is no contradition here.

[Helgoland]

But then you call ~150 years of Marxist economics bunk! Not that I necessarily disagree, but what you propose is very much non-Communist. I'd probably call it Market Socialism - then again, I probably wouldn't because that sounds contradictory

[Sheb]

The issue I see with such a decentralized vision is how do they deal with global or other large-scale issues such as global warming?

[Dutchling]

hope, optimism, and holding hands?

[Draxis]

Basically concepts like trading resources at some level will always exist, and thus some concept of relative values must exist. And differences in productivity will always exist, leading to inevitable competition (between individual workers, groups and communes). So it's not really realistic to conceive of any system that somehow transcends these factors.

Sure there is; why should economic activity be confined to trade between individual communes?  We've seen how well cooperative enterprise solves the problems of capitalism (reducing oppression a lot, but to remain competitive workplaces end up simply exploiting themselves to almost same degree or shutting down - an improvement, certainly, but not ideal.  Plus it weakens the main advantage of capitalism, massive production.)  Plus, as I understand the term 'commune', that'll just end up as a bunch of city-states or community-states in competition, with all the unpleasantness that entails.

That's a lot of why I prefer the workers' council model - that each workplace and maybe community is run as a cooperative, and elects certain members to tiered circles in cooperation with other organizations - higher-level coordinating groups, local consuming groups, resource-supplying groups, and so forth - and coordinate things.  Traditionally committees were used for that, but with the amazing information-processing abilities we have today they may not be needed in some cases now.  In any case, if it's peoples' job to keep trade going in an equitable way they'll probably do so, because what would be the benefit of, say, your own factory getting more than its share of material?  (That's why I'm skeptical on the idea of community councils, it'd be vital to have some institution to handle local issues but they could be in competition with each other for consumer goods and cause problems that way.)

If, say, a whole region had a shortage of something, they'd appeal it up until it reached a level where some constituent had surplus.  And if nobody does?  Well then the higher-level circles will be full of people getting told to find a way to get more of it.  The idea is to, since the global economy is integrated anyway, integrate it or at least a bloc of it in a rational way while still maintaining democracy and proportional control of issues by those who they effect.

The issue I see with such a decentralized vision is how do they deal with global or other large-scale issues such as global warming?

Any social will strong enough to force the liberal nationstate to do something about it can force local communes to, as well.  Probably more easily, because capital won't (within a commune, some may decide to go 'screw it, produce more to make us more competetive') be compelled to fight it.

[Reelya]

That's a lot of why I prefer the workers' council model - that each workplace and maybe community is run as a cooperative, and elects certain members to tiered circles in cooperation with other organizations - higher-level coordinating groups, local consuming groups, resource-supplying groups, and so forth - and coordinate things. 

How's that any different to what I proposed? "Commune" is just a word after all. And I made the context clear - autonomous workplaces which elect representatives to local and regional councils which coordinate things. I already made all these points in prior posts.

It's really hard to see how my version will collapse into horrible city states just because I used the word "commune" whereas yours wont because you used the word "cooperative". How we described the functioning is almost identical.

Commune in 19th century political discourse does not mean the same thing as the "hippie commune" sense of everyone living in one big mess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commune_%28socialism%29

[Draxis]

How's that any different to what I proposed?

It looks like your proposal is be a bunch of competing, individually-run market entities that are worker-run, whereas I'm proposing a single one the size of the entire economic bloc (ideally the whole world, but that's even less likely).