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And that was only possible becuase he was working in a context of little change, as I pointed out before. It would be ludicrous to accept any prescription of how to organise things from someone who couldn't possibly have, for example, imagined the internet. I'm not saying "just trust me". I'm saying "its within our capacity to resolve". And as I've already pointed out, although there are no prescriptions, we can look at historical examples for good ideas. Almost everything I'm discussing is absed on those examples. Your objection here is that I'm failing to lead you by the hand and actually treating you like an adult.

Well there's a good reason for the legal principle of favouring the status quo by default. For all I know you could just be making this up as you go along. You wouldn't expect me to put my capital into a company without seeing a detailed business plan, so why do you expect me to abandon a social system that's served me well purely on your say-so.

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Class hate much?

I thought that there wouldn't be any classes after the revolution?

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Except of course, it's YOUR PRODUCTION you control. If you don't produce anything, you don't control anything. See? That wasn't hard to figure out, was it? Now you try.

So how come everyone in the workers' collective gets paid the same?

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Well yes, except (sigh) that you do so with all of your production, not only a slice of it. Again with the presumption that if its not batshit insane is not different, while turning a blind eye to all the actual differences I've pointed out.

What happens to disabled guys who can't work?

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No I want you to stop imagining problems that you seem to think are implied. You could do me and everyone else who's ever advanced this argument the favour of not assuming we're total fucking idiots, and that if something looks obviously absurd to you, that might - MIGHT - just be becuase its a point you didn't quite get, or something we havn't touched on yet, or something that can be understood through further calm explanation, rather than pointing the finger and going "haha I've caught you out".

It's better that I do it now than that the whole of society does it when you're actually trying to apply your system.

No indeed. The cops and the law courts will do it for you.

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Well we've never been Anarchists, have we? We're Democratic Centralists. And even in the unlikely event all that happened, for the sake of argument, what would be different is that you'd be controlling your own production. Which, you may recall, was the whole point. Plus, you're slightly mistaken. Anarchists aren't disorganised. But again, that's certainly too fine a point to discuss at this juncture.

Anarchists are decentralised. A system involving branches of government won't work in a small scale community.

But anyway, is this thing going to be pure democracy or liberal democracy?

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That is precisely what I am attempting to do.

Well okay, how about stopping with the multiquote business and accusing me of nitpicking and provide one single, long description that will answer all questions?

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Well no, it is not saying that at all, and if you're going to take that stance than you're rejecting all attempts at social criticism, at even comprehending our own society. Here's a nice, hopefully not-too-excitable example: an article that points out that everyone plays Monopoly wrong. It's certainly true in my experience. They discuss the specific error being made, and speculate as to why this error gets made. Now you can, if you like, interpret this as them saying that everyone is stupid except for them. I can't stop you from adopting such a ridiculous and histrionic position. Or, you could behave like someone who isn't afraid of new ways of looking at things, who's willing to entertain the possibility that things are not what they immediately appear at the surface, and someone who thinks that turning a critical eye on our own behaviour is a useful exercise. That's your choice. But if you're going to take the position that these people are saying that everyone who plays mopoloy is stupid, and they are special becuase they've figured this out, well then, I'm going to regard as a complete fanatic who resents even the suggestion that your knoweldge isn't perfect and that you might occasionaly need to question your own assumptions.

[/QUOTE]

Monopoly has a limited number of strategies available, strict rules and one successful outcome. Real life has none of those things. Most importantly each player has a different idea of what constitutes success. In monopoly you can judge the players' intelligence by how well they achieve the shared objective. In real life you can't do that.

__________________
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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

Why is it inescapable? Last time I checked, shocks to the supply were perfectly possible and did happen...

Because the basic dynamic is to produce in large quantities and compete on price. I didn't say that nothing, ever, could be in shortage. I'm pointing out that the overall way it works is overproduction.

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How does that even make sense? First of all, as the armies of poor people around the world show, we are not even satisfying everyone's basic needs [i.e. they do not have enough money to buy the stuff they'd like to buy].

No, wrong. We are not satisfying everyones needs not because we cannot, but because they don't have the money. I posted an article a little while ago about a single cargo ship from china docking witha t-shirt for every person in the country.

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And that's still true even in the West. Give me more money and I'll find ways to spend it, no worries. So would 99.9% of the pop. I mean, I agree that the top 0.1% would probably not spend much on any given extra cash. There's only so many yatchs even Abramovich can possibly want...

I';m sure you will, but I wasn;t talking about what you would od or could do. What I'm talking about is that we physically produce far more stuff than we can absorb. And then we throw the rest away, write them of as unsuild stock, etc.

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Which would require knowing what was into people's subconscious. Messy.

Well no it wouldn't. Becuase based on the above, we know that people are slling D&G t-shiorts versus CK T-shirts not because people need T-shirts, but precisely becuase they don't. If you didn't create a need other than utility, the market would already be saturated. Consumerism is the systematic solution.

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You guys must really hate the late 30s & 50-70s or the Swedish model right now where things are clearly capitalist and yet workers were/are happy...

Nope. We just expect them to get eaten by less generous competetitors, or in the case of periods, to be replaced by greater exploitation.

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See my example between Sculley and Jobs. Paying them both the same or even paying Jobs twice as much as Sculley is simply ridiculously underpricing Jobs. Sculley nearly destroyed Apple, Jobs gave it back its life.

Shrug. He's just a guy, pulls his pants on one leg at a time. I have no doubt that there are hundreds or thousands of people more productive than Jobs within Apple's workforce.

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Less extreme or "hero-worshiping" - What about comparing Picasso and my own paintings? I mean, we both spent 10 hours on a piece. Or Picasso, because he's more experienced, spent only 5 and I, 10. Does it mean that he should be paid the same/only twice as much? I suspect he wouldn't be happy...

Yes. After all we can print millions of copies any time we want.

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The only way that would work is if, in your system, demand would automatically and non-coercibly adjusted to the amount of labour time embedded into a product. i.e. people never desired nor wanted to pay more than a stricto sensu labour value for any given product.

So you're saying that the problem with my argment is that people might want to pay more than something is worth? I think you need to think that one through. I;'ve never seen anyone standing at the supermarket counter saying, "you know, I REALLY REALLY want this, let me pay you more".

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Achieving that without rewiring the brain to exclude all ideas of pleasure and aesthetics and tastes and choices is going to be tough.

Nothing of the sort is required.

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Scientists usually produce something. Students don't.

No they don't. What does a radio astronomer produce? Nothing you can sell on an open market. What they are doing is still studying.

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A lot of it is.

Well lets fix that.

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I doubt many floor cleaner will ever see their jobs as an exercise in self expression or 'art', no matter how much they get paid for it. Note that it's not impossible. Floor cleaning CAN be made into a flow experience [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) ] but then again so can nearly anything and it's almost entirely a matter of perception, not of being paid more.

I'm willing to accept Flow, on a shallow reading. Basically, anyone take priode in their work. I know people who were forced, for example, to polish their barracks floor with the apocraphyl toothbrush. They took great pride in the result, and were outraged when others spoiled their effect. Any work, no matter how seemingly trivial, can indeed be a source of pride and self-expression - because if you hadn't done it, it wouldn't be done, and you can always compare how well you did it against others.

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Well, yes, I meant and people usually mean "financial" risk when they talk about investments and wages.

Yes, exactly. Thats precisely the way that class rule expresses itself.

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Physical risks, such as working conditions and accidents and the like are seen as operational risks.

In other words, "irrelevant to the likes of us". They are things that happens to peasants, not to Real People.

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They're covered by the relevant legislation and an obvious point of debate for unions. But they're not exactly relevant to a discussion of the profit-wages split...

They are absolutely, directly relevant. The whole doctrine that risk deserves reward originates in the military aristocracy.

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Just going with past experiences, like you. Also, I still don't think you've answered Zichao's objection about "clocking in/out and collecting" satisfactorily. You say "You don't work, you don't eat". Fine. How's that working for your paid students? How do you even know in a somewhat sizeable and complex organisation/team who does what and who deserves what...

The students are working by learning, unless they're sitting around smoking dope or something. These are easy problems to solve. And as to how we know, every organisation already monitors the activity and productivity of every worker. Additionally, one of the ways you know is by rotating roles, so that everyone has experience in whatever jobs others are doing.

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Again, this was a real problem in the USSR. There are plenty of lazy people who do need the threat of starvation to actually work.

But I don't care. Let them not work, or work as little as they wish, and spend the rest of the day sitting on the beach. It doesn't matter to me. I call that freedom.

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In your world, I suspect there'd be a lack of floor cleaner and garbage collector and rather an over-abundance of people wanting to be computer game testers and movie porn directors...

If people sought out whatever work would make them happy, it would make me happy too. Of course, just as today, just becuase they want to do a thing doesn't always mean they can - they have, in your terms, to find someone to sell it to - that is, it has to be socially necessary labour. Otherwise it's just a hobby.

Originally Posted by Zichao

Well there's a good reason for the legal principle of favouring the status quo by default. For all I know you could just be making this up as you go along. You wouldn't expect me to put my capital into a company without seeing a detailed business plan, so why do you expect me to abandon a social system that's served me well purely on your say-so.

I don't. I expect you to realise that the current system is killing you.

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I thought that there wouldn't be any classes after the revolution?

Indeed.

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So how come everyone in the workers' collective gets paid the same?

I didn't say they did. I gave you a very crude approximation of what we were talking about, seeing as you affect to not being able to see the difference between controlling your own production and being paid according to your replacement cost.

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What happens to disabled guys who can't work?

We feed them. We are after all the most productive society that has ever existed, we can affford to.

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It's better that I do it now than that the whole of society does it when you're actually trying to apply your system.

Well no it's not, becuase it's not an honest attempt to understand.

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Anarchists are decentralised. A system involving branches of government won't work in a small scale community.

How would you know what anarchists are any better than you know what communists are? Decentralised doesn't mean disorganised.

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But anyway, is this thing going to be pure democracy or liberal democracy?

I don't think either term is directly applicable to the system of soviets. Which shouldn;t be surprising, because we're necessarily not in Kansas any more.

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Well okay, how about stopping with the multiquote business and accusing me of nitpicking and provide one single, long description that will answer all questions?

Well how about I grow wings and fly to the moon?

What will happen, as has happened every time I've tried to do that in the past, is that in trying to provide a comprehensible overview there will be details that I must necessarily compress, ignore, and leave out. And if I were confident that the response that these would get would be along the lines of "could you expand on this detail" rather than "Ha! That proves you're going to send us all to the gulags!" I might be willing to try it again. As above, what that requires is honest curiosity from the audience I'm writing for, a genuine intention to try to understand rather than a mischievous and malicious attempt to trip me up with apparent inconsitencies.

I mean nobody can explain anything under those circumstances. If I tried to give a recipe for baking bread and someone said "Ha! You haven't explained where the flour comes from! You're lying to us!" then nobody is going to get anywhere.

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Monopoly has a limited number of strategies available, strict rules and one successful outcome. Real life has none of those things. Most importantly each player has a different idea of what constitutes success. In monopoly you can judge the players' intelligence by how well they achieve the shared objective. In real life you can't do that.

I presume you missed the point deliberately?

Originally Posted by contracycle

Because the basic dynamic is to produce in large quantities and compete on price.

Clearly, you haven't followed recent evolutions in production thinking? Product differentiation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I can assure you that the iPad does NOT compete on price...

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We are not satisfying everyones needs not because we cannot, but because they don't have the money.

Which is exactly what I said in the parenthesis.

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What I'm talking about is that we physically produce far more stuff than we can absorb.

And, as I said, I am not sure that's true. But I agree that we are producing more than what people can actually buy as of now. My solution is to increase how much people are paid so that they can actually buy more stuff...

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Because based on the above, we know that people are slling D&G t-shirts versus CK T-shirts not because people need T-shirts, but precisely becuase they don't.

Huh?

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Nope. We just expect them to get eaten by less generous competitors...

A problem perfectly solveable through the miracle of legislation...

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Shrug. He's just a guy, pulls his pants on one leg at a time. I have no doubt that there are hundreds or thousands of people more productive than Jobs within Apple's workforce.

What the hell productive even mean for you? That someone pull his pants one leg at a time faster than Jobs? Sure. How many fucking Apple employees did we see saving Apple? None. Again, it's a rare case, actually, but here Jobs really did make a difference when he decided to turn Apple away from its PC roots and into consumer electronics.

Look at it this way: Nokia, Sony Ericsson totally missed the smartphone revolution. And the tablet one too. They are still producing most mobile phones in the world, though. But their margins are getting tight.

"Apple may sell 20 percent of the world's cell phones, but it pockets 66.3 percent of the world's cell phones profits".



So, erm, when are we going to see those 100s and 1,000s of Nokia employees who are more productive than Jobs actually remove their thumbs from their asses and then do something about it?

I mean, surely, Apple hasn't actually captured all the people more productive than Steve Jobs? Surely?

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Yes. After all we can print millions of copies any time we want.

Please. So now you're saying that the copies are worth as much as the original? I mean, look, if you can convince people, why not? But, imho, you're not going to be able to do that without atrociously painful dictatorship that will make 1984 looks like freedom... Or genetic re-engineering.

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So you're saying that the problem with my argment is that people might want to pay more than something is worth?

What does that mean, "worth"?

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I think you need to think that one through. I've never seen anyone standing at the supermarket counter saying, "you know, I REALLY REALLY want this, let me pay you more".

Really? I think you need to think that one through. How many times do you see people going for more expensive (per calorie) meat instead of vegetables/legumes? How many times do you see people buying an Apple product rather than a cheaper product from the competition?

Ever seen a bloody auction?

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Well lets fix that.

How?

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Any work, no matter how seemingly trivial, can indeed be a source of pride and self-expression - because if you hadn't done it, it wouldn't be done, and you can always compare how well you did it against others.

Basically. And that doesn't require getting paid more. Nor would people who don't enjoy their particular task would change their outlook if they were paid more...

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In other words, "irrelevant to the likes of us". They are things that happens to peasants, not to Real People.

Class hatred, much? Operational risk management is actually a growing 'science' and lots and lots of money are invested into better systems to manage it. Coz, look, when it fucks up, some traders can loose you $2bn on some dodgy ETF trades...

And how much legislation is actually in place to define the rules and safety in the workplace? I am not going to trawl the EU websites for even a guesstimates but my impression would be that entire forests were destroyed to print even a tiny part of it. We're not exactly lacking in regulations.

But the discussion was at the level of profit sharing & tendencies % macro-systems, not down to Earth.

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The whole doctrine that risk deserves reward originates in the military aristocracy.

I thought that was just obvious logic given Humanity wiring and incentives?

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The students are working by learning, unless they're sitting around smoking dope or something.

Which, you know, most tend to do... Without even an output, except, maybe, exams results, you will have a whole bunch of people studying endlessly and passing exams... just. And smoking pot the rest of the time.

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And as to how we know, every organisation already monitors the activity and productivity of every worker.

Tell them. Promotions and rewards within team-based activities is a classic management nightmare.

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Additionally, one of the ways you know is by rotating roles, so that everyone has experience in whatever jobs others are doing.

Actually, the more advanced thinking on this is that rewarding people based on results can be somewhat off. Sometimes, things don't work out just because of randomness. The idea is that people should be rewarded on thinking rightly and taking the right steps, regardless of the results.

As to rotating roles, it sounds great in theory and, in practice, it'd be a disaster. There's a reason Adam Smith saw specialisation as the reason capitalistic firms was overtaking individual artisans...

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But I don't care. Let them not work, or work as little as they wish, and spend the rest of the day sitting on the beach. It doesn't matter to me. I call that freedom.

Yep. Unless you got to subsidise them. Remember, we are all paid roughly the same, as long as we clock in and clock out...

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Of course, just as today, just becuase they want to do a thing doesn't always mean they can - they have, in your terms, to find someone to sell it to - that is, it has to be socially necessary labour. Otherwise it's just a hobby.

Right. So work would remain mostly boring and intrinsically "alienating" - to use your own words.

__________________
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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

Clearly, you haven't followed recent evolutions in production thinking? Product differentiation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From 1933? I don't see anything novel here.

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I can assure you that the iPad does NOT compete on price...

Not YET, no. and there will alwyas be products that don't. That's not a good enough challenge though; prestige products do not and cannot make up the bulk of the economy.

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Which is exactly what I said in the parenthesis.

Yes I know. But thats a very different case to not being able to produce enough stuff. The point remains that every other system suffered from under-production, while capitalism suffers from overproduction, and therefore, "underconsumption".

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And, as I said, I am not sure that's true. But I agree that we are producing more than what people can actually buy as of now. My solution is to increase how much people are paid so that they can actually buy more stuff...

Which is impossible. If there are say a million units of cola drunk perr week in a given market, then CocaCola and Pepsi are each going to produce quantitites that increase toward a million units, so they can sell them at the most competitve price. Which means that production will ALWAYS outstrip consumption, no matter how much money consumers have.

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Huh?

What are you confused by?

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A problem perfectly solveable through the miracle of legislation...

... for exactly as long as you can stop your politicians being bought. How's that working out?

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What the hell productive even mean for you? That someone pull his pants one leg at a time faster than Jobs?

It means doing stuff that needed doing and which otherwise wouldn;t have been done.

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Sure. How many fucking Apple employees did we see saving Apple? None.

Every single worker who turns up every day.

See, this is the hero thing again. Capitalism concentrates power, and then takes personal credit for what that power achieves. Even though it was actually the work the masses.

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Again, it's a rare case, actually, but here Jobs really did make a difference when he decided to turn Apple away from its PC roots and into consumer electronics.

I'm sure thats true. Just like its true that a pilot has the fate of hundreds of people in his hands. But that doesn't mean that the pilot is more worthy than his passengers, it is just the consequence of the control system.

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So, erm, when are we going to see those 100s and 1,000s of Nokia employees who are more productive than Jobs actually remove their thumbs from their asses and then do something about it?

How about: as soon as we give them sufficient control that they are actually in a position to make decisions. But at the moment, all they can do is what their bosses tell them to do.

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I mean, surely, Apple hasn't actually captured all the people more productive than Steve Jobs? Surely?

Of course not. There are far too many. But under capitalism, being smart and productive is unimportant. Only haveing control of capital is important.

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Please. So now you're saying that the copies are worth as much as the original? I mean, look, if you can convince people, why not? But, imho, you're not going to be able to do that without atrociously painful dictatorship that will make 1984 looks like freedom... Or genetic re-engineering.

Lol. How big is the market in art prints? Pretty damn large.

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What does that mean, "worth"?

In my context or yours?

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Really? I think you need to think that one through. How many times do you see people going for more expensive (per calorie) meat instead of vegetables/legumes? How many times do you see people buying an Apple product rather than a cheaper product from the competition?

Often! But thats not becuase they WANT to pay more. If it were on sale at the lower price, they would have been happy to buy it at that lower price.

See? When you said that people "want" to pay more, you were really describing the situaiton wewre people were compelled to pay more. You deduce that the fact that they "wanted" to do this becuase they actually did it. But that isn't what they wanted at all, what they wanted was the goods.

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Ever seen a bloody auction?

Yup. and I certainly have never seen one wwhere anyone bid against themselves. The whole point of the auction is to raise the price beyond all but one buyers ability to pay. that's not eveidence of people "wanting top pay more".

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How?

By making "the activity we perfoirm in our own support" into something affirming, positive, and even creative. To repeat an argument I've made before, hunting is fun. It;s also clearly work becuase it is one way in which we can support ourselves. Yet we also do it it as a leisure activity. It;'s clearly untruer that supporting ourselves is automatically unfun. What is unfun is having no control, and not profiting from our work.

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Basically. And that doesn't require getting paid more. Nor would people who don't enjoy their particular task would change their outlook if they were paid more...

Not inherently, no. BUT! working for someone elses profit sucks. Why should you take pride in your work when nobody will congratulate you, but instead your boss? Why should an employee of Apple strive to be great, when it's going to be Steve Jobs who swoops in to snatch the glory?

How different it would be if we were all working for oursleves, in our interests, as a demonstration of our contribution to humanity?

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Class hatred, much? Operational risk management is actually a growing 'science' and lots and lots of money are invested into better systems to manage it. Coz, look, when it fucks up, some traders can loose you $2bn on some dodgy ETF trades...

Yes, but only becuase it can lose THEM a few billion, not becuase it is to the benefit of US.

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And how much legislation is actually in place to define the rules and safety in the workplace? I am not going to trawl the EU websites for even a guesstimates but my impression would be that entire forests were destroyed to print even a tiny part of it. We're not exactly lacking in regulations.

But we still don't get any EQUITY for our RISK. We;re still just the farm animals in this scenario. Our kindly capitalist masters have agreed not to whip us too badly, and not to make us do things that are too dangerous - although grudgingly, unwillingly, and trying every day to have those limitations on their "innovation" repealed. But they do not grant that we are any more than tools.

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I thought that was just obvious logic given Humanity wiring and incentives?

Not at all. See gift economy. If it were inbuilt, it would never have had to have been imposed by force. That shows that iot is profoundly un-natural.

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Which, you know, most tend to do... Without even an output, except, maybe, exams results, you will have a whole bunch of people studying endlessly and passing exams... just. And smoking pot the rest of the time.

good! So that's a win-win scenario then.

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Tell them. Promotions and rewards within team-based activities is a classic management nightmare.

Not least because its nonconsensual, becuase we;re encouraged to keep our pay secret, becuase we're having to perform to someone elses standards with no say, because we don't consent to the measurements used, and becuase the measurements are onily interested in best we can abase oursleves for our bossses.

Thats very different to the case where, in an exmaple we've discussed before, everybody knows who the best hunter in the village is.

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Actually, the more advanced thinking on this is that rewarding people based on results can be somewhat off. Sometimes, things don't work out just because of randomness. The idea is that people should be rewarded on thinking rightly and taking the right steps, regardless of the results.

I couldn't agree more.

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As to rotating roles, it sounds great in theory and, in practice, it'd be a disaster. There's a reason Adam Smith saw specialisation as the reason capitalistic firms was overtaking individual artisans...

Yes of course. And I haven't proposed abolishing it - only that there are at other needs at play. For example, the nay will seek to cross-train as many of its people in other functions as it can, so that as many crewmembers as possible can be swapped from job to job, and tso that they also appreicate precisely what other people are doing. There are, in short, other needs the trump the mere efficiency of division of labour.

None of this applies in capitalist production, of cours,e becuase workers are no more significant than machinery. But it ius important when the worker is at the centre of social production, which is of course where they should be.

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Yep. Unless you got to subsidise them. Remember, we are all paid roughly the same, as long as we clock in and clock out...

Remember, I never said that But who the fuck listens to what I have to say, eh?

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Right. So work would remain mostly boring and intrinsically "alienating" - to use your own words.

Absolutely not! Look,yoi often see people praising the "entrepreneurs" work ethic; up at dawn, hard working, engaged. And this is contrasted with the workers: stoop shouldered, resentful, doing the minimum to get by. Of course! Because the owner knows they are benefitting. They know that however shitty the work they do, every bit of it counts. While for the employee, every bit of it is a burden, an imposition, and the rewards do not in any way matchy up to the effort.

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I don't. I expect you to realise that the current system is killing you.

Life's killing me. Will I have immortality under communism?

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I didn't say they did. I gave you a very crude approximation of what we were talking about, seeing as you affect to not being able to see the difference between controlling your own production and being paid according to your replacement cost.

So how will it work?

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We feed them. We are after all the most productive society that has ever existed, we can affford to.

We voluntarily give up part of our own production, or does a central authority take it away?

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Well no it's not, becuase it's not an honest attempt to understand.

Most people out there aren't any nicer than me. They're going to want to pick holes in any theory you give them.

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How would you know what anarchists are any better than you know what communists are? Decentralised doesn't mean disorganised.

No, but it means that you can't have a system based on competing branches of power. You can't set up institutions with their own intertia if there are only one or two people in them. You need to create groups fighting to protect their own turf for it to work properly.

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I don't think either term is directly applicable to the system of soviets. Which shouldn;t be surprising, because we're necessarily not in Kansas any more.

Well okay, so how will it work?

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Well how about I grow wings and fly to the moon? What will happen, as has happened every time I've tried to do that in the past, is that in trying to provide a comprehensible overview there will be details that I must necessarily compress, ignore, and leave out. And if I were confident that the response that these would get would be along the lines of "could you expand on this detail" rather than "Ha! That proves you're going to send us all to the gulags!" I might be willing to try it again. As above, what that requires is honest curiosity from the audience I'm writing for, a genuine intention to try to understand rather than a mischievous and malicious attempt to trip me up with apparent inconsitencies. I mean nobody can explain anything under those circumstances. If I tried to give a recipe for baking bread and someone said "Ha! You haven't explained where the flour comes from! You're lying to us!" then nobody is going to get anywhere.

Well if you're not just making this up, it must come from a book somewhere. What book should I read to understand it? (Or preferably a website, as I've got no money.)

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I presume you missed the point deliberately?

I presume you did. Errors in playing monopoly just aren't a good analogy for errors in life.

__________________
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Originally Posted by contracycle

That's not a good enough challenge though; prestige products do not and cannot make up the bulk of the economy.

But the trick is that product differentiation can be applied to all kind of products, not just "prestige" product. When they sell you a Arsenal t-shirt at 5x the price of a non branded t-shirt, this is product differentiation.

We can have a look but a lot of products don't compete on price. Commodities such as oil and the like do but stuff for consummers is all about market segmentation etc etc. Competing on price is the last thing a company wants to do.

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Yes I know. But thats a very different case to not being able to produce enough stuff. The point remains that every other system suffered from under-production, while capitalism suffers from overproduction, and therefore, "underconsumption".

Well, I agree but I don't see this at being in any particular way "systematic" or solution-less.

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Which is impossible. If there are say a million units of cola drunk perr week in a given market, then CocaCola and Pepsi are each going to produce quantitites that increase toward a million units, so they can sell them at the most competitve price. Which means that production will ALWAYS outstrip consumption, no matter how much money consumers have.

I can bet you whatever you want that if there is a million cola units to be drunk and 2 competitors, the optimum point of production does not lie at one million. It's an iteration game and while the production number may start high, they will both tend to produce in function of their market share - And try to find new ways to increase said market share.

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What are you confused by?

The fact that people sell D&G t-shirt and C&K ones show that we don't need t-shirts? That doesn't make much sense...

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... for exactly as long as you can stop your politicians being bought. How's that working out?

Right now, not so well, by and large. But that's emminently fixeable. After all, the rich also have an interest in not crashing the system.

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Every single worker who turns up every day.

Then how come Enron, WorldCom and Lehman went bankrupt? I assume their workers turned up every day as well?

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See, this is the hero thing again. Capitalism concentrates power, and then takes personal credit for what that power achieves. Even though it was actually the work the masses.

So I disagree with the 'work of the masses' bit but you're right about the first part. Leaders have power and thus take personal credit for what power achieves. What pisses me off more is their tendency to try and avoid taking the blame. Normal enough, I guess - but we do have ways to see, in hindsight at least, whether they were responsible or not...

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I'm sure thats true. Just like its true that a pilot has the fate of hundreds of people in his hands. But that doesn't mean that the pilot is more worthy than his passengers, it is just the consequence of the control system.

Yes, sure. Just as a king ain't more 'worthy' than a beggar. But when it comes to attributing blame/laurels for the running of the country, the king is the one we judge, not the beggar. Ditto the plane/pilot. He is not a greater human being than his passengers but, if there's a problem and he manages to land the plane safely, he gets the credit, not the passengers. Sounds logical to me.

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How about: as soon as we give them sufficient control that they are actually in a position to make decisions. But at the moment, all they can do is what their bosses tell them to do.

Well, even if I see your point and would have only practical objections rather than fundamental ones, I think you just picked the wrong company to make your case of "employees are way way smarter than management"...

From FT.com / Management - Inside Nokia: trying to revive a giant

"Nokia, a case study in corporate turnrounds under Jorma Ollila in the 1990s, cannot be turned round this time, they claim. Poor leadership and complacency bred of success, compounded by an over-consensual culture, caused Nokia to miss the smartphone revolution"

From Wiki:

Nokia's official corporate culture manifesto, The Nokia Way, emphasises the speed and flexibility of decision-making in a flat, networked organization, although the corporation's size necessarily imposes a certain amount of bureaucracy.

In May 2007, Nokia redefined its values after initiating a series of discussions worldwide as to what the new values of the company should be. Based on the employee suggestions, the new values were defined as: Engaging You, Achieving Together, Passion for Innovation and Very Human.

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Basically, Nokia was known as indeed a flat organisation where its employees were given quite a chunk of responsability. I think they even try the internal project voting system where projects are given resources according to how many people want to work on a project i.e. via popularity...

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Of course not. There are far too many. But under capitalism, being smart and productive is unimportant. Only having control of capital is important.

Steve Jobs' share of Apple is actually quite small... And it remains that all those smart Nokia employees couldn't save their company when its products turned out to be less popular than Apple's...

Again, in any system that isn't purely stagnant, people will fail. It's not that they don't work. Or that they are not smart. Or whatever. It's just that their work has no value because people don't want to buy the stuff they're offering. And I don't believe you can avoid that. Thus economic activity will always incorporate a degree of (financial) risk. And thus, how you split that risk matters.

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Lol. How big is the market in art prints? Pretty damn large.

Yeah and they don't command the same price as the original. So? People are willing to pay more for the original and people are willing to pay more for a Picasso's 10-labour hour painting than any of mine, no matter how long I work on it.

What are you going to do to stop that? Re-wire their brain or forbid them to buy?

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Often! But thats not becuase they WANT to pay more. If it were on sale at the lower price, they would have been happy to buy it at that lower price. See? When you said that people "want" to pay more, you were really describing the situaiton wewre people were compelled to pay more. You deduce that the fact that they "wanted" to do this becuase they actually did it. But that isn't what they wanted at all, what they wanted was the goods.

Well, obviously. Sure, I want a bentley, a 20m sailing boat and a 350 sqm condo with a view on Green Park, all for free. Me and millions others. How much money we're able & willing to part for these is the discriminating factor.

How are you going to decide who gets the flats around Green Park? By definition, they're limited supply and demand vastly exceed it...

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What is unfun is having no control, and not profiting from our work.

As the Flow book points out with examples of people working on a factory line, control is mostly within your own head. And money is a secondary factor at most.

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How different it would be if we were all working for oursleves, in our interests, as a demonstration of our contribution to humanity?

As soon as you move beyond artisan-type of work, teamwork makes individual contributions unclear, at the very least to the outside world and I certainly have had the case of my own performance within a team being valued differently by 2 different team members...

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Yes, but only becuase it can lose THEM a few billion, not becuase it is to the benefit of US.

Sure. So? Enlightened Self-Interest tends to be generous and cooperative because, long term, it works better than the alternative...

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But we still don't get any EQUITY for our RISK.

Would you want equity for your risks? That's my point. I am all for a greater involvement of the workforce via equity and greater use of the cooperative structure. OTOH, I am not blind to the dangers... Again and again, equity goes DOWN as well as up...

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Not at all. See gift economy. If it were inbuilt, it would never have had to have been imposed by force. That shows that it is profoundly un-natural.

Really? You see many people taking risks without any reward of some sort at the end? Where?

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good! So that's a win-win scenario then.

How? We got students studying all kind of bullshit to avoid working and being supported by the rest of us? How's that win-win?

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Yes of course. And I haven't proposed abolishing it - only that there are at other needs at play. There are, in short, other needs the trump the mere efficiency of division of labour. None of this applies in capitalist production, of course becuase workers are no more significant than machinery.

None of your companies ever trained people? Or moved them from jobs to jobs? C'mon, this is becoming a cartoonish evil version of what real work within corporations look like...

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Remember, I never said that But who the fuck listens to what I have to say, eh?

I mentioned 'small variations'. As you said, in terms of tangible output per hour, there is a limit to how much more stuff someone more trained/competent/talented can produce. OTOH, this is the least of the concern of most people. What people care about is whether the product is of interest, not how long it took to produce...

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Absolutely not! Look,yoi often see people praising the "entrepreneurs" work ethic; up at dawn, hard working, engaged. And this is contrasted with the workers: stoop shouldered, resentful, doing the minimum to get by. Of course! Because the owner knows they are benefitting. They know that however shitty the work they do, every bit of it counts. While for the employee, every bit of it is a burden, an imposition, and the rewards do not in any way matchy up to the effort.

As I said, you won't find me arguing against a greater equity culture. OTOH, it's not going to be a limitless future with singing tomorrows. There'll be plenty of people begging to be left in their wage slavery...

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