/marx/ - Marxism

You distribute according to the needs of the people. It's planned by the state. So you basically have a hierarchically organized state system where production schedules and product distributions are planned to deliver certain amounts of things to different areas, based on poltical discussions and people's demands. People could take freely from the communal warehouse or supermarket-analog, or order a certain amount of things online, up to a point, using a sort of rationing system, beyond which they might need special permission to take more for their own use. As socialism develops into communism I would say the rules about this might become different, but who knows. That's just what I envision anyway. I also think good chocolate could be produced with good agriculture and food processing technology. Eastern Europe isn't exactly known for it's chocolate compated to that of Western Europe is it?

>>1135

>If you have 3 computers each of them is a different quality and you have 3 people how would you distribute those computers?

I guess you have the local government or some kind of small council of people decide and vote on who needs the best computer the most. Or whoever currently has the oldest computer could get the newest one. These things wouldn't need to be planned out by the Central Committee or anything, like I said it's heiarchical so for small issues like this it could be discussed on a small level.

>>1135

One thing about Marxism is that it's not a really intricately crafted one-size-fits-all economic system to be implemented onto a society. It's more a set of ideas and general principles and general goals people can use to create socialism and then create communism. The details depend on the situation in question. I think that's one difference between Marxist scientific socialism and utopian socialism.

>>1139
thats is what i am asking because, when people discuss marxism we all stick to theory and political practices. rarely there is an actual discussion about problems in production and how to solve them. what I want get here, are ideas how industry should function and be governed on a practical level. how would you produce and distribute stuff and how would you achieve quality comparable to capitalism.
would you allow luxury goods? importing?

because tbh it is an important question and people who manage those things in capitalism do it because they get paid and privileged for it. And they do it well, how do you replace them without giving them contra-revolutionary privileges for their work-

>>1141

People have a strange obsession with full one way or another economy, which is idealistic.

Socialism, as a realistic system, will basically be a partially controlled capitalism in the luxury sector, and a planned system on the absolutely necessary parts of the economy: agriculture, infrastructure, education, etc. This will last until scarcity is overcome.

Full economic planning is suicide for quite a bit of the point of socialism, which is to take the best of capital's massive capacity for production and desire fulfillment and minimize or erase the negatives of market anarchy (boom and bust, job insecurity, etc.) and eliminate the concentration of capital.

One thing that can theoretically be done is getting rid of private banking. The government banks would function not as lending institutions, but as institutions that realize value, which is the whole point of money- to represent your created value to others. So someone comes in with an idea for a business venture, the bank assesses its feasibility and possible social desirability. You're funded for a first round of production and release your product on the market. If you succeed, your enterprise gets the profit and maintains itself from then on collectively, but privately. If you fail, you're not left in debt, your business dies since clearly your goods are not wanted or needed. instead of closing your business and saying tough luck, the government would have tabs on what people are demanding more and would offer your business restructuring into a new business to meet a known demand. You'd basically have a secure income as you'll never be at a loss for a job. When the point comes that there is no expanding market to shift you into, post monetary measures would have to eventually be brought in and late stage communism begins to take shape.

None of this could even be tried in a single country of course, socialism, like capitalism, will only work on a global scale.

>>1141

My point is that there isn't some explicit ready-made way to do it. It really depends on the material conditions at the time and place you're talking about. There is a concept called theory-practice-theory, which means that you can't just theorize everything in advance. You need to make a theory, try to apply it and see how it works, and then alter the theory if necessary. Also, like I said it's not all centrally planned by the highest authority.

Short:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_01.htm
Long:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm


But, like I said, you would assess people's ecnomic need and wants using political methods, like census and votes and all that. I can go into more detail about how I personally envision it.

Town A has a certain amount of resources being shipped to it from various factories and farms, etc. which go to the town warehouses/"store" where people can take what they want with a rationing system. If they want to alter what goods they have available, they can use the poltiical system to request to the higher authority, of province A, that they want to start getting shipments of chocolate, for instance. If the chocolate can be produced in province A, then provincial government A can just increase the production of chocolate and allocate more to town A. If they need to get it from elsewhere, they can contact the higher authority, region A, or something. That's just my idea though so we'd have to see how it works in practice. I don't think there needs to be a huge distinction between luxury and non-luxury, but then I'm not that well versed in economics.

And as to how you transition to that system, well once the socialist revolution occurs and all production is owned by the state but you still have a market, then you look at what sort of distribution the market was producing, like how much was being produced shipped where, and continue with those quantities, gradually adjusting them to meet demand.

My personal feelings on the matter as someone who is largely dispassionate in terms of advocating for any sort of ideal, is that Marxist philosophy can be applied easily to two hypothetical scenarios:

1 - a primarily argrarian soceity based on trading labor
2 - a future utopian society without scarcity of resources

Every other scenario involves quite a bit of subjectivity and complexity.

In terms of OP's inital question: How this is usually handled in communist societies is one of two ways:

1) the situation is avoided entirely (things are produced to uniform measures at frequent intervals) So it'd be unlikely to have 3 wildly different types of computers in a communist society on offer to be newly acquired unless they were meant to do 3 entirely different things.
2) Goods are distributed "broadly to need" (You need a computer? Take one) on a first come first serve basis.

Obvious the inherent problem with both those approaches, as demonstrated in previous applications, is the lack of specificity to addressing individual needs.

One of the things that I have noticed as I've gotten older is that as technology advances, the complexity of developing a Marxist based economy actually decreases instead of increases (as opposed to capitalism which creates ever increasingly complex financial vehicles to exploit).

In a future, perhaps not too far off, techniques like micro-manufacturing might be available, in which case, the problem goes away entirely as people simply use their own labor to create the items they need from community owned resources.

The simpliest way to imagine it would be, if we had digital printers that could print the parts for every type of good you could want. You are allocated base resources from the community and you spend your own time and labor to make the things you need.

>>1167

>One of the things that I have noticed as I've gotten older is that as technology advances, the complexity of developing a Marxist based economy actually decreases instead of increases (as opposed to capitalism which creates ever increasingly complex financial vehicles to exploit).

Good point. Actually socialism essentially requires certain levels of technology, due to the need for socialized production and due to the advancement of sciences which can be used to coordinate the economic planning.