By Philosopher101 - 15 Sep 2020 18:07
Philosopher101 wrote:What are the compulsory requirements of Free Market Economy?@wellsy can you answer it ? Need some help here.
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Philosopher101 wrote:What are the compulsory requirements of Free Market Economy?@wellsy can you answer it ? Need some help here.
Philosopher101 wrote:@wellsy can you answer it ? Need some help here.
B0ycey wrote:Friedrich Hayek ? Specific, what work do you want me to read ? Any specific book or writings with name ? It would be helpful if you'll provide me a link. And thank you so much for answering.
Read Heyek.
Little or no government interferences.
Philosopher101 wrote:Friedrich Hayek ? Specific, what work do you want me to read ? Any specific book or writings with name ? It would be helpful if you'll provide me a link. And thank you so much for answering.
B0ycey wrote:Please link the Wikipedia article as well. And thank you so much for rest of suggestions that you just gave me. Will you mind me to DM you in subject of issues with readings in future?
In regards to your thread title "The constitution of Liberty" or "The road to Selfdom".
But to be honest, if you want to know the basics, read Wikipedia. That alone will give you an insight to the free market and his thinking. Although I prefer Keynesian economics.
The same bourgeois mind which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation of the labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as being an organisation of labour that increases its productiveness, that same bourgeois mind denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted play for the bent of the individual capitalist. (Capital, MECW 35:361)
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Bourgeois opposition to the attempts of workers to exert social control on production further reveals the practical contradiction between formal bourgeois freedom and the real freedom workers struggle for within capitalism, in struggles that necessarily point beyond capitalism for just this reason. While the capitalist defends “sacred” bourgeois freedom, he is at the same time also perfectly willing to defend the real unfreedom of the worker, the “complete subjection” of the laborer to capital.
Like all the dialogue comics, the two characters don't represent any philosophers in particular, but merely discuss an idea.
Robert Nozick's concept of a "Utility Monster" was a thought experiment aiming to criticize Utilitarianism. He imagines a "monster" with a capacity for happiness so much greater than our own, that we would be morally obligated to sacrifice everything to give the monster pleasure, as that would result in the most overall happiness. Most people recoil from this conclusion, due to its apparent unfairness. Nozick uses this idea to argue against the redistribution of wealth, because it would be unjust. He favors a society based on free exchange only, where wealth is justified based on not how fairly it was distributed, but on how fairly it was acquired. So if someone becomes very wealthy through voluntary exchanges with other human beings, "redistributing" that wealth is effectively denying the ability for people to come to voluntary exchanges - denying their freedom. Even things like minimum wage laws he saw as restrictions on freedom, because after all if two people consent to the exchange, who is the government to say that they can't? Freedom, unlike total happiness, Nozick thought, could not be subject to a "Utility Monster" because your freedom does not take away from my freedom. The ability for people to make contracts isn't a finite resource that can be "sucked up".
However, Nozick's conception of freedom is based largely on contracts revolving around property rights. That is to say, freedom for Nozick is freedom to own and control not just your own personhood, but any property that you own. Property, like resources devoted to increasing "utility", is a finite resource that could theoretically be entirely owned by a single "Freedom Monster", or maybe "Justice Monster", but perhaps best named "Property Monster". Like the comic imagines, a monster that lived forever and bent its entire will to owning more and more land could, theoretically, through entirely voluntary transactions, own all of the land. If this situation arose, the monster would have infinite leverage in any negotiation that it entered into, because everyone on earth would starve unless they made a deal with the monster. From Nozick's point of view, because neither party was physically coerced, and the monster's property came from a history of free transactions, the monster's ownership of all its property is just and free. However, the situation that it leads to seems to be one that severely lacks freedom. The monster could make any rules it wanted, and everyone on earth would be more or less "freely" forced to obliged it. Most people would not describe this situation as one where humanity is more free.
Of course, if we find this situation abhorrent, we have to question why we do not find it abhorrent on a smaller scale. For example, millions of people are born without property today, and find themselves having to obey the rules set by their landlord or boss, and this obedience to property is described as "freedom", but structurally it is the same freedom enjoyed by people obeying the monster's arbitrary rules in order to live. The business owner or landlord can control others by having far greater leverage, not infinite leverage as the monster does, because they have to compete with other business owners or landlords, but far more leverage than the person with nothing. Worse, if we look at the situations in terms of class rather than individuals, the property owners as a class do have the infinite leverage of the monster, because they quite literally own everything. So far as they have common interests, they will naturally exploit that leverage to advance those interests with great ease, since the class with no property relies on the use of their property to survive. As to what a real freedom might look like, where one or more individuals couldn't use their massive leverage to exploit others in any manner they saw fit, well, that is as they say a question beyond the scope of this essay.
I like the way Clarke develop his proof this problem: Commodity exchange presupposes individuals with different needs and different resources because if everyone had the same stuff there would be no reason for exchange. Thus exchange presupposes differences. If exchange is systematic these differences must also be systematic. Thus the formal equality and freedom of exchange is founded on different resource endowments. This means that the content of exchange can’t be reduced to its form (free, juridically equal relations between people) but must be found outside of exchange in the realm of production and property.
Scarcity relates to the application of labor to produce for need. The basis of exchange is the sale of the products of this labor. Thus the need for a theory of value based on human labor, not subjective whims.
Different types of exchange presuppose different production and property relations. The simple commodity exchange (independent producers exchanging the product of their labor in the market) is a popular image in marginalist accounts of exchange (as well as market-anarchism fantasies) yet such a system of exchange has only existed within larger societies dominated by other social relations (ie feudalism, capitalism, state-capitalism/20th century communism). Capitalist exchange presupposes social relations between two social classes, one owning the means of production, the other nothing. As we’ve seen, Marginalism tries to treat all factors of production with the same theoretical tools of subjective preference theory. But the division of the social product into rent, profit and wages actually presupposes antagonistic social relations between classes and thus requires different theoretical ideas.
Marginalists would like to treat the unequal resource endowments of individuals as due to extra-economic factors, consigning these concerns to the fields of history and sociology. But these inequalities don’t just proceed exchange historically. They are actually reproduced by exchange. Capitalism generates a world in which individuals must maintain a certain standard of living in order to survive (try paying the bills without a phone, house, car, work clothes, haircuts, health-care, etc.) and must engage in wage-labor. And wage-labor actively reproduced the two social classes of capitalist and worker and their violently divergent relationships to the means of production. Without scarcity we couldn’t have wage labor. There would be no reason to work. Thus capitalism must constantly reproduce scarcity.
Just because the market is an expression of individual preferences doesn’t mean that it is a realization of those preferences or that it is the best way to organize individual behaviours. Instead the neo-Austrian defense of the market is based more on critiques of bureaucracy and state-planning.
The neo-Austrians reinterpreted the market as a dynamic information system, in which individuals convey information about their preferences through the prices they pay. For the neo-Austrian model it is no longer necessary to assume that every individual has perfect knowledge and perfect foresight, because knowledge is no longer an attribute of the individual, but is conveyed by market prices. The freedom of the market is not defended on the grounds of a necessary tendency to equilibrium, but on the grounds of its efficiency as an information system: the freer and more pervasive are market transactions, the greater the quality and quantity of information which the market can convey
Philosopher101 wrote:Please link the Wikipedia article as well. And thank you so much for rest of suggestions that you just gave me. Will you mind me to DM you in subject of issues with readings in future?
B0ycey wrote:But how about those unaccountable tyrannies which are the product of capitalism, The cooperative tyrannies? I asked the simple question, can free market works with no private property ? If yes then how ?
Fuck! Where is VS when you need him? I can't say I have looked this up on Wikipedia on this specific point to give you a link but just type in Anarcho Capitalism and read that if you don't fancy surfing through Hayeks thinking. But there is also Adam Smith's "The wealth of nations" and look into "The Invisible Hand" which has more available online data on it.
Nonetheless if you want the basics on Hayek he says that any government interference will manipulate the market and then that will make unfair monopolies. But without any government interference the market will govern itself.
Philosopher101 wrote:But how about those unaccountable tyrannies which are the product of capitalism, The cooperative tyrannies? I asked the simple question, can free market works with no private property ? If yes then how ?
B0ycey wrote:If you summoned Wellsy, I assume we are accepting Marx's idea of private property. That is we still have personal property. In which case Heyek will explain all you need to know.
One of the distinctions frequently made in relation to the question of the abolition of private property, and often accepted as ‘marxist orthodoxy’, is the distinction between social property, in particular the social means of production, on the one hand, and personal possessions or objects of consumption, on the other. Possibly this distinction makes some sense in the “political” phase of Communism Marx refers to above. However, the conception is of limited value because, for a start, it is founded on the rupture of the human being into a producer on one hand and a consumer on the other, and life into work and leisure, dichotomies which lie at the very heart of the fragmented existence which needs to be abolished. The abolition of private property in the productive sphere whilst retaining it in the domestic sphere, would in fact reinforce the inhumanity of modern life: personal property being entirely for one’s own use, is without significance and therefore worthless, while social property still has significance only for the purpose of earning a living and is therefore alien and oppressive.
In each of the historical settings that MacIntyre investigates, he is able to show that the type of justice and the type of rationality which appears to the philosophical spokespeople of the community to be necessary and universal, turns out to be a description of the type of citizens of the community in question. Accordingly, the justice of liberalism and the rationality of liberalism is simply that justice and that rationality of the “citizens of nowhere” (p. 388), the “outsiders,” people lacking in any social obligation or any reason for acting other than to satisfy their desires and to defend the conditions under which they are able to continue satisfying their desires. Their rationality is therefore that of the objects of their desire.
Isn’t it possible to decide politically what a person’s rights are both at work and as a consumer? And isn’t such a political decision governed by ethics? We know that it is wrong that a youngster cannot get a start in life and is denied a job precisely because they “don’t have experience” and so forth? Don’t we think it wrong that someone should consume or possess things far in excess of what is socially possible or appropriate? Why and how do we have to let money decide these things?
So, there is a concept of property which exists in our relations both at work and outside work, which is to do with this: once you have established, with your co-workers, the right to work in a certain way, to work in a certain job or draw on the services of others in a given way and to a certain extent, then we believe that we have a right to demand that that activity should only be terminated or transformed with our agreement. We don’t need to bring things into that.
Money violates this right. Via money, people forcibly separate other people from their life and livelihood. Money grants to scoundrels the right to debauch themselves. But money is a carrier of the consent of the community, despite itself.
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What about use? For Hegel use is a way of taking possession of something (provided it is not already the property of someone else who wishes to use it), and has the effect of maintaining ownership. When one no longer uses something, then one has taken one’s will out of the thing and it becomes ownerless.
This concept seems to stand up. It appears to be a substantive and ethical conception of property: a thing is mine if I use it in the course of activity which is mine, that is to say, in the course of my socially determined activity. If I stop using it, it reverts to a ‘state of nature’.
In summary, it seems to me that there is a kind of concept of property which exists within the activity of working people and the ethical relations between them. Economic relations, i.e., bourgeois relations, violate this ethic and violate workers’ property. This concept of property seems actually to provide, in combination with consensus decision-making and collaboration, the basis for the organisation of social production on a global scale.
Wellsy wrote:
One of the distinctions frequently made in relation to the question of the abolition of private property, and often accepted as ‘marxist orthodoxy’, is the distinction between social property, in particular the social means of production, on the one hand, and personal possessions or objects of consumption, on the other. Possibly this distinction makes some sense in the “political” phase of Communism Marx refers to above. However, the conception is of limited value because, for a start, it is founded on the rupture of the human being into a producer on one hand and a consumer on the other, and life into work and leisure, dichotomies which lie at the very heart of the fragmented existence which needs to be abolished.
The abolition of private property in the productive sphere whilst retaining it in the domestic sphere, would in fact reinforce the inhumanity of modern life:
personal property being entirely for one’s own use, is without significance and therefore worthless, while social property still has significance only for the purpose of earning a living and is therefore alien and oppressive.
What about use? For Hegel use is a way of taking possession of something (provided it is not already the property of someone else who wishes to use it), and has the effect of maintaining ownership. When one no longer uses something, then one has taken one’s will out of the thing and it becomes ownerless.
B0ycey wrote:
@Wellsy, great post as usual, but under Communism/Anarchism there is no need to have a free market because property is owned by the collective. The thread title can only be explained best under Anarcho-Capitalism.
B0ycey wrote:
But that requires the acceptance of Marx's ideas of Personal Property from Private property, because with accepting that people have the means to trade, no trade can take place.
ckaihatsu wrote:
Can you *rephrase*, or *elaborate* on this part? I'm finding it to be unclear. Thanks in advance.
B0ycey wrote:
It should say without rather than with, an issue with typing on a phone, and should make more sense if you do that.
But to eleborate it was in regards to free trade. Without accepting the notion of possession you cannot trade with things that don't belong to you - especially if what you possess is communal. Private property is a legal term in any case. But Marx has it down to production. And with personal property you have the ability to produce/create and as such will be able trade in any environment. If you accept that and the teachings of Anarcho-Capitalism, then you can see how a free trade relationship can exist in an Anarchy environment and answer the threads title.
ckaihatsu wrote:Good so far, but on the latter part here, I've *heard* this assertion before, but it never really 'stuck' with me.
I have to ask -- what about the *material* world -- ?
How can we call a human being a 'producer-and-consumer-intertwined', post-capitalism, while *ignoring* that the result of *productive* activity is tangible goods and available services, while the result of *consumption* activity is a *diminshed* quantity of available goods and services -- ?
Sure, maybe after the revolution everything will be so enabling, proactive, and fun that *producing* and creating for the common good will be as worthwhile and personally rewarding as any individualist-type 'hobby' today, for oneself, but the *material* distinctions of 'production', versus 'consumption', can't *themselves* just swirl into a sweet gauzy daydream of experiential life.
However intertwined 'work' and 'leisure' may become we have empirical / objective *changes* in material quantities and one's own quantity of day-time, depending on whether one is more on the 'producer' side of things, or more on the 'consumer' side of things.
Capitalist overproduction is overproduction of exchange values, not overproduction of use values. A crisis of overproduction of exchange values breaks out when there is still very much an underproduction of use values, especially use values that the workers themselves need.
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now. [2]
Marx lays out, briefly, a way to make labor directly social, breaking with capitalist value production, in his Critique of the Gotha program. In Marx’s concept of directly social labor he advocates a system which breaks with the disciplining of production by socially necessary labor time. Producers in this post-capitalist society will not be compensated according to the social average but instead compensated directly for the actual amount of labor time they expend in production. If I spend 2 hours making a widget I get a labor-certificate entitling me to purchase consumption goods equal to two hours of labor. If you spend 3 hours making the same widget you get a certificate entitling you to 3 hours of consumption goods. Regardless of productivity our labors are directly social because they are compensated in full, considered part of the total labor of society, no matter what.11
Careful readers may ask how such a society would determine the labor-content of consumption goods (the ‘prices’ at which workers ‘buy’ them with their labor-certificates) in the absence of socially necessary labor time. This calculation would be based on the average social labor-time that it took to make a commodity. The calculation could be done simply by adding up all of the concrete labor times that go into making widgets and dividing this by the number of widgets. Such a calculation would allow society to continue to make production plans and to ‘price’ commodities. But the compensation of laborers would not be done through such a process of averaging. So such a system would not eliminate the role of average labor time as an accounting unit. What it would eliminate is the role of average time in the compensation of workers.12
The *difference*, though, between capitalist 'private property', and *post*-capitalist 'personal property', is that capitalist private property is *unbounded* in potential accumulation, as we see with modern corporations. *Personal* property is bounded by what one can use or consume *oneself*, as a *person*, 24/7/365, which is *necessarily* a finite quantity due to the finite constraints of experiential time. (One can only be in one place at any given moment.)
If the political-economy *context* for this is meant to be post-capitalist, then I really *don't* understand the value judgments here -- *of course* personal property would have *significance* and *worth* to the person *using*, or consuming, it.
And post-capitalist 'social property' would *not* be alien and oppressive as it is under capitalism, because it would not be alienating or oppressive. It would be 'the commons', roughly analogous to a public park today, but encompassing *all* physical space on earth, for social-productive activities as well as personal-use-and-consumption ones.
Yes, *this* is a far better description of 'personal property', and one that I haven't seen before.
But, for anyone who's *willing*, I'd like to hear suggestions on what the *parameters* of this might be. What if I happen to use a certain bedside table every morning when I wake up, but I'm not even *near* it for the rest of the day? Should it be scheduled-out to others for 23 hours of every day? How about my bed? My 'inactive' clothes in the closet, etc. -- ?
The abolition of the capitalist system will, undoubtedly, solve the economic side of the Woman Question, but it will solve that alone. The question of marriage, of divorce, of paternity, of the equality of woman with man are physical and sexual questions, or questions of temperamental affiliation as in marriage, and were we living in a Socialist Republic would still be hotly contested as they are to-day. One great element of disagreement would be removed – the economic – but men and women would still be unfaithful to their vows, and questions of the intellectual equality of the sexes would still be as much in dispute as they are today, even although economic equality would be assured. To take a case in point: Suppose a man and woman married. The man after a few years ceases to love the woman, his wife, and loves another. But his wife's love for him has only increased with the passage of years, and she has borne him children. He wishes to leave her and consort with his new love. Will the fact that her economic future is secured be any solace to the deserted mother or to her children? Decidedly not! It is, a human and sexual problem, not an economic problem at all. Unjust economic conditions aggravate the evil, but do not create it.
Isn’t it possible to decide politically what a person’s rights are both at work and as a consumer? And isn’t such a political decision governed by ethics? We know that it is wrong that a youngster cannot get a start in life and is denied a job precisely because they “don’t have experience” and so forth? Don’t we think it wrong that someone should consume or possess things far in excess of what is socially possible or appropriate? Why and how do we have to let money decide these things?
So, there is a concept of property which exists in our relations both at work and outside work, which is to do with this: once you have established, with your co-workers, the right to work in a certain way, to work in a certain job or draw on the services of others in a given way and to a certain extent, then we believe that we have a right to demand that that activity should only be terminated or transformed with our agreement. We don’t need to bring things into that.
...
In summary, it seems to me that there is a kind of concept of property which exists within the activity of working people and the ethical relations between them. Economic relations, i.e., bourgeois relations, violate this ethic and violate workers’ property. This concept of property seems actually to provide, in combination with consensus decision-making and collaboration, the basis for the organisation of social production on a global scale.
Property is a social relation in which personality is manifested in an objective, sensuous form through the recognition given by other people. Property is commonly seen as a relation between a person and a ‘thing’, as in “this thing is mine”. However, the real, human relation intended here is that the use of the thing by me is sanctioned by the community of which I am part. Conversely, according to Hegel, if I no longer use something, then I give up my possession of it. In property, this relation between me and the community is mediated through a signification given to the thing, namely “mine”.
...
Property is thus a basic form of Right, and so is meaningful so long as Right is meaningful. Right is not an eternal social category however. Right is meaningless among friends, for example, and pre-supposes a social division of labour.
In ancient and feudal society, complex systems of rights and duties, closely connected with kinship relations, regulated social life. The emergence of what Hegel called ‘civil society’ (bürgeliche gesellschaft — literally ‘bourgeois society’), rupturing the connection between the rights and obligations of the family, on the one hand, from the rights and obligations which attach themselves to political life, on the other. Over the last few centuries, ‘Civil Society’ has absorbed wider and wider domains of life, in particular what is called “the economy”, such that social life is now no longer either traditional or intentional.
Wellsy wrote:
Marx lays out, briefly, a way to make labor directly social, breaking with capitalist value production, in his Critique of the Gotha program. In Marx’s concept of directly social labor he advocates a system which breaks with the disciplining of production by socially necessary labor time. Producers in this post-capitalist society will not be compensated according to the social average but instead compensated directly for the actual amount of labor time they expend in production. If I spend 2 hours making a widget I get a labor-certificate entitling me to purchase consumption goods equal to two hours of labor. If you spend 3 hours making the same widget you get a certificate entitling you to 3 hours of consumption goods. Regardless of productivity our labors are directly social because they are compensated in full, considered part of the total labor of society, no matter what.11
Careful readers may ask how such a society would determine the labor-content of consumption goods (the ‘prices’ at which workers ‘buy’ them with their labor-certificates) in the absence of socially necessary labor time. This calculation would be based on the average social labor-time that it took to make a commodity. The calculation could be done simply by adding up all of the concrete labor times that go into making widgets and dividing this by the number of widgets. Such a calculation would allow society to continue to make production plans and to ‘price’ commodities. But the compensation of laborers would not be done through such a process of averaging. So such a system would not eliminate the role of average labor time as an accounting unit. What it would eliminate is the role of average time in the compensation of workers.12
Monti wrote:
Can Free Market exist without Private Property in Anti-Authoritative Society?
The answer is YES.
Market does not need private property. These are two separate things. True, we were always told that they constitute a fundamental unit.
Liberals tell this because capitalists's property is their treasure; they do not want that we understand that market can do without it. Marxists are on the same wavelength. They believe strongly in planning and do not like that we understand that collective ownership can do without it.
It is possible to imagine an economic system composed of public enterprises, of which the management is independent and not obliged to apply a plan. It is a real market; so the management decides freely the prices, quantities, investments, wages... Naturally, it seems normal that a strong regulation supervises the enterprises. I do not know if it is compatible with what you name "anti-authoritative".
In the article in link (in the second half), I give a description of a such a system I designed and of two other systems devised by Bardhan and Roemer.
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/64255/
Monti wrote:
It is possible to imagine an economic system composed of public enterprises, of which the management is independent and not obliged to apply a plan.
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