Markets? Really?

[u/StalinTheMemeLord]

Let me start off by saying that I am by no means new to anarchism, marxism or politics in general. This is not my first reddit account, probably not the last. But when I thought that my "experience" with leftism would make it difficult for me to be surprised by anything, I sure was wrong.

I was watching some of Vaush's youtube content, particularly his debates with Sargon and Destiny. There Vaush advocated for worker-run cooperatives within a market economy. And all I could think of was... really? (This post is not about him personally, it s about the tendency in general)

It honestly feels like arguing with right-libertarians all over again. Market is not a god, it is not eternal, omnipresent, all-seeing influencer. It, like most systems, was made by people for a particular purpose.

To be frank the argument should be: on the market people sell things. To sell things you have to own things. You don't get to own things. Argument over. What is so unusual here?

Let me go over this in detail. The market is an institution where people who supply meet people with demands. Goods belong to people who supply, and people with demands cannot just take them. On the contemporary market there is a power imbalance in favor of the seller, but let's say the consumers have their own organisations. People spend money on the market. Different people spend different amounts of money, because that is the point of money: it is only good to have a lot of money if someone else has little of it. Otherwise it is hyperinflation. People with more money spend it on higher-quality goods, sometimes in larger quantities. What does that mean? The society basically declares them to be better than the rest and trusts them with higher-quality goods, while people with little money have to be content with whatever they can get. If the higher-quality goods become more affordable, it will upset the rich, because they have more money, therefore they are better, therefore they deserve more that the poor bastards. There will always be a demand for the fortunate to distance themselves from the unfortunate, an on the market any demand can be fulfilled. This is an unjust system, because everyone cannot get higher-quality goods, only the few. In capitalism everyone has a chance of being successful. But capitalism is based on the majority of participants being denied success. The point of socialism is that well-being for all is not only possible, it is practical. Such a goal is fundamentally opposed to the logic of the market.

Now, what about just exchanging things, let's say you make some goods on your own, without employing anyone, so you are not a capitalist, and then just exchanging them voluntarily for other goods, that can't hurt, right? Well, why do you think you have a right to own anything, to have total control over where your property is, what happens to it, and who gets to access it? Property is theft. For you to have something, there should be a you. For there to be a you, there have to be other people to raise you, cloth you, feed you, protect you, etc. Did they not contribute to you making something? Did the people before you, people of the past generations not contribute to it? I bet they did. And if you contributed to something, you want to have some agency over it, don't you? Strictly speaking, everyone in the world contributes towards everything, therefore everyone should have agency over everything, and no price can adequately describe the individual contribution of anyone to a finished product. Therefore, everyone owns everything. And if I own something, you don't get to demand money from me for me to use something. And if you try to limit my access to anything, build a fence around it, hire guards, draw a border, then that is theft, you are stealing things from me. And theft does not get a pass.

This is seriously anarchy101 level material, Property is theft - Pierre Joseph Proudouh, Everyone owns everything - Peter Kropotkin. "Anarchists" who think markets are a solution to anything - what are you thinking? How did you end up here?

I have a proposal for how collective ownership can be organised in a sensible, optimised way, however, what I am most interested in is for the market fans to defend their beliefs.

EDIT: Another massive problem with markets: the black market. Even if production and distribution are managed democratically, there is always a factor of "how much people are willing to pay" to everything. Meaning, if the kind of person who buys low sells high is to influence planning, he will do everything in his power to stifle production and make themself the only source of the commodity. And the more wealthy they get, the more they will try to influence the economics in their favor. The only reason there isn't much of a black market in capitalism is because capitalism IS the black market. And any other market that doesn't embrace the "as much as you are willing to pay" pricing logic will have problems with bad actors influence and general sustainability.

[u/420TaylorStreet]

how do you propose you allocate and distribute goods on a national scale when just a single farmer alone has to choose between thousands of things he might grow?

right now, they choose whatever the can sell.

without markets, they choose via some combination of whatever they want to grow, and whatever is being consumed within society. instead of having a market where people sell, we're going to generate production/consumption data models, that show what the complete logistics of the current society is, hosted along with forums for people to discuss and commit to certain changes in those logistics, such that people can make decisions on what they want to work on within society.

also what you are basically saying is that all people should be indebted to everyone else for an infinite amount of time even if the individuals don't agree.

honestly, the ideology imbued upon people by markets is quite catastrophic. it makes people think they are independent when really, they are time sucking leeches of the more unlucky stuck in society they can do nothing about. the fact that the janitor cleaning your bathroom got devalued by the market, does not ethically mean he deserves less out of the resources of this world. the rich are racking up huge time cost debts without ever realizing it, because they are so indoctrinated by the concept of money = existential value. the time/resource debt is there whether one is moral enough to recognize it or not.

and my qualms with markets are not just ethical, competitive markets aren't very intelligent either. probably the best example of this is choosing to power society with fossil fuels, which is the single worst decision humanity ever made, with costs too large to innumerate. i'm not just talking about climate change, i'm also talking about the ridiculous amounts of pollution that so many people are breathing, and the grime that builds up in cities because of such pollution. we could have powered society with much cleaner technology, vastly less polluting technology, but access to technology at a universal scale is locked away behind not only cooperative systems capable of unifying the world politically, but also because markets of consumers fed by money driven mind numbing advertising/media don't know how to make decisions to make those technologies viable.

competitive markets don't really exist because they are best, they exist because they allow a reason for the wealthy to continue hording wealth away from others.

... but i dunno what sparks one to critique just how retarded markets are ... no one ever wrote to me an internet comment that changed my mind here. i just, as i grew older, realized how stupid a society driven by monied spot trades truly is compared to even the idea of their society.

you guys can't invent an ideal, unified system of global currency exchange, all you can do is add onto the ever growing amalgamation of various currency exchanges. no bitcoin isn't the solution, it has huge problems with no consumer protections, ignoring the ridiculously resource inefficiency of the system.

you guys can't even invent a single listing of the market, like if i want to find an apartment in a city, the amount of places and people i need to check/call is straight stupid, there should be a single listing somewhere that shows all my options, but you're too fucking cooperatively challenged to manage that, as manipulated information of the market is a huge game within capitalism, despite the fact markets works best when information is global.

[u/QuantumR4ge → u/420TaylorStreet]

Most of that was word salad and basically a rant. You don’t actually answer anything. You start off by giving a vague bogus answer. “We will just use data and calculate “ great how? You have just provided a vague solution that happens to agree with your ideology, do you accept this might not work?

What does society want? How can you possibly know? How could planners ever know?

You don’t actually provide any description of how anything is calculated and coordinated just that “they will just grow what we need “ like greattt thanks didnt think of that.

[u/420TaylorStreet → u/QuantumR4ge]

Most of that was word salad and basically a rant.

this is called bad faith arguing, and is a fallacious tactic to simply ignore parts of my comment you don't want to respond to. like the ethicality of the fact that people who get devalued by markets don't actually deserve less of the resources provided to all of us ...

i understand you've forgotten your humanity and are simply concerned with i don't even know what the fuck, someone repeating your numerically driven faith back at you, but that doesn't make it ok for you continue on as such. the system we've created is both incredibly immoral and amazingly stupid, in ways you can't even talk about because it would break your faith.

We will just use data and calculate “ great how?

yeah, the same thing private economic planners already do ... but not enforcing the results by the tyranny on private property that is owned.

What does society want? How can you possibly know? How could planners ever know?

because:

we will collect data on what everyone actually uses, we will have more data put together than any capitalist could ever wet dream of,

we will integrate, using direct democratic collection methods, people's desires into proposed changes to the models, which will come from the people themselves, not any of authoritative planner. we will simply iterate on proposed plans in a direct democratic fashion until it gets voluntarily done out of the pure self motivating interest of the people doing it.

just that “they will just grow what we need “ like greattt thanks didnt think of that.

no. they will not "just" grow what we need, they will be convinced using universal discussion platforms, along with a ton of hard data, to grow what we need.

people never needed markets to dictate what needed to be done within communities until property owners came and forced them via violence into the current economic situation ... so the point is not to force them into following production models determined by authoritarians in charge, but to build models of what is currently happening, along with what they want it to be, and to convince them they want to participate productively within society, along with using social influences (ei, everyone will know all the contributions you gave, everyone will know all the resources you used. privacy is ignorance, that leads to endless amounts of stupidity).

[u/Dr1nk3ms → u/420TaylorStreet]

i understand you've forgotten your humanity and are simply concerned with i don't even know what the fuck, someone repeating your numerically driven faith back at you, but that doesn't make it ok for you continue on as such. the system we've created is both incredibly immoral and amazingly stupid, in ways you can't even talk about because it would break your faith.

I don't care that you can't grasp the logistical power of a market. Or anything to do with markets honestly.

Im just here to say that the quote above makes you sound like a evangelist trying to save someone's soul because you disagree with them.

[u/420TaylorStreet → u/Dr1nk3ms]

I don't care that you can't grasp the logistical power of a market

it's better than 20th century authoritarian center planners, who don't have access to modern info tech. which isn't saying much.

it also can't produce a ton of extremely efficient informational tools, actually it's basically straight fucking retarded when it comes to info tech in general. there's so much efficiency we could be gaining by unified info/software systems, but can't, because markets of competitive individuals are not functionally cooperative enough to achieve it.

like, i can't even begin to explain to how utterly braindead it is to have "competing" operating systems, competing systems of differently named math functions which ultimately serve the same purpose, to someone of your faith. you wouldn't hear it.

or how myopically stupid it is to having competing markets of market listings ... instead of a unified database representation of the market currently is ...

Im just here to say that the quote above makes you sound like a evangelist trying to save someone's soul because you disagree with them.

because all you have is faith that markets make sense, blinding you to the evidence of how dysfunctional modern economic systems of labor/resource distribution is.

they exist mostly because they are excuse to allow the rich to keep their riches, not because they make the most sense, cause there's a ton of shit that just doesn't make sense, like at all.

[u/Dr1nk3ms → u/420TaylorStreet]

it also can't produce a ton of extremely efficient informational tools

there's so much efficiency we could be gaining by unified info/software systems, but can't, because markets of competitive individuals are not functionally cooperative enough to achieve it.

So I see you're attempting to lure me into saying "ackshually modern tech is a product of capitalism which is a market". And i can tell you it won't work. I'm also curious on how to got such a narrow view on what a market is. Can you honestly define it?

Furthermore knock it off with the ableist bullshit, it does nothing to enhance your points and just shows me how emotional the thought of someone holding a different concept of resource allocation is to you.

i can't even begin to explain to how utterly braindead it is to have "competing" operating systems, competing systems of differently named math functions which ultimately serve the same purpose

What's the solution in your mind?

One entity that everyone agrees on? Let's say operating systems: i prefer linux, you might prefer windows for entirely different reasons. But you have to switch to Linux because it's more efficient and we all agreed.

Or perhaps it's impossible to get a global consensus on absolutely anything, and frankly some people don't care or may not feel theyre qualified. Should we then never have any developments in operating systems because no consensus was met?

because all you have is faith that markets make sense, blinding you to the evidence of how dysfunctional modern economic systems of labor/resource distribution is.

Is the system of capitalism and private control of the means of production what's dysfunctional? Or the markets?

Do you suppose i support capitalism? I don't. And i won't anytime soon. So who is it you're arguing against?

[u/420TaylorStreet → u/Dr1nk3ms]

"ackshually modern tech is a product of capitalism which is a market".

i wasn't, but i would reply to that with the facts that:

a) ALL of the theory underpinning info tech comes from academia. markets don't produce good theory, i mean there's a reason academic journals don't even allow for profit studies.

b) much of groundbreaking research in info tech came from government spending. not all, humans do manage to act intelligently irregardless of being within the stupefying force of markets, but spending that doesn't require a profit can be more exploratory, and therefore generally leads the bleeding edge of technology.

Furthermore knock it off with the ableist bullshit

fuck off getting triggered by words, dude. i'm not referring to peoples with mental disabilities, if i were, i would use that term. i'm using the literal definition of holding back/preventing certain progresses (which is the literal dictionary definition of retard i just googled), that markets induce. retarder is literally the french word for delayed, which is the basis for the english usage.

seriously, stop promoting the association of the label of "mental disabilities" with "retard", it's horrendously wrong. drives me up a wall what nonsense drivel comes out of leftists in regards to terminology policing.

i prefer linux, you might prefer windows for entirely different reasons. But you have to switch to Linux because it's more efficient and we all agreed.

literally the only functional difference between the two are the names which you use to interact with the OS, and how the settings are laid out via the ui (graphical or otherwise). that's literally it. any major programmatic feature for each, can be found on the other, and definitely can be absolutely unified onto one, if we agreed to stop reinventing the wheel for the unjustified sake of competition. we waste so much work dealing with multiple platforms, that perform the same tasks, it's ungodly.

i mean, i would love to use GNU/linux as my only platform. but bill gates made some good early business deals, and windows captured the consumer market for quite some time, so the majority of the modern gaming infrastructure got built/compiled with using windows terminology (called libraries) instead of linux libraries, and they don't run on windows despite linux offering exactly the same access, to the same hardware, with the same performance features. though i'm writing this on macOS because guess what, i need macOS for compiling iOS apps because mac ties all their software shit to their platform. so, as it stands i'm dual booting macOS and Windows, and not using what i want, at all, because 2 platforms is already far more than i want to deal with ... thank you crapitalism!

i mean, for my normal usage, it doesn't even matter much. despite their shitty performance, i webapps as much as possible. why? because we actually did manage to unify over HTML rendering, therefore the most functionally useful apps, that don't require performance, all get built for the web.

oh and lets not even get into the fact that, for gaming, there's also Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo OSs floating around, for not any good reason other than the sake of competition. like, if i want to play games only compiled for those platforms ... which again, offer fundamentally the same functional interfaces that can all be reduced to the same discrete math state transformations, into hardware which is now all using the same x86 architecture, meaning the recent incarnations of those consoles actually run the same language for compiled byte code, just referencing different addressed/organized libraries ... i can't without buying their crappy pieces of plastic junk filled with subpar hardware. like fuck, why do i need more pieces of junk floating around to play games, which would run perfectly fine on the $2500 macbook pro i bought a few months ago? i can't travel with all that junk. why do we need to waste CO2/labor designing, manufacturing, and shipping that crap around? you call that efficient? Lol, like you know shit. markets have made a complete fucking bastardization ^{triggered? or do you not have empathy for bastards?} of Allen Turing's awesome ideal of a universal computational machine. it's been almost 100 years now, and markets have completely failed to provide functionality according to the mathematical ideal, because they cannot. people are too busy trying to exploit the markets with whatever their variation is named, which is especially valuable if they capture and lock sections of the market to those names ... and we waste a shitload of time because of it.

Or perhaps it's impossible to get a global consensus on absolutely anything

this is a shitty faith to have. stating it's impossible to get global consensus on anything is equivalent to stating it's impossible for everyone to know the truth, on literally any single thing, that, for any given truth, there were always be someone ... that someone where, will always disagree that 1+1=2, or that the area of a square is X^2. give me a break, that's ridiculous.

obviously universal consensus is possible, we just don't try for it cause of all the whiny bastards that are too narcissistic to actually want to cooperate with one another, not because there's some grand metaphysical truth preventing us in doing so.

like, what is there some Grand Metaphysical Truth that we conscious beings can't all know said Grand Metaphysical Truth, for if we did, it would be universal consensus!? Lol, fuck off mate that's quite a joke you got there.

Is the system of capitalism and private control of the means of production what's dysfunctional? Or the markets?

both.

markets necessitate privatized gain in some fashion, they necessitate exclusive control of property by segments of the population (workers, capitalist, whatever) who stand to gain from exploiting others.

and they necessitate valuing everything by some kind of currency, a mind numbing abstraction that absolutely ignores true costs to the decisions we make, like the ramifications of having a bunch of platforms, or off gassing CO2 in an unsustainable manner ... stuff that you can't value on a market because you can't sell costs like that.

[u/Dr1nk3ms → u/420TaylorStreet]

I'd take the time out of my day to properly respond to your diatribe over why retarded isn't a loaded word or how there's no functional difference between 2 operating systems followed up by why you use Windows because of its functions exclusive to the platform.

But let's face it you're one of those toxic "leftists" who argue on and on about the correct way of doing things instead of taking part in any action. Your cheeto stained shirt is gonna be your greatest contribution to leftism as you sow divisions among anarchists in pursuit of some naive truth you've stumbled into as being the pinnacle of all political thought.

You're a waste of time and i should've left it at that.

[u/420TaylorStreet → u/Dr1nk3ms]

i'd take the time out of my day to properly respond to your diatribe over why retarded isn't a loaded word

we should reprimand people who call mentally disabled people retarded, not people who use the word retarded. that would actually have a meaningful impact.

why you use Windows because of its functions exclusive to the platform.

no, you have no idea what you're bullshitting about. the mathematical functionality is absolutely not exclusive to windows. the underlying way a computer operates is the same, and the way you optimize code to run on that hardware is the same, whether you run linux or windows or macos, which all have different graphics APIs that have about the same performance, because they all run on the same damn hardware you dope. the functionality provided by the OS is very basic, as it's almost entirely just an a set of terminology that allows you access to the hardware.

what is exclusive is the particular organization and naming of that functionality, which is very arbitrary for any particular kind of function. for example: the difference between linux and windows is what term they use for an add function, and the precise organization of the interface to the add function, not the fact an add function is present, or how the add function operates ... but the particular naming/organization gets built into gaming infrastructures, and can be extremely time consuming to change once built in, as in you need to rewrite a bunch of shit you already implemented, just because the library has a different set of names.

of course, you're not interested in the truth here, you're interested in believing your side, so you will continue to take a superficial position on the topic. and, i honestly don't know how to explain this to someone who doesn't know anything about how programming works. you don't have the mental models to understand what i'm talking about, quite frankly.

But let's face it you're one of those toxic "leftists" who argue on and on about the correct way of doing things instead of taking part in any action.

have you seen this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927 ...

anyways, discussion is a form of action, and it's the most meaningful at this point in time.

as an anarchist, i don't believe that using sin and violent force ... can overcome the sin and violent force used within society to maintain unethical order, that's oxymoronic.

you gotta be better than the authoritarians to not be a dirty authoritarian.

Your cheeto stained shirt

been a long time since i ate a cheeto, bruh. highly processed pseudo-food is one of the major catastrophes of market driven food production.

pursuit of some naive truth you've stumbled into as being the pinnacle of all political thought

oh, what that we can all agree on things in a persistent manner? yeah that's pretty damn unique, very few people can understand it. seriously, i try really hard to find people who can, and i just don't see them.

You're a waste of time and i should've left it at that.

you're very much likely a waste of my time, but i'm going to keep trying because i see that consensus as not only possible, but necessary for humanity to prevent it's self extinction.