Reddit reviews Red Plenty

Soviet planning was based on a system of five-year-plans, the first of which was enacted in 1928. The plans were comprised of the national targets as set down by the upper levels of the party. For instance, the first five-year-plan set a target for replacing the then current agricultural system with the kolkhoz, or collectivized farms.

The five-year-plans were rough guides that mostly dealt with the end states rather than the path to hit the various targets. The day-to-day planning was left to an agency known as Gosplan, or the State Planning Committee. In the absence of private property and a price system, Gosplan had to keep a massive inventory of every input within the economy. Given the targets, Gosplan officials would use a a system known as the method of material balances to allocate inputs to producers. Their decision making made heavy use of linear optimization. They would build production functions for every sector in the economy and would allocate resources based on which allocation maximized production functions relative to five-year-plan targets.

Obviously Gosplan could not perfectly predict the output of each producer. There were literally infinite complications that could occur to cause minor deviations in the plan. Even minor deviations create huge calculation costs, since if output in one sector didn't live up to the projections, it would reduce output in another sector. Since every single input had to be accounted for to fully optimize production, any problem would basically necessitate recalculating the allocation of almost every input in the economy. After de-Stalinization, Gosplan moved to using a partial price system to alleviate this huge calculation burden.

Edit: While not a work of history, Francis Spufford's Red Plenty is a fictionalization of Soviet planning and the people who made it happen. It's a moving and, in my mind, true to history look at this massive process.

Nice read about the historical massacres and bloodbath of communism:

The Rise and Fall of Communism

Funny story about the contradictions within communism - Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

somewhat close to truth.

I see Red Plenty finally has a US publishing date of 2/14/12. A great book!

Since I'm technically on spring break from classes, I'm about to start the People's History of the US as suggested by my cousin or this book my uncle got me on the economy of the Soviet Union.

What kind of books are you usually into?

EDIT: Here's the book about the Soviet Union

Karl Marx doesn't really give us a system of government. He gives us a critique of capitalism, with the occasional remark about how we might not be alienated under another system. If you really want to see how Marx talks about future governance, don't look to the Communist Manifesto, but to this later essay:

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

Lenin is the thinker you want instead of Marx if you need to talk about actually existing socialism.

This novel might also interest you:
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042

Edit: Also, there is no way of analyzing "objective effectiveness of hypothetical systems of government." You should define what you mean by "successful" as it pertains to your interests, and see how that trait is dealt with in the various thinkers that you read. You will not have the time or the space to do what you're proposing to do, which isn't a problem! But you should take some time and try to shrink down this project to Communism in a particular time or genre (i.e. literature or political pamphlet)

The problem is that Communism made its debut too soon and in the wrong place. I'm going to quote from Francis Spufford's Red Plenty. You should buy it. It's fantastic.

>The problem was that Marx had predicted the wrong revolution. He had said that socialism would come, not in backward agricultural Russia, but in the most developed and advanced industrial countries: in England, or Germany, or the United States. Capitalism (he’d argued) created misery, but it also created progress, and the revolution that was going to liberate mankind from misery would only happen once capitalism had contributed all the progress that it could, and all the misery too. At that point, there would be so much money invested by capitalists desperate to keep their profits up, that the infrastructure for producing things would have attained a state of near-perfection. At the same time, the search for higher profits would have driven the wages of the working class down to the point of near-destitution. It would be a world of wonderful machines and ragged humans. When the contradiction became unbearable, the workers would act. They would abolish a social system that was absurdly more savage and unsophisticated than the production lines in the factories. And paradise would very quickly lie within their grasp, because Marx expected that the victorious socialists of the future would be able to pick up the whole completed apparatus of capitalism – all its beautiful machinery – and carry it forward into the new society, still humming, still prodigally producing, only doing so now for the benefit of everybody, not for a tiny class of owners.

If the USSR hadn't come about and poisoned the words "Communism" and "Socialism" (or, I should clarify, caused the West to poison those terms), there would still be some hope of Marx's dream coming about. As it is now, though, no matter how bad it gets, every's just going to go "Fuck Communism!" and trudge on about their repressed way.

Seek mental help. At one level the answer is that Marxists are right: the revolution was supposed to happen in a highly developed country and the socialist system was dependent on the plenty that an industrial economy could bring. ("Red Plenty" is good on this. take a good peak at it on your kindle if you don't mind spending the change: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042)

Neither Tsarist Russia nor China were the right place according to Marx's theory. But somehow many Marxists seemed to forget the theory and the iron laws of history once the USSR was established.

Stalin's war crimes, human rights violations, purges, little bizarre anti-semitic campaign disguised as going after the "rootless cosmopolitan" https://www.rbth.com/history/327399-stalin-versus-soviet-jews (hypocritical given his claims supposedly bashing the ideology, and the historical Jewish presence among leftist groups leading up to the Revolution) are well documented. I don't need to explain that to you or drag it out here, if you wish to willingly ignore it and assume it's all "western bullshit" then have fun in the asylum. All you have is ignorance and blindness to the facts. http://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/moderneurope/laura-hill/

China wasn't much better.

https://www.ft.com/content/762ad992-1be0-11e6-b286-cddde55ca122

China under Mao and the USSR (the same can be applied to the kim cult state today) weren't “true socialist” countries but rather “countries striving to build socialism”. This was their own claim until Khrushchev announced that the first part of socialism had been attained in the 1950s.

However, soviet (and, even more so, Chinese) “socialism” lacked the core feature that is meant to characterize the system; democratic control.

The command economy had a very unsocialist effect on society and disenfranchised ordinary people leading to an odd kind of bureaucratic, inefficient blend of state capitalism and feudalism.

In the end, the leaders in the USSR and China started to redefine socialism to justify their system but any real analysis of the way things worked in these societies feeds the conclusion that they were not socialist in the sense meant by Marx or even most of Marx’ rivals in the socialist movement.

The same thing happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot
http://endgenocide.org/learn/past-genocides/the-cambodian-genocide/
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/khmer-rouge-cambodian-genocide-united-states/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnVn2YzXypo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SI8RF6wDE

Also in Ethiopia under the Derg . And I know many Ethiopians and Cambodians' parents that would testify to this firsthand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX-I6HK_FSw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opqIf3dZ3xs

Not to mention the shit-show of the North Vietnamese so called "communists". BTW fuck the US, they were a bunch of corrupt imperialist genocidal maniacs during the war murdering and raping plenty of civilians, but war crimes were a plenty by the vietcong 'comrade's. Plus the Hmong were literally being genocided by other similar "comrades". https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/laos-forgotten-killing-fieldsandquot/Content?oid=2174619

This was just a continuation of generations of anti-Hmong prejudice that already existed in Laos. The Pathet Lao killed dozens of people. https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/historpedia/home/politics-and-government/the-secret-war-and-hmong-genocide-fall-2012

And in countless other shit-shows masquerading as 'marxist thought'. Fake communists who were just either genocidal psychopaths or power-hungry despots. There was no intention of a true democratic worker's paradise or a stateless society in which the workers controlled the means of production. This was only terror.

You don't have to be a Marxist-Leninist to be credible in any way, shape or form. Lose that sectarian bullshit.

Am înţeles că Why Not Capitalism, de Jason Brennan, ar fi o replică mai bună, n-am început-o, dar recenziile sunt favorabile. Mie mi-a plăcut mult Red Plenty.

You might enjoy reading Red Plenty, which is a novelization of lots of very dry Soviet planning documents and ideological treatises. It's not a controversial position to say that Marx was a materialist, or the Soviets after him.

> Demurrage the shares at whatever rate means that it would take you putting in the same portion of your stollars each unit of time to stay in the same place?

That makes sense. It's equivalent to my model, but with only a limited amount of companies you can vote for per "election" cycle. Neat solution for voting, as well.

> Are you sure that the ability to grow that large isn't just an effect of regulatory capture?

I guess I can't be? My point is that a monopoly on invested capital is as problematic as a monopoly on e.g. railroad stock, and as such a company that massively outranks the next competitor in terms of capital investment should be treated the same as a natural monopoly.

> If you can explain why even amazon as a co-op is a problem, then sure.

Coopazon would be able to insert itself as a crucial part of a supply chain and proceed to eliminate all competition through predatory pricing, then create class separation in the same way the Yugoslavian energy coop did.

> Woah, really? Source?

It's mainly linear programming (developed by Leonid Kantorovich and intended for economic planning. There's an absolutely excellent fictional novel about him), Krylov spaces (developed by Aleksey Krylov, a Tsarist admiral who switched sides during the war to become a Soviet admiral -- quite an interesting character as well), as well as a ton of work building on the works of Kantorovich, Markov (e.g. Markov chains), or Chebyshev (e.g. information theory) -- Markov and Chebyshev were both dead by the time of the revolution, but their students and their students' students published a ton of theory that is used today. You've also got Kolmogorov, famous for Kolmogorov complexity, as well his collaborator Vladimir Arnold. I don't have a good source, I just work in AI currently trying to teach a robot language with a bunch of old Soviet mathematics :)

Anyway, Kantorovich developed his theory of linear programming in 1939. He tried for years to convince people that the idea should be applied to economic planning, which is actually not a stupid idea (if economic allocation was not a nonlinear problem, his idea would give a provably optimal solution). Brezhnev finally told him to stuff it after getting into power, then proceeded to take away the majority of his funding for being insufficiently Stalinist in his approach to mathematics.

> Have you run into my concept of stratodemocracy

No, but please explain!

Sounds like you'd enjoy some sci-fi economics: https://www.amazon.ca/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042

I've heard it's really good if you're the right type, though haven't read it myself.

EDIT: to add on to the above, I wrote a little bit more in another comment about how I discovered this book:
>I read a huge blog post over a series of days going in depth about market planning and it single-handedly (and quite enjoyably) convinced me that a market economy is the only feasible (if imperfect) way to do things. This was the blog post I think: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/
It seems that it would take a computer the size of the sun to process the multi-million by multi-million matrix of inputs and outputs in an economy.

Concerning the USSR, it's all relative to the conditions that existed beforehand. Living standards absolutely did rise. People had health care, housing, a job, free education and the security of a generous pension. Simply listing every negative thing that happened in 75 years does not mean it was "an awful place" to live for most people for most of that time.

Red Plenty is a great book about the myth and reality of the Soviet Union. It was a time of great hope and crushing disappointment..

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042

>Practically the entire economy was based on malinvestment

This is demonstrably false. From the conclusion of non leftist economists:

>Surprisingly, the evidence from our examination of nine industrial sectors during the period 1960–1984 shows only small differences in measured allocative inefficiency between the United States and Soviet economies.

Their ability to divert resources and invest capital in the most efficient manner is on par with the US in the same time period.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00153775