askchapo

Where would be a good place to start? Should I just quote Das Kapital to him?

of course not. start with value, price and profit and engels' synopsis of das kapital

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/

that said, it's probably most fruitful to focus on the "supply" side of things. how are goods and services supplied? does the supply of goods and services ultimately depend on anything else that perhaps provides the true source of value? some kind of socially useful labor time, perhaps? get your friend to the labor theory of value on his own intuition and he'll drop this silly supply and demand liberal economics nonsense.

Just bring up the Daraprim price hike and ask him if that was a predictable effect of supply and demand.

S&D do not govern the markets. Power does. Every economic relation has a social relation behind it. Marx says this in tens of thousands of words but sometimes you need to whack someone over the head with a grotesque example when you make a parameter arbitrarily large to understand the mathematical function behind it.

Even if we accept his argument that it's too complex for humans and need computers to manage it, I'll point to Wall Street high-speed trading software that already runs the economy by this logic. It means we should seize Wall Street and direct those machines towards a different outcome.

Besides, we don't need super-intelligent AI, just computing resources. It's computationally feasible to turn the economy into a big sheet of equations that need balancing. If you squint it's a bunch of Linear Algebra. Like a chess AI, the question becomes how long do you give the computer to calculate a more fine-grained production balance. Finally, we can fudge all of this with buffers (storage tanks, grain silos, warehouses, etc) that can store these materials to absorb inaccuracies in the planning or simply to prepare when plans need changing, like a natural disaster. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell's Toward a New Socialism details such a program.

Marx's point is that capitalism is the tyranny of value. Value is useless to communists because it's useless to humanity. Capitalism is bad because it is the just and fair exchange of equivalents, not because it is an inefficient exchange.