Dialectically speaking, competition breeds innovation early on when there are many players competing, and over time evolves towards monopolies as the winners grow. It's an excellent example of why we can't reason about dynamic systems based on static snapshots.

[–] darkernations@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Agreed. I would also add even when there are multiple competitors there are still material conditions and dynamics to consider as it is still not a given:

(1) most of the world is under capitalism and most of the world is poor; the competition did not bring (formal or informal economy in the Global South) about the requisite innovation (eg: could be not enough time was given, or having to deal with yoke of imperialism. In liberalism the blame is "culture"/genetics ie a racist metaphysical explanation)

(2) a lot of innovation in capitalist countries is not under the direct drive of profit induced incentivisation (though could be argued indirectly it still is). For example, most larger corporations where the worker creates the innovation for a salary and maybe a bonus - everything from pharmaceutics to big tech to mineral extraction.

(3) what we consider the most innovative period of the West - the 20th century - was directly following socialist pressure from the USSR and domestic workers using that leverage, the concessions afforded in developing a much larger skilled workforce, being forced to take care of a lot of Maslow's pyamid for a chunk of the population (all of course subsidised by Global South exploitation) set the seeds for the burst of innovation that capitalism takes credit for - there were no internal mechanisms for such burst of innovation despite 2-4 centuries of capitalism.

But I do agree given the right material conditions (such as the western USSR-led concessions above or market forces under a dictatorship of the proleteriat as in PRC) competition does breed innovation - my cautions are maybe just the "depth"/"quantity"/"rate" of innovation may be lacking when there are no non-capitalist pressures.

Marx very clearly does give capitalism credit for its ability to supercede the productive capacity over feudalism and slavery; therefore I don't want to minimise what you said. Not only that, with massive subisidy from the Global South imperialist core countries did make strides in mathematics and physics in the 17th-18th centuries by creating the conditions to have sufficient researchers (if we set aside "inspiration" from the east/south)

Furthemore, I still have not got around to reading your recommendation: Thinking in Systems!

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This is where I think the real brilliance of Chinese system is where they combine top down planning at high level with market mechanisms at the execution level. Markets allow for dynamic allocation that happens organically, and create competition between different companies, meanwhile the party can guide overall development in the desired direction. Another thing that China does right is having the party own the golden share in large companies that emerge as natural monopolies, meaning that they're not making decisions purely based on their business interest. Ideally, I think the government should just straight up nationalize companies that become essential for the economy, but this is a decent compromise.

And yeah, thinking in systems is definitely worth a read and not too long. I found it's just a different perspective on dialectics framed using modern terms.

[–] darkernations@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Ideally, I think the government should just straight up nationalize companies that become essential for the economy, but this is a decent compromise.

I have only recently started to appreciate why pre-mature nationalisation (of non-commanding heights of economy) will introduce its own contradictions though these can be much more easily out-manouvered in a socialist system such as China's.

Before I became a marxist-leninist (with an emphasis on the leninism and the extension that the PRC is socialist ("even" after the Deng reforms, or one could argue that it won't have engaged in scientific socialism if it hadn't engaged in those reforms)) I would have thought it was given that "higher" wages, nationalisation and "free" universal healthcare are all immutable tenets of socialism; how wrong was I!

["Higher" wages - without having control over the prices that affect the cost of living you're just risking inflation. And if you don't reduce the cost of living by reducing the production costs of all those aspects of living then you are then potentially creating a subsidy for a poorer quality services and products. Strikes in a capitalist nation should ask for more than higher wages - they should ask for control over the cost of living otherwise they will just need another strike down the line - and in doing so will see the limits of trade unionsim.

Universal health care - is just an extension of the above cost of living concerns

Nationalisation - without a dictatorship of the proleteriat nationalisation is just another service to capital and introduces own inefficiencies of beaurocracy and lack of quality of service improvement with funds at the mercy of what ever transitional government is in place. In capitalist countries I would argue a truly public sector would be independent of the government, have commanding heights of issuing money and control over the means to defend itself while still not being profit based, with continous feedback mass line style. Ie parallel economy that is not beholden to a government at the mercy of its donor class, industrialists and financiers. But if you could do all those things... then you could have a dictatorship against capital.]

Going back to market dynamics, I remember reading Ha-Joon Chang's (cearly influenced by Marx but says himself not interested in the "poltical revolutionary" aspect; typical liberal BS) 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism where he mentions - I think in counter to the Economic Calculation Problem postulation - that the anarchy of the market is why you need an external force to guide where you want it to go, that the ECP demands such a government precisely you can't always predict what a market wants (Since then I have become a marxist and the ECP is obviously a pile of baloney and Chang was referring to South Korea's development conveniently ignoring the siege against socialism) - even non-marxists understand the limits of market.

This is where I think the real brilliance of Chinese system is where they combine top down planning at high level with market mechanisms at the execution level.

You are right and the remakable resource efficiency by doing so, countering market constraints and using market benefits astutely. (They also have mandaotry communist cells within every big enough corporation - you may have written about this too) It echoes, in my opinion, how they navigate anti-socialist culture - rather than spend disproportionate resources to convince the domestic and foreign populations of socialism it is better to create material conditions (relations rather than stresses) to generate the ideals - the material always come before the idea - and now you have the likes of Inside China Business as a shining example of a socially conservative redblooded USAmerican capitalist defending China more deeply than I have seen so-called western leftists wearing sickle and hammer aesthetics have done.

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I have only recently started to appreciate why pre-mature nationalisation (of non-commanding heights of economy) will introduce its own contradictions though these can be much more easily out-manouvered in a socialist system such as China’s.

Same, and reading thinking in systems really crystalized the problem for me. The fundamental issue is that you end up with slow and noisy feedback loops. You have signal going up from a factory to the central planners, it takes time to get there and to be analyzed, there is noise along the way, for example people might want to cook the numbers to make themselves good, etc. Once the signal makes it up the chain, it takes time for the decision to be made, then it has to travel back down. By the time it starts being implemented, the situation on the ground may have changed. This creates an oscillatory system where you end up having overcorrections and sharotages, and eventually the whole thing falls over.

And yeah, I completely agree that creating selection pressures is the right approach. The behavior is ultimately driven by what the system rewards, not what's mandated. If you try to create rules and expect people to follow them blindly, then you're doomed to fail. Instead, you want to set up the selection conditions that favor behaviors you're looking for, and then treat them as emergent properties of the system that don't need to be designed. In my view, creating the correct conditions to guide behavior is the primary task of the central planning apparatus.

[–] darkernations@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the explanations - agreed! (And I need to read TiS don't I!)

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 4 days ago

definitely worth it in my opinion :)