You write:
> CB: How now , Boddi ?
>
> I've heard Marxists say that socialism will have cost accounting. The
> planning of production will certainly involve counting up a lot of things by
> the planners. We don't want "finance", the magic of money as indirect
> counting. We want direct counting of needs and means to meet needs.
>
> As to commodities, the problem with the historically developed commodity
> exchange system is that it leads to anarchy of production. Commodity
> producers "isolated" from each other ( private producers) inevitably and
> often produce a total supply that doesn't fit demand. For, these private
> producers' aim only to increase their private wealth, to appropriate
> privately. The critical change we need is that the aim of production be to
> produce "social" wealth, wellbeing for all, to a woman, child and man.
> Aiming that way will make a better fit between demand and supply.
Why don't we want "finance" of the "magic of money"? I understand the prejudice, but I think it's naive to conclude that we don't want money or finance.
The problem with "direct counting of needs" is that it doesn't create a ranked decision space very well. There are plenty of things that people don't need, but they really want and plenty of things they would like, but they wouldn't pay for and would not be comfortable sacrificing things for.
Filling out a questionaire is not as real a process as allocating scarce cash.
I don't see the anarchy of production as all that bad, frankly. Most everybody who produces stuff ends up selling it somewhere. What I see is a real lack of production - too many people have too little and do work that is too unproductive because they are not part of a well-oiled interdependent economy.
The tragedy is not that people want what they don't have. That's bad, but it's been the case for most of human history. The tragedy is that people want to work - want to be productive in exchange for their needs - and find no opportunity. It's tragic that people *want* to provide for each other and are denied the means because they lack even small amounts of capital.
Social wealth and material wealth may not be the same thing, but they are closely related. Material wealth is a subset of social wealth. Uniform re-allocation of world GDP would mean about $7 thousand per person per year GDP which probably means $5K-$6K per person per year disposable income - not terrible, but not great either. I'm not quite sure of those numbers, but I think they are about right.
Socialism needs to foster economic growth as well as redistributing income - especially with the high levels of non-commercial investment anticipated under a socialist system.