Voyou wrote:
>
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> Thanks for that summary. I have to say, this looks (like Parecon) to be
> a very complicated system for simulating a market, while the market is
> itself a complicated system for simulating a planned economy (planned by
> Walras's auctioneer). This seems like a remarkable waste of effort.
One source of the 'problem' is the totalitarian nature of the isolated brain, which has complete control over its 'product.' Hence any attempt to plan (!) the future ends up with a potential totalitarian society. Sweezy's insight is crucial here: There cannot be a scienceof a socialist society because science can only be carried out by experts, and a socialist society must be a democratic society (in the original sense of democracy: rule by the _demos_). One of the earliest scribblings we have from Marx is the letter with the beautiful phrase, "recipes for the cookshops of the future," and whatever other changes his thought went through, I think he held to this perception to the end. I've read a page or twoo of Cockshott in past years and got bored at once. I agree commmmmpletely: "a remarkable waste of effort."
For one thing, we have absolutely no idea whatever of what will be the conditions (and the prior history) under which a socialist movement would achieve power, and those unknowable conditions, including the preceding years of struggle within a vulnerable capitalist regime, would totally determine the range of options open to the members of that embryonic society. To even guess at those conditions is to claim possession of a crystal ball.
Carrol