I’ve been dabbling with the idea of communism for quite some time now, but one thing has always prevented me from being fully convinced. How do you allocate the inherently scarce resources. I strongly believe that a local person/company knows better how to allocate resources efficiently than a central government 100s km away. For example food. A central government will never be able to know the area as well as locals. How do you solve this?

  • Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Through responsiveness between local and national (or global) concerns, something that the market system is not as good at as Neo-classical economists want us to believe. It is a bit myopic to think that capitalist firms today don't engage in decision making about resources 100km away either. Large firms already engage in significant economic planning internally, markets are not a resource efficient mechanism as much as they are a profit mechanism. I still have not seen a convincing argument as to where the breaking point is between a large firm engaging in internal planning and a planned national economy. Even capitalist economies engaged in widespread planning and non-market mechanisms of resource allocation during the second world war, and they did it without the widespread computing we now have.

    If you want a short but detailed book to read which also dives into the mathematics of how to compute this, Economic Planning in an Age of Climate Crisis is good as it deals with optimal uses of resources and consumer demand. Two of the authors also wrote Towards a New Socialism which also deals with similar issues. We've had the mathematical concepts to do this for a hundred years, there is a reason Kantorovich won a nobel prize in economics. Linear programming is still taught today as a way to calculate efficient uses of resources, not to mention the advances capitalist firms have created since then in figuring out efficient ways to produce and move good internally without a market mechanism.

    There are a few other authors who have long books engaging with how to do this as well which I can recommend to you if you want more.

    If you want to bring up the criticism that soviet planners failed to respond to local conditions, just remember they used abacuses almost right up to the end to compute things, and information traveled slowly. Its amazing they were able to accomplish what they did tbh.