On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 01:41 PM, Charles wrote: > > This is all technical stuff that leaves out the main class choice. Profit > and capital accumulation are absent. The one mention of profit is > mechanical, quoting Coase: "The main reason why it is profitable to > establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price > mechanism"
I don't disagree with you on that point. You might recall that in the "Why do Marxist economists avoid using math, and what kind of conclusions do they reach without it?" thread, I suggested that might be possible to create a partial synthesis of Marxian and Coasean economics. With regards to economic planning and the socialist calculation debates, we might attempt to create a synthesis where Coase would supply the mechanism (how coordination becomes cheaper), while Marxism would supply the critique (whose interests that coordination serves and why). The result is a framework that explains not only that digital planning can work, but why it becomes politically salient under capitalism. And yes, I would agree that Coasean economics by itself would lead to a technocratic approach to socialist economic planning. A Marxist might appreciate that digital technologies lower transaction costs in ways that systematically favor large-scale coordination and undermine competitive markets. It's already the case that platforms, logistics networks, and data infrastructures socialize production in practice, even as ownership remains private. A Coasean reading explains this as a shift in the cost boundary between market exchange and internal coordination; a Marxist reading adds that this shift intensifies class contradictions by concentrating control over socially integrated production in private hands. Digital planning proposals like Cockshott’s thus appear not as utopian blueprints but as attempts to reclaim, for collective purposes, coordination capacities that capitalism itself has created to economize on costs. I that most of us here are aware of how both Amazon and Walmart have created platforms that allow them to manage electronically private economies that are as large and as complex as the economies of entire countries. Imagine what could be accomplished if that technological infrastructure was taken out of private hands and brought under social ownership. The kind of synthesis being suggested here reframes socialist planning as neither a moral aspiration alone nor a purely technical fix, but as a historically grounded response to capitalist development. Coasean logic shows how algorithmic planning can outcompete markets in specific domains by reducing coordination costs; Marxism explains why these domains expand, because capital seeks to discipline labor, stabilize accumulation, and manage interdependence at scale. Digital planning thus becomes a form of democratic reappropriation: replacing privately controlled, cost-minimizing hierarchies with collectively governed ones, without abandoning Coase’s insistence that institutions must be judged comparatively, by their real informational and administrative costs rather than by abstract ideals. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39896): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39896 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116961607/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
