Thanks for starting this thread. > On Dec 27, 2025, at 08:25, Jim Farmelant via groups.io > <[email protected]> wrote: > > As we know, Coase would later on shift from being a socialist to become a > Chicago School conservative. A part of his rationale for this shift were the > claims that the administrative costs of planning rise rapidly with scale, > that planners face incentive problems and that legal and political > instiutions matter. But those were contingent conclusions, not refutations of > the young Coase's logic. Once markets were seen as costly institutions rather > than natural mechanisms, planning becomes a legitimate alternative wherever > it lowers coordination costs. The firm itself is empirical proof that > planning works; socialism extends this principle from private to collective > control.
Many ecosocialists would reject those criteria as having nothing to do with human well-being or the well-being of other species on this planet. I'm glad to have read more about Coase, however. Up to today, I only knew him from Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (https://spectrejournal.com/the-price-of-freedom/): 'Coase ... argued that economic activities are not unidirectional but “reciprocal”: their effects always go in two directions. The smoke from the factory chimney, for example, would have harmful effects on health only if people chose to live nearby: thus “both parties cause the damage.”48 Conversely, to limit smoke, as Pigou proposed, would impose a cost on the factory owner in the form of reduced production.49 Why, Coase asked, should the factory have to accept the costs of reducing smoke for the benefit of the neighborhood? Why instead should nearby residents not pay the factory to reduce the smoke, or move away from the area altogether? Economists could not answer these questions, Coase argued, without imposing moral judgments inappropriate to a technical field.' Battistoni, Alyssa. Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (p. 125). To flip a famous quote, both rich and poor have the right to live with industrial effluent or to "move away." > > In recent years, there has been a revival of interest among many socialists > in the development of new modes of socialist economic planning. The collapse > of the Soviet Union back in 1991, had convinced many people, including many > leftists, that socialist economic planning does not really work. > A class-based analysis might instead conclude that a nation state that has abolished its capitalist class didn't hold its own with international capital in production of military and personal goods. At least, this was arguably true during capitalism's most ecologically-destructive period on earth, post WW II (Pirani). One factor in the capitalist victory over the Soviet system might be in capitalism's superiority in exploiting many more planetary resources in the relentless quest to accumulate capital. Many of these resources were weaponized against the Soviet Union. But the ecological costs of infinite accumulation include warming the planet and causing its rotational pole to drift among PFAS and plastics poisoning, to name only a few. ... > This mirrors Coase’s insight that the price mechanism itself is costly to > use, and that non-market coordination expands whenever those costs can be > lowered relative to market exchange. In Coase’s terms, digital technologies > shift the boundary between market coordination and planned coordination > outward. > > More specifically, Cockshott’s reliance on input–output tables, algorithmic > allocation, and feedback-driven adjustment replaces the costly processes of > search, bargaining, contracting, and enforcement with standardized > computational rules. This is structurally identical to Coase’s explanation of > why firms substitute managerial direction for contracts: authority (or, in > this case, algorithmic governance) economizes on transaction costs. Digital > planning thus generalizes the Coasean theory of the firm to the economy as a > whole, arguing that when information processing and coordination costs fall > sufficiently, planning can outperform markets over wide domains without > invoking any claim of theoretical market “impossibility.” > One mistake of the Soviet system might have been the uncritical adoption of advanced capitalist techniques of production. I think it remains widely accepted on the left, for some reason, that a planned economy must outperform a capitalist one. Conversely, Harry Braverman lamented Lenin's embrace of Taylorism, which leads to deskilling the workforce (Labor and Monopoly Capital). And this focus on "outperforming" preexisted Coase's rightward shift to Hayek, et al. Nonetheless, this thread has given reasons for studying Coase someday. thanks, Mark -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39911): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39911 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
