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Why wouldn't you???

Yeah those um 2 IBM 360's your talking about have no where near a modern iphones processing power or storage.

So Im assuming your going off of this?
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf

1993 is a looooong time ago. We have gone literally from MB harddrives to petabyte clusters for the joe blow company or even a person if he or she really wanted to... let alone the NSA's Zetabyte clusters

The question is why wouldn't you want that type of A.I. monitor supply/demand/logistics all the way to the local level? I mean corporations do this today why not just merge them all into one system?

Planning of what at the local level?

To remind you that agriculture is becoming increasingly automated as well.

Have you partaken in local politics/ community politics before? It is hardly efficient/smooth.

Planning the local economy.

Im kind of basing my thoughts off of this town
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/marinaleda-spanish-communist-village-utopia

Its seems like they are running fine without the help of super computers managing their economy for them. It almost seems like just the state of mind that they are in is keeping them moving forward.

There is a big difference in Computing and cost today than there was 23 years ago. The gift cards you give to friends/family that have cute sayings have way more processing power than the computers in WW2. I think its easily 10x more.

See to me the planners wouldn't be as needed as once the "fancy software" is developed I.E. a powerful A.I. I'm sure even today with Java, Python, C+ or even as old as REX you could write a program that would destroy Cybersyn and the amount of planners necessary for operation let alone a complex A.I.

Been a while since I replied, sorry for that.

Azul:
Selection by lot isn't bad, and is truly democratic. I have nothing against that. The points I posted seem to me to be a minimum of democratic procedure needed. You ask if bourgeois parties should be allowed, and my response is 'meh'. It really depends on local conditions, though I'm inclined to allow them, for the simple reason that I don't expect they will have much support, while any degeneration would not require outright capitalist parties. About recallable candidates, yes, I do take it literally. 15 minutes after the election they can be recalled. I don't see it as much of a problem, really. But having some limit between an election and when they can be recalled, in order to prove themselves, isn't that much of an imposition.

On administration:
I am fully confident that modern literacy and numeracy mean that we can implement the part-time administrative staff point immediately. On the other half of the issue, where you point out the need for all work to be part time. I'm also fully confident that this part can be implemented relatively quickly. There are so many jobs that can be abolished or downsized right now. Jewlery manufacture, advertising, finance, insurance, commodified cultural production.... So these jobs take up a huge chunk of the workforce, people which can be put to work in productive jobs, reducing the need for individuals to work the same hours while producing the same amount of s**t (this is important in general, but also specifically with regard to your point about remunerattion). If the average work week is cut down to 20 hours, then adding another 10 for admin s**t will still result in much lower work week over all, leaving more time for education, cultural, and scientific pursuits. If this results, at first, in more admin work, then I am ok with that, so long as there is not a group of people who become deciders and implementers separate from the rest of the population. My denunciations of bureaucracy are not the leninist criticisms of red tape, but of that group of deciders and implementers separate from the producers who are in a position to appropriate a part of the social labour for themselves.

You point out that there's a difference between decision making admin and paper pushing admin work, and that's entirely correct. But that decision making, whether in bureaucracy or in a factory or in a food distribution warehouse/supermarket/however s**t is organised then is a 'responsible position' that should be subject to election or, as you suggested, selection by lot.

On workplace management:
My position is informed by the results of what happened in the Soviet Union with the spetsi and party/soviet management (Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat is a really good read on this). This might have not been evident at the time, but we have history to help say how things work out, so.

On the vanguard:
Sure, the 'taking power' part and the 'revolutionising social relations' part are very different, have different timescales, and different participants, however in this case I was only talking about the 'taking power' part. I don't think voting in current elections really constitutes political activity, but regardless of whether it does or not, I was talking about in a revolution. There will be a general collapse of whatever form of rule is present, the mass of the class will mostly go about its business as normal, keeping an eye on how things go for that minority of the class engaged in the important strikes, street battles, and political activity in whatever organs are thrown up. That section of that minority which is leading and directing these efforts, both through personal influence, organisational connections, and class politics, that forms the vanguard. The point was, however, that I don't think there's any need for 'a' vanguard party, but also that opposiition to vanguardism is just nonsense. I really don't think it's meaningful to talk of a vanguard outside a revolutionary situation, however.

I don't think you really addressed what I said in my 'two possibilities' of the left at the moment. You mmade some comments, but I don't think they were really addressing what I was asking, and I am interested in what your thoughts are.
Possibility 1: The ideas of the left (as a whole) have been shown to be wrong by the trend fo the last few decades of leftist impotence and decline.
Conclusion 1: We need to find out what is wrong, and fix it.
OR
Possibility 2: The ideas of the left (or some subset of the left) are correct, however there has been no organisational success because the historical situation is such that there is no possibility for success in this period.
Conclusion 2: ease off the party form at the moment, recognise that the point at this stage is to 'hold the torch' for a future generation in another period, and treat activism as a subculture and not a meaningful or useful activity.

I don't know which of those is correct, which is why I bring it up often.
(my instinct is anti-voluntarist cynicism, while also participating in the activist subculture because it's not like I have anything else to do, but that isn't an answer, is it)

(Also, Draper's points on organising and political centres is what I currently subscribe to, though I find the schactmanite politics is something I find gross)

On 'the abbility to produce more stuff':
I didn't say that 'the ability to produce more stuff' is what determines coordination, nor was it the intended implication. The intended implication, rather, was that iit should. And 'producing more stuff' would be systemic purpose. I desire a post-scarcity world, and post scarcity means producing and distributing a ******** of s**t. Yes, we produce a lot now, but just as you point out, the ability to produce has increased the necessity of coordination, and that coordination is not possible under capitalism. Now, maybe you were pointing out that it's not simply how much we produce, but also what we produce, and that's a fair point (though if so, you raised it in an abstract way).

I'm not talking about the robots vs. human labour issue.



True, but it's impossible to generate every variant of every possible plan in advance. Correct quantities are going to have to be produced as they are needed, when they are needed. Massive databases aren't needed for that, just a solid technique. If data is to be stored, the main point would be to provide sufficient background knowledge for Bayesian tests of systemic stability. There is a rational kernel in the calculationist's argument. While it's true that a plan can be calculated with today's technology, there's more to the kind of planning that we want, and complexity dictates that there's no "abacus" for that. However it doesn't follow that the planning task is impossible, it means that instead of a metaphorical "abacus", we need metaphorical "scales" - just as we use scales to determine whether two weights are the same, without having to count each individual atom. This is the possibility that the calculationists overlook.

Just this: systems of unfathomable complexity can still be managed, just not algorithmically, but heuristically. It's this option that Hayek et al. don't take into account.