@beadsland@disabled.social i definitely agree that the needs of people is more important than efficiency for its own sake. But I still see economization as a key way to achieve the needs and wants of people. That's wielded entirely for profit now, so we've never really seen people-centered economization, but I think it exists and is necessary.
You bring up worker co-ops, and that's an important area to touch on with regards to scale.
I haven't done a big post on this yet, but I have thought about one -- one of my favorite takeaways from Anwar Shaikh's work relates to labor and how the rate of profit gets determined.
Neoclassical drivel assumes that there's a "natural" rate of profit, which they more or less correlate to the average rate of profit, but in their usual style, this thing isn't real. It's a chicken nugget of shredded up ideas and idealization filling.
And they dance around this cause they don't wanna have to explain what Shaikh identifies as the real point of division between the profit share and the wage share, which is the relative power of the two groups.
On one end, you have slavery, all workers reduced to property, "paid" only in enough rations to live. The cost of up keeping labor at that point is more like material costs than a wage bill, so the entire surplus belongs to capital.
On the other end, you have communism, totally communally owned means of production, in which case, capital is reduced to a mere cost. There is no more "profit" in that sense, capital doesn't earn anything for itself unless a capitalist has power to assert that he gets paid on the machine's behalf too.
What does this have to do with efficiency?
Well depending on which end of that labor-capital power spectrum we're on, what efficiency means can vary a lot. The further down the capital side you go, the more it is measured in purely profit terms.
The further you push it on the labor side, there's certainly still an output component, but it gets way more flexible in terms of what it means to utilize resources efficiently.
Labor can make the choice to make a change that increases efficiency and use that increase in efficiency to reduce hours worked without reducing compensation.
Capital cannot make that choice. It's such a corrosive mindset that even though they theoretically could, they have all brainwashed themselves into believing that someone else would just eat their market share for it so trying to do anything good is pointless.
Personally, I think everything should be a co-op or public utility. But in a pinch, I would settle for coopertization of the major industries. The petit bourgeois are a mother fucker but I think they would be pretty containable if we could just knock the super centralized part of capital out
