A Theory of an Optimal Strike

Interesting concept. The opposite was carried out in Chile before the Pinochet coup, where petty bourgeois shop owners would withhold stocks of food. The problem is that the bourgeoisie can survive without yachts and helicopters and so on whereas workers cannot survive without food. But perhaps there are some critical points, like making rent extraction impossible by building cheap union-only housing, thus putting pressure on the rentiers, some of which will be over-leveraged..

If we define some notion of damage then we can seek to maximize the ratio between the damage done to the bourgeoisie to the damage done to workers. The obvious measure of damage is to the capitalists' money purse. We also know that a long strike can be better weathered if food supplies and housing are guaranteed.

I've used the term "rate of cheating" for the amount that workers claw back in the post Shadow plans and ghost shifts. I think it may bear repeating that strikes have the problem that they produce no value. It would be even better to, rather than stopping work, to keep working, squirreling away goods produced for direct consumption by workers. This also takes away profit from the capitalists. That requires a system of planning to already be in place.

@thardin You're right, that's the tricky thing; liquidating the capitalist firm into the commune. Strikes won't work on their own.

One thing struck me as I was heading to uni today: by mapping the stock ownership of the major shareholders in a company and organizing solidarity strikes in overlapping companies, you can hit the entire portfolio of the majority shareholders.

@thardin I like it, so targeting index funds essentially? Seems like you could even target specific shareholders i.e lots of rightist political parties have a handful of reactionary finance patrons; good way to smother fascist movements in their crib.

You can't target every capitalist outside of a general strike. But yeah you could target individuals who are particularly bad.

Posted by: @madredalchemist

I want to move towards the planning part in Adversarial planning, more akin to tomas' framework, https://www.xn--hrdin-gra.se/blog/2021/02/24/planning-complexity-for-model-economies/

But instead of computing optimal inputs, it'll compute an optimal supply shock.

Right now, my centrality analysis is a bit blind, sectors are not distinct, it's simply finding a sector that where the economy is most vulnerable to cascade failure regardless of which sectors are failing. However, we'd like to minimize the downstream effects on workers and maximize downstream effects on bosses.

I ended up finding Ian's work on super-integrated labor coefficients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jROxFYv1bks

https://ianwrightsite.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/general-theory-labour-value2.pdf

I think this might be the special sauce; if a strike can be planned to induce a supply shock that maximizes the losses in the capitalist consumption sub-graph and minimize the losses the rest of the system we hurt the bosses with the least 'friendly fire'; "Better to sink a yacht than a cargo ship"

I wanted to use this thread to brainstorm. 

There needs to be a notion of a 'supply shock vector', a vector that when subtracted from present input renders an output that is optimal in the manner described above, which is the tricky part, any ideas?

Ian's super integrated labor coefficients are awesome, a real breakthrough in my internal model of LTV when I read about them. I'm not sure if they have special advantage for this purpose over other models - I think all you need is some way to get better disaggregated input-output tables. One thing you might do is try to look at what industries are most fundamental in BEA tables, then zoom in on major companies in that industry, looking at what companies have correlated financial data. Use that to build an index, add research on production techniques as you zoom in on a target.

@casperadmin Ehh I thought that I could compute a tactical strike in a way that would maximize losses to the capitalist consumption subgraph but the I/O stuff doesn't account for nonlinear things like centrality so the answer would just end up being "subtract labor from the industries in the capitalist consumption subgraph" which is trivial (i.e if we could we would)

The cross validation with finance networks is a better idea and I think the next step is figuring out how to target non/low-unionized industries with strikes in unionized ones. As an aside, if you checked out my post on centrality, did I use the right I/O table from BEA? ( https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=150&step=2&isuri=1&categories=Io#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTUwLCJzdGVwcyI6WzEsMiwzXSwiZGF0YSI6W1siY2F0ZWdvcmllcyIsIkdkcHhJbmQiXSxbIlRhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCI2MDA0Il1dfQ== ) 

Tomas' point about strikes not creating value makes me think if theirs any objective function to judge a strike by, it's if the gains from it are sufficient to construct the commons (i.e can gains from strikes and corresponding boost in dues revenue suffice to construct co-operative groceries, housing etc. for the union members).