Aeiough wrote:’With

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ALB
Keymaster
Aeiough wrote:
'With collective production…There is no reason why the producers should not recieve paper tokens permitting them to withdraw an amount corresponding to their labour time from the social consumption stocks.'Capital, Vol 2, the Penguin edition, page 434.

I think that translaion is a bit too prescriptive. The Moscow Foreign Language Pubishing House translation has "for all it matters". The French translation has "si l'on veut", i.e if you like. The original German word is "meinetwegen" which my German dctionary says means "so far as I am concerned" or "for all I care". Othe translations say it means  "I don't mind", even "whatever" (though I doubt that usage was current in Engels's day as the one who edited Marx's notes!).  In any event, David Fernbach who translated the Penguin edition doesn't seem to have taken enough care over this passage. "As far as I'm concerned the producers could" seems a more accurate translation than "there is no reason why the producers should not". In other words, Marx was saying that labour-time vouchers were just one way amongst others of distributing consumer goods in the early stages of socialism, not the (only) way.I know this is getting a bit Talmudic, but is here any native German-speaker (or professional translator) out there who can help? The passage occurs at the end of Chapter 18 here:http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me24/me24_351.htm#Kap_18_II