Reply To: Article on Neurath
We have been aware of Neurath’s view for 40 or more years, as in this passage from an article published in 1984:
“There were three possible reactions to Von Mises’s criticism:
1. To accept that money would have to continue to be the unit of economic calculation in “socialism”;
2. To argue that labour-time could be the unit of economic calculation “in an economy where neither money nor exchange were present”;
3. To argue that in socialism “calculation in natura [in kind] can take the place of monetary calculation”.
(….)
Otto Neurath (later prominent as a logical positivist philosopher) argued that even labour-time accounting would be unnecessary in socialism (state capitalism). In an “administrative economy” production plans could be drawn up and executed directly and solely in real physical quantities:
‘The theory of the socialist economy knows only a single economic agent — society — which without profit-and-loss accounting, without monetary circulation — whether metallic money as now or labour-money — and on the basis of an economic plan, organises production without using a unit of account and distributes the means of subsistence according to socialist principles.’ (O. Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung, Berlin, 1925, p.84)
As the last part of this passage indicates, Neurath too argued that consumer goods could be directly allocated to people in kind.
(…)
In the end, then, it was Otto Neurath, with his view that socialist society could organise the production and distribution of wealth directly and solely in kind, who was on the right track.”
Having said this, Neurath did seem to have a rather centralised view of how production and distribution would be organised, with free distribution rather than free access.