Yes, he is very good on why a

[ALB]

Yes, he is very good on why a “transitional society” between capitalism and socialism is an impossible contradiction in terms, but I see he comes out in favour of the “labour-time voucher” system mentioned once by Marx as one way of allocating consumer goods in a “first phase of communist society ” (had it been established in 1875).”Labour-time vouchers” seems to be an American disease. What with the SLP, Parecon and now Kliman and the Marxist-Humanists all favouring it. Still, it could have been worse. At least they accept that socialism does involve the end of commodity-production as production for the market and the end of money as the medium of market exchanges. Not that a labour-time voucher scheme could have lasted for any length of time before collapsing back into commodity-production, despite Marx’s tepid blessing for the conditions that obtained in 1875.Having said this, there is one who has moved beyond this — Paul Mattick (father). This is what he wrote in 1970,ie after a further 100 years development of the forces of production:

Quote:

In the advanced capitalist countries, that is, in the countries where a socialist revolution is possible, the social forces of production are sufficiently developed to produce means of consumption in overabundance. More than half of all capitalist production as well as the unproductive activities associated with it (totally disregarding the productive forces which are not exploited) surely have nothing to do with real human consumption, but only make sense in the irrational economy of capitalist society. It is clear, then, that under the conditions of a communist economy, so many consumption goods could be produced that any calculation of their individual shares of average socially necessary labor time would be superfluous.

That’s more like it. Mind you the Marxist-Humanists are not likely to think too much of Mattick after his hatchet job on their founder, Raya Dunayevskaya (that first appeared in the Western Socialist, then the journal of our companion parties in the US and Canada).