ALB
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Here is what Marx wrote in chapter 3 section 2c of volume 1 of Capital, alluding “here only to inconvertible paper money issued by the State and having compulsory circulation”:
”The State puts in circulation bits of paper on which their various denominations, say £1, £5, &c., are printed. In so far as they actually take the place of gold to the same amount, their movement is subject to the laws that regulate the currency of money itself. A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold. Such a law exists; stated simply, it is as follows: the issue of paper money must not exceed in amount the gold (or silver as the case may be) which would actually circulate if not replaced by symbols. Now the quantity of gold which the circulation can absorb, constantly fluctuates about a given level. Still, the mass of the circulating medium in a given country never sinks below a certain minimum easily ascertained by actual experience. The fact that this minimum mass continually undergoes changes in its constituent parts, or that the pieces of gold of which it consists are being constantly replaced by fresh ones, causes of course no change either in its amount or in the continuity of its circulation. It can therefore be replaced by paper symbols. If, on the other hand, all the conduits of circulation were to-day filled with paper money to the full extent of their capacity for absorbing money, they might to-morrow be overflowing in consequence of a fluctuation in the circulation of commodities. There would no longer be any standard. If the paper money exceed its proper limit, which is the amount in gold coins of the like denomination that can actually be current, it would, apart from the danger of falling into general disrepute, represent only that quantity of gold, which, in accordance with the laws of the circulation of commodities, is required, and is alone capable of being represented by paper. If the quantity of paper money issued be double what it ought to be, then, as a matter of fact, £1 would be the money-name not of 1/4 of an ounce, but of 1/8 of an ounce of gold. The effect would be the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as a standard of prices. Those values that were previously expressed by the price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of £2.”
Here is Paul Mattick jnr’s reply;
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/11/field-notes/Inflation-Government-Policy-and-Profits-an-Exchange
First error is about Marx and the Quantity Theory of Money. He did indeed “roundly criticise” it where gold and/or a paper currency convertible on demand into a fixed amount of gold was the currency. He argued that it only applied when there was an inconvertible paper currenc
Paul Mattick is right that the prices of commodities can rise for all sorts of reasons other than a depreciation of the currency but this does not alter the argument that over-issuing an inconvertible paper currency does cause a rise in the general price level. Obviously, contrary to what he supposed to be the argument, this does not happen immediately it one go; it spreads throughout the economy as sellers have occasion to increase their prices.
Two contrasting headlines in today’s papers showing the government’s priorities;
”Four million public sector workers to have pay frozen.”
and
“Navy is big winner in Johnson’s £16bn defence spending spree.”
And they said they couldn’t afford to pay for free meals for deprived kids during half term,
Meanwhile, according to this, the old US military/foreign policy establishment is trying to postpone implementing Trump’s decision to quickly withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan (just as they now admit they did over Syria) until Biden takes over in the expectation that he won’t be so keen to do this.
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-54968200
So, whose the greater evil now?
Well, it wouldn’t be socialism since, in a socialist society where both the means of production and the products would be commonly owned (ie belong to no one or no group within society), why would there be a need to put a price on everything? You only need to that when a section only of society owns the means of production and needs to sell what is produced.
Perhaps today, given the enormous development of computing power since the days of Mises, Lerner, Lange and the others, it might be theoretically possible for a computer or network of computers to second guess the prices that the market would produce, but what would be the point?
To organise the production and distribution of goods and services, even under capitalism, there needs to be calculations in physical units (tonnes of steel, kilowatt hours of electricity, so many workers with a particular skill, etc). But, in order to calculate profits, capitalism needs to duplicate this “calculation in kind” with a calculation in money as a general unit of account. In socialism this duplication will be unnecessary. The calculation in a general unit of account is dropped and we calculate just in physical quantities.
This chapter from our pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative sets out how a socialist society could organise the production and distribution of wealth without money:
“The transformation of a highly cultivated society like Germany in the 1930s into a murderous death cult provides all the evidence we need for the existence of the ‘death instinct’.”
No it doesn’t. It is possible to give a more rational account of the rise of fascism in Germany in terms of economic, social and historical circumstances.
In any event, to prove the existence of a “death instinct” you need to show that this exists in every individual human. Which, quite apart from other considerations, what happened then in Germany does not provide.
There is simply no such thing as a “death instinct” in humans.
Here’s two passages quoted in this article from the Socialist Standard, in which Marcuse contemplates a minority dictatorship to unbrainwash the majority:
In An Essay on Liberation (1969) he writes:
“True, such government, initially, would not have the endorsement of the majority ‘inherited’ from the previous government—but once the chain of the past governments is broken, the majority would be in a state of flux and, released from the past management, free to judge the new government in terms of the new common interest.”
and, in a talk given to Berlin students in 1967 (published in Five Lectures):
“You can of course say, and I say it to myself often enough, if this is all true, how can we imagine these new concepts even arising here and now in living human beings if the entire society is against such an emergence of new needs. This is the question with which we have to deal. At the same time it amounts to the question of whether the emergence of these new needs can be conceived at all as a radical development out of existing ones, or whether instead, in order to set free these needs, a dictatorship appears necessary, which in any case would be very different from the Marxian dictatorship of the proletariat: namely, a dictatorship, a counter administration, that eliminates the horrors spread by the established administration. This is one of the things that most disquiets me and that we should seriously discuss.”
More good news about technologies that could be applied in socialism and may even be under capitalism:
Your critic seems to be assuming that you were advocating a system of central planning (as proposed by Lange, Lerner, Taylor, etc) in which the state tries to price goods at the same level that they would be if the market had been allowed to establish them. This wouldn’t be socialism but some form of state capitalism. The critics might be right that such a system wouldn’t work, at least not for long or not as intended but it is not what socialists advocate.
Socialism is a system where, on the basis of the common ownership of productive resources, goods and services are produced directly to satisfy people’s needs. The problem socialist society will have will not be how to sell what has been produced (since what is produced will be commonly owned) but how to distribute it to people for them to satisfy their needs.
In some cases this could be by the direct allocation of something; in others by the provision of a free service; in yet others it could be left for people to take from the common stores what they consider they need. In all cases there would be no buying and selling, no pricing and no money. It is this that the partisans of the ECA say is impossible and irrational.
Their arguments are full of holes.
When Hayek’s argues that when people buy something they are voting for that to be produced he ignores — in fact accepts — the unequal distribution of purchasing power under capitalism with what the majority can buy being rationed by how much they are paid as wages.
It’s the same with Mises. He criticises socialism as not been able to make rational decisions about production but that’s because he defines rational as decisions made by the market. But that is not the only definition of rationality.
Both of them are assuming that “scarcity” exists but, again, this is a matter of definition. They define this not in the usual sense of a shortage of something or an inability to produce enough of it but as the absence of “sheer abundance”(everything growing on trees waiting to be picked).
Here is an example (there are others, but this is the only one in the internet) of a polemic against an ECA critic of socialism refuting their arguments point by point. There might be something there you could use for your rebuttal.
Incidentally, can your video be seen somewhere?
Looking at the trailers and other stuff in that link, it seems that the film is about the new human rights movement that he wrote about in the book of the title that was reviewed in the Socialist Standard in 2017.
So it will criticise capitalism but he is also presenting it as an experimental avant-garde film in keeping with his profession as a filmmaker. Sounds as if it might be too avant-garde for most of us.
“the dialectical relationship between Eros & Thanatos which was later taken up by the Frankfurt School to great effect.”
I am afraid that the temptation to pursue this is too much ! This is an example of what I meant of trying to introduce the dialectic into “Nature”. While it could be said that there is a “life wish” amongst humans (indeed amongst all life-forms) as a “wish” to survive (though this is not just about sex, more about food I would have thought), I can’t see that there is any evidence for the existence of a “death wish”. That does not fit in with what we know about human and other life-form behaviour. It seems to have been introduced just to demonstrate a internal dialectical contradiction in humans. No wonder the Frankfurt School liked Hegel.
The Frankfurt School had some good ideas, as putting the emphasis on criticising capitalism as a “civilisation” rather than just an economic system, but I think they were wrong here. In fact, their theory that capitalism has manipulated the psychology of the working class to make them want capitalism raises the question of how this can be undone or whether in fact it could be. The theory risks proving too much and making a mass socialist consciousness impossible under capitalism. No wonder Marcuse thought that the only way out would be for some minority to seize power and unbrainwash the majority.
I’d forgotten, Wez, that you used to call yourself a Freudo-Marxian. Lucky I didn’t include Freud along with Jung as a philosopher rather than a scientist! Nobody has been able to discover in human physiology the special “sexual energy” that his school posits and that gets repressed, diverted and whatnot. But that’s another thread.
“As a form of logic it goes way back to ancient Greece.”
So that’s all you mean by dialectics? Thesis and antithesis confronting each other, resulting in a synthesis? A bit trite, I would have thought, as it’s something that happens everyday in numerous meetings. Who, as you say, can be opposed to that? It will go on as long as there are decisions to be made. In fact, I am sure it has been going on ever since Homo sapiens evolved and so pre-dates Ancient Greece.
The real argument is over whether or not it extends outside the field of human thinking and decision-making. Is it something more than “a form of logic”? Does it apply within (for want of a better term) “Nature”?
Of course everything everywhere is always changing; nothing remains the same. If accepting this is what dialectics is then that’s not a problem. But did and do the changes take place through internal contradiction? Does the fact that the water in a river is not the same as it was a moment before due to some internal contradiction? Does the evolution of a species of life-form that can be traced from the fossil record take place because of internal contradictions within the preceding form? Does water change from liquid to gas spontaneously through internal contradiction?
It is possible to describe some of these changes using the language of Hegelian dialectics (interpenetration of opposites, changes in quantity leading to a change of quality, etc) — Marx himself said he “coquetted” with doing this — but this is still only a way of describing what humans perceive is happening, and not necessarily the most useful or insightful.
Yes, that it’s. It all here (which also has relevance for the other thread on “philosophy”).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
