[ALB]

There's some good stuff there especially fom the other person Hedges interiewed. For instance:

Quote:

 Instead of focusing on the plight of all of the oppressed, oppressed groups began to seek representation for their own members within capitalist structures.

Quote:

“The left became a kind of grab bag of discrete, siloed identity movements,” Derber said. “This is very connected to moral purity. You’re concerned about your advancement within the existing system. You’re competing against others within the existing system. Everyone else has privilege. You’re just concerned about getting your fair share.”

Exactly and why socialists can't support it, in fact must oppose it.And I learnt a new word "siloed" (click on it in the quote to see what it means). Perhaps if we introduce it to this side of the Atlantic we'll get the interviews Alan says we're missing out on. Or is it just managementspeak?

[ALB]

Dave B wrote:

I think came it comes skill etc in Karl’s analysis who was really talking about a skilled bricklayer being able to build a was twice as fast as an unskilled one etc.

I don't think so. I would hve thought he was talking about the distinction between a skilled bricklayer and the unskilld labourer who worked with him, with the former creating more value in an hour than the latter. By all means if you want devise a scheme in which one hour of any work whatever it is is counted as equal to an hour of every other kind of work, but don't imagine that you are thereby mirroring the equivlent of "value" under capitalism. It would just be an arbitrary, utopian scheme.

[ALB]

"person" is politically incorrect too.  You have to say "peroffspring"

[ALB]

Not what you look like of course 

[ALB]

I thought it was you  ! 

[ALB]

Her articles have been published as a pamphlet:I assume it is not being advertised as we are virtually out of stock, but there will be a few copies available.

[ALB]

Actually, Marx himself brings out a similar defect in the labour-time voucher scheme in his famous discussion of it in his Critique of the Gotha Programme:

Quote:

The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

He went on to add:

Quote:

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Our point is, isn't it, that now, over 140 years later (140 years is a long time, what?, 4 generations) both the "economic structure of society and its cultural development" mean that socialist society could go over to "to each according to needs" fairly quickly. Whether or not the scheme Marx described would have worked in his day is another matter, but is only of academic or historical interest now.

[ALB]

No doubt, but that doesn't mean that there'd be the buying and selling of products in socialism just because socialist society doesn't adopt labour-time as a general unit of account in place of money.

[ALB]

It showed that one of the aims — increasing the price of stocks and shares — of low interest rates and quantitative easing  worked. In the sense that now the rate of interest is likely to rise this is going into reverse.On the other hand, the bond market should revive. So the stock market gamblers can survive by switching from shares to bonds.Meanwhile (for other reasons) the price of bitcoins continues its slide, falling below $7000 from a high of $19,000 a month or so ago.

[ALB]

Alan Kerr wrote:

Where we do not yet know the number of labour hours (out in society) result is commodities.

That's a rather eccentric definition of a commodity. I always thought a commodity was an item of wealth produced with a view to being bought and sold. It's also faulty logic as the conclusion doesn't follow from the (single) premise.  I don't think your new-found friend, Dave Bsc, would agree either.

[ALB]

Dave B wrote:

I pointed out to them an actual real example of how extremely easy it was to calculate the amount added of labour time in a factory.In my case it something like 7 seconds of labour time was added to the raw materials in the production of a litre of juice.It took less than 15 minutes to do that from the start as the amount of stuff that was produced in a week was available and you just need to divide that by number of employees and time worked etc.

But that's a calculation that woud be useful in socialism as part of general calculation in kind, in this case of the amount of labour needed alongside the raw materials, energy, etc to produce something (though you'd have to specify the types of work skills required too). Nobody's objecting to that. The objection is to the need to give a labour-time "value" to the materials, etc rather than counting them too in kind, some much weight of this, so man of that, etc.

[ALB]

Quote:

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell – arguably Britain’s best-known Marxist – will speak on the theme of “Into the 21st century: Marxism as a force for change today” alongside guests from around the world, including Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the Communist party of India (Marxist), and Luo Wendong, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

This one is going to be a real anti-socialist fest, as it would be being organised by the Tankies who control the Marx Memorial Library.The British Museum exhibition seems much more relevant. I remember that when they last did one on Marx, in 1867, on the centenary of the publication of Capital, we were able to sell lots of Socialist Standards outside the gates.

[ALB]

We are discussing two different things here. First, whether or not Marx advocated labour-time vouchers (a matter of historical fact, some would say nothing more than that on the grounds that it's not really important for deciding what to do on the basis of what Marx may or may not have said). Second, the merits and demerits of such a scheme.As regards the first, we don't have to guess Marx's view. It is clearly stated in the passage from the first volume of Capital (incidentally, the only view on this in a writing he himself saw to publication) that we've discussed here (from section 4 of Chapter 1, on the fetishism of commodities). Talking about socialism as

Quote:

an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force

Marx goes on to say that a part of what is produced

Quote:

is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided among them. The way this division is made will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers. We will assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time.

In other words, he was leaving the question open, with the exact method of distribution being left to socialist society to decide in the light of social and technological conditions. He was certainly not advocating that it should seek to parallel what happens when there is production for sale. Not even Robinson Crusoe tried to do that: he simply produced what he needed and took from the part set aside for his immediate personal consumption what he needed as and when he needed it.Incidentally, nobody here is advocating that the organisatin of the production and distribution without money should be based on guesswork so I don't know why you keep going on about this. What we are discussing are two, different but both science-based ways of calculating what resources to use and how. You are making the same mistake as Baron von Mises of assuming that there is only one "rational", scientific way of doing this — the one you advocate — but this is begging the question, i.e assuming what has to be proved, by defining it as "rational" so that any other way is by definition irrational.

[ALB]

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

[ALB]

Brian wrote:

Or a further alternative would be for party members to post questions relevant to the party case.  For instance:  How relevant is the Marxist theory in the twenty first century

That didn't work, did it? . Which goes to show that it's better to leave forum members discuss what they want to rather than trying to artificially discuss what's considered more appropriate.

[Author]

Posts