ALB
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 forceMarx 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.
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
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 centuryThat 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.
Apparenly what the City, Big Business and some of the Cabinet are hoping for is something called "Bino" ,i.e. Brexit In Name Only, i.e just leave the institutions but stay in the single market and customs union, which would still be respecting the letter of the referendum result (though to respect the spirit you'd have to kick out all the Poles, Lithuanians, and Pakistanis too).
Agreed that that's a good article. Not sure, though, that even if bitcoin could be made bubble-free as suggested and become the alternative payments system it was supposed to be, this woud make it "rational".Bitcin "mining" is no more rational than Keynes's joke suggestion that one way to prime pump the economy would be employ people to dig holes and then to fill them up again. Bitcoin "mining" involves using specialised computers to solve complicated mathematical problems of no interest or use The labour-time involved in this is not "socially necessary" in any sense of the term.It is a waste of time and computing power and computer use.As I said, what's wrong with Paypal or Visa — unless, that is, you are a drug dealer, merchant of death, tax dodger, money launderer, or a government subject to economic sanctions?
I think that earlier on in this thread someone suggested that we should also survey ex- members, but has anyone else noticed that most of the nasty discussions going on here at the moment involve ex-members. At least 5 of them. I think the conclusion of such a survey would be that in the past we tended to atract cantankerous types. As to other ex-members, we know that a dozen or so who have left recently have gone reformist and lined up behind the Corbynite Labour Party. They should know better of course but at least we'd get a more usful discussion with them than with the lot we've currently got..Anyway, the good news is that the report on the surve should be out this weekend.
According to this article, the authorities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq are toyng with the idea — or at least are being urged to — of doing something similar with their oil. The author, however, does seem a bit over-enthusiastic:www.kurdistan24.net/en/opinion/93e50bc0-f3e4-4669-9cca-a728720ff775Personally, I'd prefer to use Paypal.
This brings out something that not a lot of people know — that despite mentioning "labour-tme vouchers" for illustrative purposes two or three times, Marx spent much more time demolishing the idea of "labour money" or what in the quote is translated as "time-chits". While it is true that in the labour-time voucher scheme mentioned by Marx the vouchers were not supposed to circulate but to be cancelled on use (like a ticket to the theatre), there would be a tendency for them to ciculate, i.e for the scheme to degenerate into the sort of labour-money scheme Marx critiised as unworkable. In the same chapter of the Grundrisse that YMS has quoted from, Marx also wrote:
Quote:The time-chit, representing average labour time, would never correspond to or be convertible into actual labour time; i.e. the amount of labour time objectified in a commodity would never command a quantity of labour time equal to itself, and vice versa, but would command, rather, either more or less, just as at present every oscillation of market values expresses itself in a rise or fall of the gold or silver prices of commodities.The constant depreciation of commodities – over longer periods – in relation to time-chits, which we mentioned earlier, arises out of the law of the rising productivity of labour time, out of the disturbances within relative value itself which are created by its own inherent principle, namely labour time. This inconvertibility of the time-chits which we are now discussing is nothing more than another expression for the inconvertibility between real value and market value, between exchange value and price. In contrast to all other commodities, the time-chit would represent an ideal labour time which would be exchanged sometimes against more and sometimes against less of the actual variety, and which would achieve a separate existence of its own in the time-chit, an existence corresponding to this non-equivalence. The general equivalent, medium of circulation and measure of commodities would again confront the commodities in an individual form, following its own laws, alienated, i.e. equipped with all the properties of money as it exists at present but unable to perform the same services. The medium with which commodities – these objectified quantities of labour time – are compared would not be a third commodity but would be rather their own measure of value, labour time itself; as a result, the confusion would reach a new height altogether. Commodity A, the objectification of 3 hours’ labour time, is = 2 labour-hour-chits; commodity B, the objectification, similarly, of 3 hours’ labour, is = 4 labour-hour-chits. This contradiction is in practice expressed in money prices, but in a veiled form. The difference between price and value, between the commodity measured by the labour time whose product it is, and the product of the labour time against which it is exchanged, this difference calls for a third commodity to act as a measure in which the real exchange value of commodities is expressed. Because price is not equal to value, therefore the value-determining element – labour time – cannot be the element in which prices are expressed, because labour time would then have to express itself simultaneously as the determining and the non-determining element, as the equivalent and non-equivalent of itself. Because labour time as the measure of value exists only as an ideal, it cannot serve as the matter of price-comparisons.Incidentally, even if labour-time vouchers did not end up circulating, the problem mentioned by Marx here of increasing productivity meaning that newer vouchers would be less "valuable" (exchangeable for less products) than older ones would still exist, meaning that it would be advantageous to hoard older vouchers so as to be able to redeem more goods. There are ways round this — to place a date limit by which the vouchers have to be used or to have them reduce in "value" the longer they are not used — but this just adds complications to the scheme, another reason why it's not workable except for a short while.
