[ALB]

Once again you've got the wrong end of the stick. Dave Bsc and me were talking about work in socialism not about labour under capitalism and making the point that socialist society would not have to pursue your obsession of trying to replicate what the law of value is supposed to bring about under capitalism (minimising labour time). Why minimise work that is enjoyable? Pieter Lawrence gives other examples of why we won't want to minimise labour time in socialism in this article (shorter this time so you can read to the end):

Quote:

With socialism, on the basis of common ownership, the producers are elevated to a social existence which is formed by direct relationships of co-operative activity about mutual needs. In breaking out of the capitalist relationships of value, labour will express a direct productive relationship between people, and will be released for human need. Socialism will abolish all economic relationships of exchange. With production for human need no significant economic relationship will exist between items of wealth, and there will therefore be no need to compare or measure their methods of production in terms of any common factor such as labour time.The capitalist exchange relationships between commodities themselves, including the human commodity, labour power, will be replaced by a direct relationship in the line of productive activity; items of wealth, and human need. This direct relationship of wealth to need replaces the capitalist relationship between things. The price mechanism which transmits an economic message throughout capitalist production, to do with cheapness and competitive, profit-making success, will be replaced in socialism with a direct relationship of production to human needs.Production of use will be the organisation of necessary production in line with consciously chosen levels of consumption with no intervening economic factors between the two activities. The organisation of production therefore will resolve itself as a problem of quantity analysis. These will be absolute quantities of things in relation to need, not relative quantities of labour time in the things themselves. Socialism will quantify its needs and then organise production in direct response.The choice of production methods would not resolve itself simply as the selection of the most efficient method of production, that is, the method which embodies the least amount of labour time.The capitalist market pressure to embody the least amount of labour time in production will be replaced in socialism by all the requirements of need. These will include material necessity, work itself as a human need, social safety, care of the environment, conservation, animal welfare, and so on.

[ALB]

Alan, as I can't believe that you have yet had the time to read the articles on your reading this, here's the alternative to commodity production from one of them:

Quote:

What socialism will establish is a practical system of world production operating directly and solely for human needs. Socialism will be concerned solely with the production, distribution and consumption of useful goods and services in response to definite needs. It will integrate social needs with the material means of meeting those needs, that is to say, with active production. Under capitalism what appear to be production decisions are in fact decisions to go for profit in the market. Socialism will make economically-unencumbered production decisions as a direct response to needs. With production for use, then, the starting point will be needs.QUANTITIES OF MATERIAL THINGS Socialism will not depend on calculations of labour-time or the conversion of these into costs since production will not be generating exchange-values for the market. Production for use will generate useful goods and services directly for need, and this will require not economic calculation but the communication of quantities of material things throughout production. This will result from the change in productive relationships. The use of labour in a market system begins with an exchange of labour-power for wages, which is an economic exchange between individual workers and invested capital. This will be replaced by direct co-operation between producers to satisfy social needs in the material form of productive activity.Modern production embraces activity across the world as a network of productive links. It consists of decisions and actions by individuals, small groups and large organisations. Many of these dispersed activities interact with each other and alter the pattern of the whole. Modern production can only operate on the basis of particular production units being self-adjusting to social requirements in response to information being communicated to them.Socialism would take over existing world production which is generally structured on three scales. Socialism could rationalise this world structure on a decentralised basis which could operate in the most efficient way through a world, regional and local structure.Extraction and processing of basic materials such as metals, oil, coal, and some agricultural products, etc., could be organised as world production with distribution to regions and localities.These materials could be taken up by the regions for the production and assembly of component parts of machinery, equipment and goods for distribution to localities within a region. This regional organisation could include the extraction and supply of those materials which could be contained within that region. A regional tractor-producing plant could take its materials from world supply and then distribute tractors down to the localities within that region.On the smallest scale, but nevertheless extremely important, local production units could be producing local goods for local consumption and use.This need not be a rigid arrangement, but an adaptable skeleton structure operating in these three, world, regional and local scales. These would represent the general scales of productive organisation, through which required quantities of materials and goods could be communicated between production units.DIRECT RESPONSES TO NEEDS Production for use could work with the basic structure as outlined above. It would operate in direct response to need. These would arise in local communities expressed as required quantities such as grammes, kilos, tonnes, litres, metres, cubic metres etc., of various materials and quantities of goods. These would then be communicated as required elements of productive activity, as a technical sequence, to different scales of social production, according to necessity.Each particular part of production would be responding to the material requirements communicated to it through the connected ideas of social production. It would be self-regulating, because each element of production would be self-adjusting to the communication of these material requirements. Each part of production would know its position. If requirements are low in relation to a build-up of stock, then this would be an automatic indication to a production unit that its production should be reduced. If requirements are high in relation to stock then this would be an automatic indication that its production should be increased.The register of needs and the communication of every necessary element of those needs to the structure of production would be clear and readily known. The supply of some needs will take place within the local community and in these cases production would not extent beyond this, as for example with local food production for local consumption.Other needs could be communicated as required things to the regional organisation of production. Local food production would require glass, but not every local community could have its own glass works. The requirements for glass could be communicated to a regional glass works. These would be definite quantities of required glass. The glass works has its own suppliers of materials, and the amounts they require for the production of 1 tonne of glass are known in definite quantities. The required quantities of these materials could then be passed by the glass works to the regional suppliers of the materials for glass manufacture. This would be a sequence of communication of local needs to the regional organisation of production, and thus contained within a region.Local food production would also require tractors, and here the communication of required quantities of things could extend further to the world organisation of production. Regional manufacture could produce and assemble the component parts of tractors for distribution to local communities. These would be required in a definite number and, on the basis of this definite number of final products, the definite number of component parts for tractors would also be known. The regional production unit producing tractors would communicate these definite quantities to their own suppliers, and eventually this would extend to world production units extracting and processing the necessary materials.This would be the self-regulating system of production for need, operating on the basis of the communication of need as definite quantities of things throughout the structure of production. Each production unit would convert the requirements communicated to it into its own material requirements and pass these on to its own suppliers. This would be the sequence by which every element of labour required for the production of a final product would be known.This system of self-regulating production for use is achieved through communications. Socialism would make full use of the means of communication which have been developed. These include not only transport such as roads, railways, shipping, etc. They also include the existing system of electronic communications which provide for instant world-wide contact as well as facilities for storing and processing millions of pieces of information. Modern information technology could be used by Socialism to integrate any required combination of different parts of its world structure of production.

[ALB]

Dave BSc wrote:

If work becomes a pleasure then it is not ‘work’  in my opinion and thus has ‘no value’ as labour time value is predicated on it being shit and something you have to do and time lost in the enjoyment of your lifetime  rather than having a fun time.

That's the only part I understood  It's a good point.

[ALB]

I was going to reply to your earlier question as to why a labour-time system wouldn't work for long. Of course the labour-time voucher scheme mentioned by Marx wasn't supposed to be permanent. But then you made the ridiculous claim that because we don't advocate labour-time vouchers the Party is advocating commodity production. Particularly ridiculous as your scheme of labour-time vouchers and labour-time prices for goods and services is much nearer to production for sale.So that you can acquaint yourself more with what we stand for please read these articles:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1971/no-801-may-1971/labour-time-vouchershttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/socialism-practical-alternative#ch4https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1987/no-1000-december-1987/socialism-and-calculationhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/english/world-socialist-no2-winter-1984/how-socialism-can-organise-production-without-money-2http://www.worldsocialism.org/english/world-socialist-no2-winter-1984/how-socialism-can-organise-production-without-money-1Then you will be in a position to criticise what we do stand for rather than what you imagine we stand for.

[ALB]

I don't know what you are talking about. I don't suppose anyone else does either.

[ALB]

Thanks. That answers my question. It sounds like he doesn't like Jews either.

[ALB]

Rod Liddle wrote:

It was only when China decided that Karl Marx was about as much use as a pork pie in a mosque and embraced capitalism instead that it became a world leader.

I wonder why he wrote "as a pork pie in a mosque" rather than "as a pork pie in a synagogue"?

[ALB]

Alan Kerr wrote:

But, in Crusoe's counting, his labour hours are just his labour hours. And if you look at Crusoe's bookkeeping then an average hour = an average hour whether skilled or simple labour. To Crusoe 1 hour of skilled = 1 hour of simple labour. To Crusoe with skilled and simple labour the ratio is just 1:1. Yes, I know how Marx says that Crusoe's relations with the things which Crusoe makes "… contain all that is essential to the determination of value." But that also tells us that Crusoe does not bother himself in inessential details.A market competition would make each skilled hour to make a hut count as something more than 1 hour of making a simple stack of firewood.Yes, Crusoe could also count skilled as something more than simple-labour. But what does Crusoe care about that? It's up to Crusoe to choose. In his bookkeeping Crusoe chooses to make 1 hour skilled count as 1 hour simple-labour.

Yes, both Robino Crusoe and socialist society could decide that the ratio of skilled and simple is 1:1, i.e that one hours's work of any kind is counted the same as one hour. That's how most of its supporters have interpreted the labour-time voucher scheme described b Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. This would in fact be the easiest way to make such a scheme workable. But, as you yourself recognise, this would no longer be a parallel to what happens under capitalism to determine "socially necessary labour time" as the labour-time "prices" of the products which the vouchers could be used to redeem would not be the same as their labour-time values under capitalism (nor would the labour-time content of the raw materials, machines, energy, etc used in calculating what to produce).So much, then, for your original claim that socialist society will calculate the "socially necessary labour-time" content better than the market. According to this latest version of your scheme it wouldn't be calculaing this. Not that, anyway, it would need to. Both labour-time vouchers and labour-time accounting (counting every product in labour-time) are unncessary in socialism and, if tried, wouldn't work for long.

[ALB]

Good cover. Pity about the inane comments.

[ALB]

Alan Kerr wrote:

@ALB, Then which thought does Ludwig von Mises attack and where?

Baron von Mises's objection to labour-time accounting can be found here:https://www.mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth/html/c/16#currentI think he has a point when he brings up the practical difficulty, in the absence of a market for labour power (i.e of the wages system), of reducing skilled labour to so many units of simple labour. In theory it could be done but in practice it would be an arbitrary, administrative decision.Of course he is completely wrong when he writes:

von Mises wrote:

Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation.

That is simply assumng what is to be proved, though I dare say you might agree with his definition that "without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation".

[ALB]

This article puts our position rather well:https://www.marxists.org/archive/lawrence/one_world.htm

[ALB]

And the first casualty of war is ….http://observers.france24.com/en/20180124-fake-images-turkey-offensive-afrin-syria

[ALB]

Maybe, but it wasn't funny, no more funny that if he "joked":

Quote:

"wtf not another Sympo thread relating to value, can Nazi  Germany please start existing again so I can get gassed"

[ALB]

Sympo wrote:

I know what you're all thinking: "wtf not another Sympo thread relating to value, can the USSR please start existing again so I can get shot in a mass grave"

Why would we think that? You must know that we don't think that the USSR was socialist and don't advocate or support mass shootings.I thought your questions were sincere, but this suggests otherwise. 

[ALB]

That's what I thought you thought.

[Author]

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