ALB
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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.
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".
This article puts our position rather well:https://www.marxists.org/archive/lawrence/one_world.htm
And the first casualty of war is ….http://observers.france24.com/en/20180124-fake-images-turkey-offensive-afrin-syria
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"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.
The Socialist Standard commented on this a year ago:https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2017/no-1350-february-2017/cooking-books-abolish-money-%E2%80%93-not-now
Just checked and you're right. It says
Quote:Subject cannot be longer than 128 characters but is currently 160 characters long.Forum post could not be created for your comment to be published.A design fault seems to have been uncovered.
Thanks. That doesn't sound too bad, i.e we could provide a link to it from the Turkish-language section of the WSM website?http://www.worldsocialism.org/türkçe
I think you have to go to the article itself in the online issue of Socialist Standard in which it appeared and click "Comment" at the bottom of the article. Then it auomatically appears in the Comments section.
I am not advocating that we only count the labour-time expended at the last stage of the production of something. That would be absurd and lead to the anomalies that you point out. But this is what those who like the idea of labour-time vouchers are committed to as their scheme is based on recording the time spent by "living labour" producing goods and providing services and on fixing the "prices" of goods the vouchers can be used to claim to reflect of this.I am not at all arguing against calculation but just against the need to calculate the labour-time content of everthing, i.e the need for some general unit of account. Of course socialist society will have to count what work resources are available to produce what is needed, but it will also have to count what other resources are required but in specific units. Labour is counted by time (and particular skill), steel in tonnes, electricity in killowatt-hours, and so on.Why try to reduce all producive resources to a laour-time content and to make a point of minimising this — that's what the economic laws of capitalism work to bring about. Even work-time itself need not be minimised when the work is interesting and satisfying. Socialism allows humans precisely to escape from the tyranny of minimising costs that capitalism imposes and allows other thngs to be taken into account such as working conditions and impact on the environment. Labour-time counting and minimising would tend to bring about the same result that capitalism's "law of value" does.
The Turkish translation of this, together with answers to further questions about the Russian revolution, has now been published here:http://cdn.haberajanda.com.tr/contents/files/dergiler/sayi134/index.html#70It continues on pages 72-3 and 74.Anybody out there know Turkish to see what the introduction says? All I know is that the magazine's name "Ekim Devrimi" means"October Revolution".
Bijou, the points you make are covered, in almost the same terms, in chapters 3, 4 and 5 of our pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative, i.e goods and services for individual consumption being a more or less self-regulating way in accordance with what individuals take or use, with major infrastructure decisions made democratically:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/socialism-practical-alternative
