robbo203
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alanjjohnstone wrote:Gandhi had a saying “The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.”However, it is how you define greed that is the questionThere is a Situationist-influenced pamphlet called the Right to be Greedy (word-play on Paul Lafargue's Right to be Lazy)https://libcom.org/library/right-be-greedy-theses-practical-necessity-demanding-everything"Greed in its fullest sense is the only possible basis of communist society. The present forms of greed lose out, in the end, because they turn out to be not greedy enough."Free access and the accompanying argument that distribution will be to each according to self-defined needs, i think has been pointed out by Robbo and others on another thread that this is not actually literally true.It will be society as a whole which will define what needs are that are to have free access, not the individual. What is consumed will be socially decided in what and how much and even where production of various things will take place.We are of course not talking about a central command economy imposing limitations but social democracy being applied to allocation of necessities.
I think you need to make a distinction between the procedure by which we set about meeting our needs in a socialist society and how we define these needs, Alan.. I am quite happy to go along with the argument that consumption patterns in socialism will be heavily socially influenced. We are after all social animals and in a socialist society where the mutual interdependecne of everyone is fully recognised of course individuals will take cognisance of the needs of others and adjust their own conusumption to some extent to allow those needs to better met. This does not even have to happen in quite the calculated and conscious fashion Ive described; people tend to adapt to the norms established by social practice in quite unconscious ways as a matter of course . It becomes just second nature so to speak,However it is one thing to say our individuals needs will be socially influenced and determined; it is quite another to say that society will decide what each of us gets to consume as individuals i.e. we will be all be rationed and allocated a fixed amount of goods as determined by "society as a whole". That would be moving towards the totally preposterous and unworkable idea of society wide central planning. The only way any kind of large scale society can function is if it has some kind of feedback mechanism. That of necessity rules out central planning and rules in some kind of mechanism of spontaneous adjustment of supply and demand to each other
Vin wrote:Mike Foster wrote:Yes, this is the kind of question which keeps coming up (along with 'who will clean the sewers in socialism?') and which we need to have replies to.IMHO the party needs a second longer video offering answers to questions from the Introductory video.
The party also needs a pamphlet directly dealing with the human nature argument because it is consistently the number 1 objection to socialism. The "Are we prisoners of our genes" pamphlet is good but does not deal with the argument directly in my view which break down into 3 basic assertions: – human beings are inherently lazy- human beings are inherently greedy- human beings are inherently warlike and aggressive We need to deal with each of these claims once and for all – systematically and comprehensively – within a single publication And Vin, in answer to your tweeter, you could point out that most work even under capitalism is UNPAID and the so called grey (non-monetary) economy is larger than the official white and unofficial black money economies combined in terms of hours worked
Alan Kerr wrote:If you followed this thread, then you should already know how Crusoe's way works full-scale. That future society will find in detail (counting labour-time properly with computers) what works best at the time. And you should know how same will not work if you do not bother to count labour hours properly, or to make best use of the numbers, then cash market and the mess we have now will go on. If you 1) fail to count labour hours properly plus 2) try to suppress £s then you will have to issue your crisis SPGB ration-voucher scheme.Thats absurd Alan. On what grounds do you make this assertion? I dont say implementing a system of fullscale labour time accounting (by which I mean trying to assign a value to every product produced indicating the amout of labour it took to produce it), will mean the "cash market and the mess we have now will go on". I simply say the procedure you are advocating is quite unneccessary and will prove wildy inaccuate, despite Dave's confidence hat you can measure labour time inputs down to the last millisecond You have not really explored the alternative to fullscale labour accounting. It does not forsake the "counting of labour." It simply mean focussing only on what Marx called "living labour" rather than "dead labour.". You want to use a labour as a universal unit of account mimicking the role of money which is indeed necessary under capitalism to establish equivalence in exchange. But some of us, at any rate, reject completely the need for a universal unit of account and advocate instead calculation in kind. Units of living labour will be counted in just the same way as as any other input on the basis of a self regulating system of stock control which efficiently monitors the supply of these things in real time.. That is what we need to know for the purpose of allocating labour inputs – not past labour inputs which is not a particuarly useful guide to the future allocation of these inputs anyway unless what you are proposing is a totally static society in which there will be no technological change whateover
Bob Andrews wrote:Six Form F's. At this rate you will soon be able to take on the (Reconstituted) SPGB, who can be found at http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk, at five-a-side.When did the Socialist Studies Group last have a Form A? At least there were 4 Forms A this month in the case of the SPGB
ALB wrote: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.Thats good to hear! Perhaps if the Party is virtually out of stock and not advertising, this suggests there must be quite a strong demand for the pamphlet and that there is a good case for reprinting it. We urgently need to broaden our range of pamphlets in stock, I think…
Its very good. I like Heather Ball's style – very human(e) and direct Is there not a collection of her writings for the SS? This should be published as a pamphlet and advertised as such
Dave B wrote:I have done this with them before Alan They are prejudiced about the subject. 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. To demonstrate it was universally simple I asked someone working in the production of milk came up with a very similar figure. Iteration going back through the supply chain is a straightforward process especially with computers. In fact in software development and big engineering projects people familiar with the components required to produce something will be asked to ‘cost’ it in terms of labour time etc. I was talking to some people about that incidentally just last week. The bean counters will price it later. The stuff about accurate measurement is also a straw man argument as it is not being suggested will have to be. The stuff about inputs? The only inputs are human effort; as products are labour. The objective or purpose is twofold. To provide objective measurements to reduce labour time and maximise productivity etc. And to give consumers and indication of how much of other peoples labour they are consuming so they can make socially responsible decisions about what to consume. I was taught in childhood to appreciate how much work had gone into something. The Crusoe thing was supposed to be in part a kind of analogy, metaphor or allegory or whatever. So a socialist society would take into consideration the same kind of things as Crusoe did even though Crusoe was no communist.Dave Sorry but this simply will not do as a defence of full scale labour time accounting. By that I mean assigning a value to all the products of labour, expressed in units of labour time. I have no objection to calculating how many units of labour (under the different headings of different types of labour) are required to produce a given output in response to the demand for a given product but that is quite a different proposition to the one you are putting forward. That alternative approach involves treating labour as one would any other kind of input on the basis of calculation in kind. You are advocating not calculation in kind but a single universal metric expressed in labour time units You make the calculation of labour time inputs sound easy peasy. You say 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.Needless to say it would be misleading to suggest that the cost of producing a litre of juice was 7 seconds – as you seem to acknowledge – because you have also to take into account the labour costs in providing the raw materials or the machinery involved in processing them However, you then go on to assert that these indirect costs can also be taken into account using labour time accounting: Iteration going back through the supply chain is a straightforward process especially with computers. This idea of a “supply chain” suggests a single linear path along which you can trace the transformation of the product from raw material into finished good. But that is wrong. It is not so much a supply chain that we are talking about a network of connections that radiates outwards ultimately embraces the totality of production You justify your approach in these terms. Labour time accounting enables us"To provide objective measurements to reduce labour time and maximise productivity etc. And to give consumers and indication of how much of other peoples labour they are consuming so they can make socially responsible decisions about what to consume." On this last point we also need to make socially responsible decisions about what to consume with respect to non-labour inputs as well not least because of the environmental repercussions of using them. So why focus solely on labour units? As far as providingobjective measurements to reduce labour time and maximise productivity etc. again I make the point I made earlier to Alanif the idea behind this proposal is that the products involving a high labour content will be abandoned in favour of those with a low labour content then this is highly questionable since different products with different labour contents may have completely different use values. What you are asking for, in effect, is to compare and choose between different use values. That’s like having to choose between apples and oranges – or chalk and cheese – on the grounds that it takes slightly more labour to produce an apple than an orange. That aside, as has been pointed out, we might want to actually expend MORE labour on certain goods for reasons such as the intrinsic pleasure of such labour or for environmental/ecological reasons e.g. more emphasis on labour intensive farming than capital intensive monoculture farming As for “raising productivity” I find it odd that you should cite this as a reason for instituting a system of full-scale labour time accounting when you offer no way of weighting different kinds of labour in terms of skill and productivity. I presume, as with Alan, you propose to treat all labour time units as equivalent. So one hour of labour performed by a structural engineer or a neurosurgeon is worth exactly the same as one hour of labour performed by a street cleaner. There might be a moral argument in favour of such approach and very clearly maintaining clean streets is a vitally important task that needs to be done but it seems a bit arbitrary to say the productivity of a street cleaner and a neurosurgeon is exactly the same. The labour time accounting approach needs to assume this however in order to ensure commensurability and even substitutability right across the board. In that respect it is highly misleading Incidentally, I don’t assume as Alan seems to suggest that labour time accounting implies commodity production according to its critics. The case against full-scale labour time accounting is simply that it is impractical and will involve divert a large amount of administrative effort into doing something that will be of little worth to a socialist society
Alan From the Engels quote: "Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time." It is precisely this that I am questioning on the following grounds 1) It is grossly naive and simplistic to imagine that "society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine". You have also to take into the labour that went into components out of which the steam engine was assembled, the production of the electricity used, the transport costs involved, the effort that went into the extraction the relevant minerals from the ground etc etc. There is also the question of the level of skill involved and the heterogeneity of labour. Do you treat every unit of labour as the same and if so why? 2) I just dont see the point of the exercise. If you want to economise on inputs including labour a far more effective approach is to act upon their relative availability-cum-scarcity – which information we can derive from a self regulating system of stock control Apart from anything what you are suggesting will turn out to be a bureacratic nightmare that will divert a lot of labour from more useful pursuits. As I said before, if the idea behind this proposal isthat the products involving a high labour content will be abandoned in favour of those with a low labour content then this is highly questionable since different products with different labour contents may have completely different use values. What you are asking for, in effect, is to compare and choose between different use values. Thats like having to chose between apples and oranges – or chalk and cheese – on the grounds that it takes slightly more labour to prpduce an apple than an orange. That aside, as has been pointed out, we might want to actually expend MORE labour on certain goods for reasons such as the intrinsic pleasure of such labour or for environmental/ecological reasons e.g. more emphasis on labour intensive farming than capital intensive monoculture farming I think quite a lot of the comments that Marx and Engels made on the organisaion of a future socialist were not very well thought out at all and should definitely not be taken as gospel
Alan Kerr wrote:Thank you Robbo, yes I said "There is no question of attaching a value to the product. Total social product already contains social labour." Crusoe does count his labour better than the market. For Crusoe one hour of skilled = 1 hour of simple labour. We need to do as Crusoe does but counting with computers.It's true that Crusoe can miscount and mishap is possible. In practice, builders expect 10 per cent waste on materials. Crusoe must likewise work out probabilities and keep a reserve to cover for this.The answer is please compare what Crusoe does with a market and with what you want.Yet again youve lost me. You dont want to attach values to the product but you do want to count the social labour that goes into the product like Crusoe does but with what computers e.g 300 social hours to make product A compared to 350 for product B. But how is that not attaching a value to a product?
Alan Kerr wrote:Thank you Robbo, Then let's be clear. There is no question of attaching a value to the product. Total social product already contains social labour. It was inevitable that we lost count of how many social labour hours our products cost. This is why we must now make things for exchange as commodities. Only in a commodity producing society does it seem as if value in exchange is attaching to the product. That is illusion. Really, value is social labour-time that it takes to produce, or to reproduce the product. In a society, that knows what its products cost in labour-time (and such knowledge is now un-stoppable) that illusion is impossible. In a society, that knows what its products cost in labour-time the production of commodities and the market are impossible. See above and Crusoe solves all of your unsolvable labour counting problems..Alan, Im still no clearer on what you are saying. You say on the one hand "There is no question of attaching a value to the product" presumably referring to a socialist society. On the other hand, you say also "In a society, that knows what its products cost in labour-time the production of commodities and the market are impossible." But knowing what a product cost in labour time IS attaching a value to it measured in labour time units! Incidentally I still want to know HOW you think a society can "know" what it products cost in labour time, without guess work. There is no way of reliably knowing this in a system of socialised productiom in my view – whether in capitalism , socialism or any other system. And even if you could know what use would such informaton be to you, anyway? You dont explain You seem to be saying – though I may be wrong in interepreting you – that unless socialism engages in fullscale labout time accounting it will not work and we will be stuck with a market economy. If so, I emphatically reject such a claim I also reject your suggestion that the Crusoe approach "solves all of your unsolvable labour counting problems" Crusoe by defintion did not have to deal with the problem of heterogeneity of labour
Alan Kerr wrote:If you repeat this crude guess-ology over enough, I hope you will see why you fail to convince. Please try to convince Dave b to use your guess-ology in his work, as analytical chemist, in the food industry. You will fail as you are also failing right now to convince Aeiough. Or please try to convince the schools that guess-ology is the more exact way to prove truth in maths and science. Or please try to convince all industry that guess-ology is the more exact way to prove key facts. First, convince everyone to trust in guess-ology, in all problems of life. And if guess-ology is workable in practice then, yes, I'll push my copy of Marx' Capital aside and trust in guess-ology too.But until then, why should we bother with your guess-ology? What has your guess-ology to do with changing from one whole economic system to another? Why should we trust in your way to prove as we switch to Crusoe's way to labour,–full scale?You would have no right to risk your unworkable way in practice without checking, as Crusoe does, by counting our labour-time too.Please see the Socialist Standard for Sep. 2017.Alan, I am having difficulty trying to figure out what exactly your criticism is. Nobody is suggesting not to "count labour". The question is – in what way? Are we talking about fullscale labour time accounting, using labour time as a universal unit of account, to attach a value to all the products of labour? Or we talking about monitoring supplies of particular kinds of labour required for particular purposes in precisely the same way as we might treat any other factor input? I would favour the latter approach and reject the former. If your are talking about "guess-ology" then fullscale labour time accounting is a very good example of precisely that. How can you possibly calculate how much labour went into manufacturing a fridge or ballpoint pen or a laptop computer? And what use would such information be to you anyway? Are you going to abandon the production of fridges becuase it absorbs more labour than the production of laptops? Of course not. Past labour is also not necessarily a useful guide to the future allocation of labour given the fact that technologies are constantly changing. There is also the formidable problem of weighting different kinds of labour. I have yet to hear a convincing explnanation of how this problem of the heterogeneity of labour can be overcome in socialism. I keep on making this point that the fundamental thing we need to know about all factor inputs, including different kinds of labour units, in a socialist system of production is their relative scarcity, not their labour content. Relative scarcity is something we can determine with reasonable accuracy via a self regulating system of stock control. Look up the literature on Justus von Liebig's "Law of the Minimum" This is the way ahead for efficient and effective resource allocation in a socialist system, not fullscale labour time accounting
I have just come across this which is quite a treasure trove of references to the socialist calculation debate. Very handy to have https://theredand.black/forums/topic/561-the-socialist-calculation-debate-and-the-economic-calculation-problem/ The SPGB's material is mentioned under other biblography
DJP wrote:Dragon festival it was, 2002 I think. Cigarrones was the place.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_FestivalIncidentally I was in Barcelona earlier this year, there was an exhibition in Montjuic Castle about German fascism in Barcelona. The Nazis had a strong prescence with long Nazi banners being hung across the city from 39-45 http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/castelldemontjuic/en/activitats/exposicions/nazis-and-fascists-symbolic-occupation-barcelona-1939-1945Of course Catalonia is the region where the authorities now take the exhumation and identification of war remains most seriously.Yep Cigarrones is the place. We lived for 5 years in Tijola directly opposite and on the side of the river until literally last month . This will bring back a few memories for you, DJP – the Green Dragon Festival in 2006. I went then and in 2007 when it was at its height (my ex wife was one of the peformers on stage in 2007). Very Woodstock and all thathttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elRM-ZRK_vw Also this which gives you a look-in on the hippies and Sufis of Orgiva (in Spanish though)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe1rTI4xfxI
DJP wrote:I visited Orgiva about 15 years ago. A lot of British and other European hippies live near there on a dried up river bed, but I think that is not at El Carrizal. I had no idea about the mass grave there. Spain is second only to Cambodia in terms of victims whose remains have never been found.http://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2008/10/20/%E2%80%9Cthe-dead-are-so-many-here%E2%80%9D/Hi DJP. I think you are referring to a place called Estrella just outside Orgiva where a few hippies are encamped. Most reside in Beneficio which is up in the mountain above Orgiva and there is a third group along the banks of the Guadalefeo which is never dry and goes all the way down to the Rules dam. This last spot was the site of (for a while) Europe's largest free festival – the Green Dragon festival – until it was closed down by the authortieshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX37tRoUqVE The expat community in Orgiva – about half the total population of 5500 – are mainly non-hippies and there are some very wealthy individuals among them some with some pretty sumptuous prperties nestled amongst the olive groves. You just have check out some of these properties on the "owners direct" site to get a flavour of the place https://www.homeaway.com/results/spain/orgiva/region:2105 I have a soft spot for the hippies of Orgiva. They have a tough life and I doubt if I have what it takes to live the kind of lives they lead. Im a bit too partial to my creature comforts to take to living in a clapped out old van or flimsy tent though I quite like sleeping in a yurt which I have done. Many of them scrape a living making arty crafty stuff which they sell on street market every Thursday
alanjjohnstone wrote:Robbo was lucky to be born in the pristine wilderness of the South African veldt. But the threat to such areas it isn't coming from nature being crowded out by people but the arrival of corporate pirates and cattle barons.Well , truth be told, Alan, it was not in the pristine wilderness of South Africa that I was born but in a rather large and unappealing South African city called Germiston (near Joburg) whose only notable feature apart from being surrounded by goldmine dumps is to be the largest railway junction in Southern Africa. That said we did frequently as a family venture into the bush and my love for wilderness sprang from these experiences I wouldnt say it is entirely down to corporate pirates and cattle barons that wilderness is being encroached upon. Population growth is also a factor although there are complex linkages between these factors. Land grabs for example have displaced many subsistence farmers in various parts of the world pushing them onto ecologically marginal land that then becomes subject to environmental deterioration
alanjjohnstone wrote:And don't forget, Robbo, on your trip through the intensive agriculture of the Netherlands, at one time it was under the sea and/or salt marshes.The achievement was indeed remarkable that it was turned into farm-land, in the first place.Yes thats a fair point. But as I say my reaction to the rural landscape of Holland was a purely aesthetic one . I thought it was dreary even ugly at times with its criss crossing network of power lines, and heavily built up. Other people might think quite differently about it. that is their prerogative. I prefer a less cluttered and as I say, less overcrowded landcape. That does not make Holland or the UK for that matter "overcrowded" from the standpoint of being able to feed their respective populations and that is essentially the point Im making. – that there are different senses in which you can talk of a country being overcrowded
