robbo203
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Ike Pettigrew wrote:A point to consider is that not all employers are capitalists. I think small and micro business owners have very different interests to larger employers. The former might bitterly oppose measures such as a statutory minimum wage and higher taxes that have the effect of increasing labour costs, whereas larger employers might welcome and even lobby for such measures because of the burdens they impose on smaller competitors.
Yes, I agree.. The standard SPGB definition of a capitalist as someone who posseses sufficient capital to live upon without the need to sell his/her labour is essentially a sound one in my opinion but it does mean that the division between the classes in a Marxian sense is not a sharp one – more a case of one class shading into the other. The majority of workers are clearly workers and the majority of capitalits are clearly capitalists but there is a grey area in between where you cannot say definitively that someone is a capitalist or not. But that does not matter that much. All sociological analysis is based on abstraction , generalisation and inevitably a degree of simplification. No sociological model can ever hope to capture within its net the totality of social existence. For example what consititutes sufficient capital to live upon without the need to labour? Some capitalists might well be content with a very modest standard of living; others not. Would the former then be truly considered capitalists? All we can do is imvoke some kind of social average of what constitutes an adequate standard of living from that point of view. No theory is perfect It is the left who tend to lose sight of the wood for the trees when they go on about the petit burgeosie and the self employed as not being part of the working class. This is an extension of the ruling class strategy of divide and rule, In the extreme case where a workerist definition of the working class is invoked ,depicting the working class as nothing more than the cloth-capped blue-collared industral proletariat and all the rest as tthe so called "middle class", this effectively makes workers a small minority of the population. If that were truly the case, then the prospect of a working class or proletrian revolution must be considered to be non existent. Such is the reactionary role that leftwing sociological analysis tends to play in buttressing capitalism, By whittling down the working class to a small residual category through the application of overly narrow criteria it presents a picture of a class numerically in no position at all to mount any kind of revolution
kenax wrote:okay, i read the two articles and checked out the video and would like to respond as follows. first of all, i believe we have similar intentions to the degree that people should not have to suffer in poverty while others get filthy rich. in this respect i found jesse ventura's proposal (which he got from someone else) that there be a cap on income, the rest going to taxes. such as 100 million bucks a year. cannot that be enough for anyone? is not a billion bucks a year in income totally obsene when we consider so many starving people around the world, who could all be well fed on just US's military monthly budget in Iraq of some 80 billion dollars (not sure if i remember all the statistics correctly). or apparently in denmark, if you are of certain wealth, taxes might be 105%, meaning you pay out more in taxes than you actually earn. if a person is wealthy he should be happy enough. the problem with the ruling class is based on human nature. these driven, shrewed, highly motivated and often very intelligent and not so honest people become obsessed with a craving for more power, while most of us are happy with some job and loving their families in the evening. those who are obsessed with power can easily despise the poor or common joe. my parents are very driven and i can see how they despise to see lazy people freeloading off the social net in canada while they work hard.so yes, 8 billionaires controlling so much wealth is a crime, i agree, i just cant see the practical implementation of a purely socialist society. without currency? how are we supposed to trade? such as one's labour for a dozen eggs? in your video was surreptiously inserted "people will volunteer their labour". Really? why? what is their motivation? this is why i brought up envy. maybe it's similar to a kibutz, although i have never experienced it myself. i honestly do not want to argue or anger anyone here. i am truly enjoying the discussion.Hi Karel The short answer to your point is that there is no need to trade in a socialist society and consequently no need for money either. Trade or quid pro quo exchange implies private or sectional ownership of the means of producing wealth. As such it is incompatible with the economic foundations of a socialist society where the means of wealth production are the common property of all, where goods and services are made available on a completely free basis and where labour is perfomed on a purely voluntary basis. Its no fault of your own, Karel, that you seem to have got the wrong end of the stick about socialism given the sheer volume of misinformation/disinformation on the subject. However, it is comments such as yours and countless others I have come across that convinces me of the urgent need for the SPGB to bring out a comprehensive and well reseached pamphlet on the so called Human Nature argument against socialism. I am convinced this is the major reason why people such as your good self tend to be somewhat skeptical. I hope we can demonstrate to you in due course that this is not at all the barrier to socialism that you might suppose…
kenax wrote:that's at least the story my parents said or what i heard about under communism in czech. without incentive for the means of production, people just get lazy me thinks and things start to rot from the inside out. i've traveled a lot around the world and i find that envy is predominant among most people. if you create a socialst system, people start to get jealous that someone else is working not as hard as them, and everyone starts competing against each other in terms of who can be the most useless and unproductive. as they used to say in czech to the communists: "you pretend to pay us and we'll pretend to work". the communists eventually had to bend so they started giving catholic land to the czechs for cottages in the country in exchange for a little more work. when i arrived to czech after the fall of communism, pratically everyone had an apartment in prague as well as a cottage in the country, with NO DEBT. they didn't even know what a mortgage was, amazing.Karel, to be quite honest I do think you need to read up a little more on what the SPGB is saying as I detect quite a few straw arguments in what you say. As long as you are under the misapprehension that what socialists are advocating is something akin to the so called "communism" – actually, it was just state administered capitalism – that operated in the old Czechslovakia you will miss the point of much of what is being said to you. Classical socialism in the sense that we are talking about is totally different to the distorted Leninist and Labourite version of "socialism". What you are effectively doing is considering what we have to say through the lens of this latter definition of socialism which we would in fact define as state capitalism Of course people are envious under capitalism. Capitalism thrives on envy. Much of what "consumerism" is about under capitalism is based on the notion of "keeping up with Joneses". Meaning it is status driven. In capitalism that is how you acquire status and the esteem of others – though the accumulation of wealth, not what you contribute to society. Money is the metric by which individuals are accorded esteem and respect. Money also converts into the currency of political power and as Oxfam has pointed out a mere 8 billionaires in the world currently own as much wealth as half the world's population combined! It does not matter what system of democratic voting you have in place, unless you address and overthrow a system that can generate such grotesque and enormous inequalities you will never have a truly democratc society. And then you wonder why people are supposedly "lazy" today. What incentive is there to work when your work serves to enrich the few at the expense of the majority and when you have little or no control over your conditions of work under the authoritarian system called "waged employment" (which socialists seek to eliminate)? Actually even under capitalism most work is not paid , disproving the claim that you need a so called monetary incentive to incentivise people to work. According to some statistics – see writers like Charles Handy – slightly more in the way of total labour hours falls completely outside of the money economy than inside it. Also, there is some evidence to suggest that the very fact of monetary payment itself has a demotivating effect on volunteer work. In their article "Does Pay Motivate Volunteers?" (Review of Economics and Statistics, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich , Working Paper Series , ISSN 1424-0459 , Working Paper No. 7, May 1999) Bruno S. Frey and Lorenz Goette argue that monetary rewards actually serve to undermine the intrinsic motivation of volunteers.
alanjjohnstone wrote:"After Trump Jr. announced on Twitter that “Vanessa & my children are safe and unharmed after the incredibly scary situation that occurred this morning,” the Socialist Party of Great Britain also seemingly condoned the attack, posting, “Disgusting people attract disgusting behavior.” Not quite sure how calling such behaviour "disgusting" is "condoning" it. This sounds like a cover up for a cocaine deal that had been rumbled as some commentators have suggested
Young Master Smeet wrote:What society can decide is that each person should have access tohttps://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Goodfood/Pages/reference-intakes-RI-guideline-daily-amounts-GDA.aspxEnergy: 8,400 kJ/2,000kcalTotal fat: less than 70gSaturates: less than 20gCarbohydrate: at least 260gTotal sugars: 90gProtein: 50gSalt: less than 6gSomewhere between 2 and 3.5 litres of clean water per day for drinking (Somewhere around 150 litres per day need for sanitation and hygene).About 18 cubic metres of personal space (a room 3x3x2) as a bare minimum, with appropriate environmental controls and electricity, suyitable to keep it to about 22 degrees C all year round.Environmentally and culturally appropriate clothes (including socialist burkhas, ba-doom tish), which translates into yay much cotton, wool, nylon, etc.etc.This is off the back of a fag packet, and would be the global standard, that specific communes might want to alkter into greater specificity, taking into account food miles, seasonality, etc.The substantive point is any system has to be consumer demand driven.Yes that is a good point YMS. Its an example of "social influence" in action – the presentation of a norm of what constitutes reasonable consumption and the expectation that people will adapt to this norm out of a sense of empathetic concern for the interests and wellbeing of others upon whom they are dependent. Taking too much for yourself jeopardises their interests and harms your own in the long run But again this cannot be a top down process where something called "society" (which will inevitably mean a technical elite given the impossibility of 7 billion people meanfingfully deciding that everyone should be allocated 3.2 litres of water per day – a ludicrous scenario) what you can consume. That would amount to a rationing society and with that will almost inevitably come a system of compulsory labour and hence the eventual re=emergence of class society. A socialist society can proactively take steps to "mould" consumer behaviour but cannot dicate it. As you corectly say "any system has to be consumer demand driven." That is the bottom line. Cooperation has to emerge organically from the bottom up, not be imposed from the top down by an elite purporting to derive their authority form "society" which is what will inevitably happen if you let "society" call all the shots. It has to be a two way thing.
I think we should be clear on one point – there is no way whatsoever in which the magnitudes of literally millions of different types of items can be decided collectively or democratically in an apriori sense by the global population of a socialist society. Everything is interconnected and to produce 658 million four-inch screws as agreed by a democratic vote would require a democratic vote also on the requsiite magnitudes of materials and inputs required to produce 658 millon four-inch screws. That is assuming it is even possible to organise a meaningful vote among 7 billion plus individuals! So I wish people would be clearer when they talk vaguely of "society" determining in a socialist society what is to be produced. There is absolutely no way in which the overall pattern of production can be consciously predeterimined in this sense. No way at all. That pattern can ONLY arise spontaneously as the outcome of countless decisions made right across society by individuals, communities and production/distribution units themselves. There is no other way of organising large scale prpduction without some form of feedback mechanism which is precisely what the idea of conscious society-wide apriori planning rules out.. Of course "society" influences what individuals consume. Society is not the mere sum of its parts; it is more than that. But we should be ore precise in our language as how this influence might express itself. I can certainly envisage social decisions being taken on what would be the priorities of production in socialism and I cannot imagine the manufacture of prestige cars would count amongst these priorities. In that sense you could certainly say society is shaping its pattern of consumption. But that is a very different from the proposition of society-wide apriori central planning which is a complete non starter
Vin wrote:robbo203 wrote:The party also needs a pamphlet directly dealing with the human nature argument because it is consistently the number 1 objection to socialism.I agree.But with the experience of the Party's twitter and video reaching to all corners, perhaps a video introducing the subjects you mention with a referral to the more in-depth analysis in the pamphlet. This tweeter watched the Intro Video but would he have read a Standard or Pamphlet?
Thats a good point Vin. Cross referencing across different forms of media wpould be very useful
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
