robbo203
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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
I agree with ALB on this subject. I cannot see the point in either labour time vouchers or labour time accounting (too quite different concepts) in socialism whatever Marx might have said on the matter. Marx's views on the matter ought not in any case to be treated as holy writ. I see no reaosn why labour cannot be counted in precisely the same way as any other factor input in socialism – that is to say on the basis of calculation in kind. What we would be interested in is the available supplies of specific types of labour relevant to the specific tasks at hand as determined by consumer demand. In the same way we would be interested to know the available suplies of physical components etc. It is the availability of all these different inputs that is key here becuase this is what constrains or limits the amount of output of a given good that can be produced.. In fact, this is where Justus von Liebig's famous "law of the minimum" comes into play and its importance for socialist planning cannot be understated. Essentially what Liebig was saying was that the output of any good is limited by the particular input that is scarcest. Liebig was an agricultural chemist and so his theory essentially related to the various components necessary for plant growth (although it can be extended to cover the entire prpduction system). Supplies of organic based fertiliser tended to be the limiting factor in his day until the invention of artificial fertilifer. As a result some other factor then tended to take the place of fertiliser as the limiting factor e.g. pesticides , irrigation water supplies etc etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum For any given output there is always going to be one input that serves as the limiting factor. Increasing the output of the good in question means either increasing the availability of this input or, alternatively, changing the technque of production itself and technical ratios of the inputs to each other to prpduce a given output. In other words economising most on inputs that are most scarce (which is the rational thing to do). To enable these kinds of decisions to be made what is needed is some idea of the available stock in the case of each input. That information is something that would be made available through a self regulating system of stock control using calcualtion in kind. The point is that this system is already in place in capitalisim today – we dont need to invent or introduce it – and operates alongside a system of monetary accounting. In fact wthout the former capitalism would grind to a halt. In socialism we would continue to use this system but dispense with monetary accounting altogether. All this talk about the need to calculate how much labour goes into all the various products produced in a socialist society is a complete distraction and an irrelevance. Even if it were technically feasible to accomplish – which it is not given the socialised nature of modern production – what use would it serve? Past labour is not a particularly useful guide to the future allocation of labour and as has been pointed there is the problem of the heterogeneity of labour (e.g. skilled labour versus unskilled labour) which makes it near impossible to apply labour time as a universal unit of account. You dont need to do that anyway – quite apart from the enormous bureaucratic costs involved in trying to attach a value expressed in abstract labour time to literally millions of different products. "Socially necessary labour time" is only relevant to a capitalist exchange economy for the purpose of establishing equivalence. Meaning it only reveals indirectly ad retrospectively through market prices at the point at which supply and demand in theory equilibriate. So it presupposes a system of capitalist commodity exchange . Or as Marx put it: "Social labour-time exists in these commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident only in the course of their exchange…. Universal social labour is consequently not a ready-made prerequisite but an emerging result’ (Critique of Political Economy)
Im not going to bother with the personal stuff which is getting a real bore now and just stick to the thread. It strikes me that people are taking a too polarised view on this subject. The world is capable of producing enough to satisfy the reasonable needs of every person on this planet and from that point of view is not "overcrowded" – though I think the term "overpopulated" would be more applicable. It is nevertheless possible to agree with this statement and still think the world is overcrowded but for quite other reasons e.g. the loss of natural habitat , species diversity etc. Last year my partner and I visited Holland which is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and also of course one of the richest per capita. The vista unfolding from the train window of a heavily built up and almost industrialised rural landscape did not appeal to me in the least – though I loved the ambience of some of the old historic towns like Leiden and Utrecht. My reaction to the Dutch countryside was essentially an aesthetic one. Wilderness has always had an appeal for me but I guess that comes from having been born in, and spent my early years in South Africa. So I think it is legitimate to talk of some parts of the world being "overcrowded" providing one does not put some kind of Malthusian spin on this with the implication that socialism is out of the question becuase there are too many people on the planet to meet the needs of everyone.. If anything I would say if you want a less crowded world, socialism is the way to go. It is economic circumstances that ultimately derive from the fact that we live in capitalist world that tned to make for high birth rates. In the Global South where a significant chunk of the population still live in the countryside and earn a living from farming , large families are indispensable not only as a household labour force but to provide for the old in the absence of a social welfare system. Of course with urbanisation and declining infant mortality this is changing and we are begining to see quite sigifnicant falls in fertility rates in most of the Global South Another reason that tends to make for higher birth rates is the pro-natalist policies of many capitalist nation states which attach importantce to population size for obvious reasons – it gives them more clout on the world stage. Economists also fret about the "dependency ratio" and the prospect of an aging population being supported by a decling fraction of the population of working age. Yet absurdly the capitalist nation state imposes barriers on the free movement of workers which would otherwise address this problem, seeking instead to reform the tax system to encourage large families
