[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

 Yes, but 'labour time' can be voted upon, because it is a 'social unit of account', not a 'universal unit of account'.If you post the quote with Marx's statement of 'universal', I'll post the correction of Marx, who often uses sloppy terms which contradict his whole thesis, about socio-historic production (ie., not 'universals', 'absolutes', etc., which are 'divine'). Marx was human, y'know!

 If labour time is the only unit employed the planning process then it is necessarily a universal unit of account. There is no contradiction between saying it is a universal unit of account and a social unit of account. It is both in this case. In any event how can labour be "voted upon" if is past labour already “congealed” in the product? What would be the point of the exercise?  If you are referring to the future application of human labour – again what would be the point of that?  How would you square this with the communist principle that workers should be free to determine their own contribution to production?  If they are compelled to work in certain kinds of jobs and for a specified duration as decided by society in general then this alienated or estranged labour; it is not freely chosen and voluntaristic communist labour.  It is not communism I suspect what you are really trying to say is that there should be a democratic vote on what gets produced as a opposed to a democratic vote on what each of us should do in the way of work (and for how long).  But this too is deeply problematic from a communist point of view.  I dont discount democratic voting by communist communities with respect to, say, some large-scale social project but if you are seriously promoting the idea here that the totality of production should democratically voted on in advance and coordinated through some kind of gigantic input-output Leontief type matrix then this is completely bonkers.  It stands not the slightest chance of getting off the ground This is what is meant by society-wide central planning – one single giant premediated plan covering literally the totality of production.  Do you support this idea LBird?  How do you envision 7 billion voters deciding on the global output of 6 inch cross head screws and coordinating the inputs in such a way as to ensure this target is met? There is only one way in which any kind of modern system of production can be operated and that is essentially on a self-regulating basis ( via a system of stock control).  Anything other than that is just pie in the sky – totally unfeasible

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

 What the latter proposes is to introduce a single universal universal unit of accounting – namely labour time – governing the entire economy and as such is grounded in the same mindset that rationalises the need for money as a universal unit of account

[my bold]I agree with you, robbo. Another name for this is 'absolute'.It is opposed by 'social'.The political reason for an 'absolute' is so that a minority can 'know' this supposed 'absolute', outside of any social (and thus, democratic) input.Any mention of 'universal' or 'absolute' (and many other synonyms, that you already know that I'd use) is only made to prevent the political appeal to democracy (ie. the appeal to the majority).This is to allow a minority to (supposedly) 'objectively calculate' what the majority (supposedly) require, without the majority having any say in their own 'requirements'.Marx warns against this, in his Theses on Feuerbach.[edit] the 'mind set' that you mention is 'ruling class ideas'.

 Marx also advocated a universal unit of accounting in the form of labour time  units

[robbo203]

There is an interesting article here on the links between Trump, Putin and the "carbon bubble" which feeds directly into the argument about climate change  https://thenearlynow.com/trump-putin-and-the-pipelines-to-nowhere-742d745ce8fd#.jbf9slmm3 

[robbo203]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

Even if you could "follow the labour trial" – I think you seriously underestimate the scale of the task given the thoroughly integrated and socialised character of modern production – to what end would you do this?.  What is the point of the exercise?  Past labour is past labour.  Also how would you weight different kinds of labour anyway?  Is one hours labour by a neurosurgeon equivalent to one hours labour by a janitor, say? If not what is the ratio you recommend – and why?

No ratio, like I said, rough reckoning which would show what share each sector/enetrprise was taking of the total available workforce: bnut we'd also need specific records of specific types of labour, just as we would any other inventory item.  We wouldn't compare dentist and mortician, we just need to know how many hours of each and by how many people.  We might also have a commonly agreed working week, where everyone works a certain number of hours within a restricted range of industries (e.g. 20 hours a week on farming, say)…

 Im trying to think this through but this could very  well be an example of the kind of acceptable or practical model of labour time accounting as opposed to the impractical holistic model I outlined in post no 45.   The  key phrase in your post is that labour availaibility would be treated just as we would any other inventory item  Exactly! The point being that it is not just labour we need to economise on,  We also need to economise on things like energy and raw materials,  And we need calculation in kind to do this whch is precisely what a holistic system of labour accounting militates against..  What the latter proposes is to introduce a single universal universal unit of accounting – namely labour time – governing the entire economy and as such is grounded in the same mindset that rationalises the need for money as a universal unit of account I think the labour time accounting system proposed by Marx and Engels is an unwarranted and inadvertent extension of the labour theory of value into a post capitalist society and as such must be repudiated in favour of a model of labour accounting that falls under the general rubric of calculation in kind

[robbo203]

Dave B wrote:

  Most factories like where I work produce one kind of thing. We add about 5 seconds  of labour time to each litre of juice; something that can be calculated in about 10 minutes. I asked a friend who worked milk and it was a very similar figure, for milk and it took him about 10 minutes to work that out, when he got to work and looked at the spread sheets for the production. In moneyless socialism/ communism there should be an interest in reducing the amount of time, and effort, in producing things. 

   Dave I dont disagree with the contention that in a socialist society there should  be an interest in reducing the amount of time spent on producing things    Depending on the thing, of course – is time an active consideration when you are painting an oil painting? Do you say to yourself "I better hurry up and finish my masterpiece so how can I cut corners and leave out some those interesting details I had intended to put in the painting…."  Hmmm But such quibbles aside I go along with your point.  But here’s the thing – its not just labour time or human effort we would want to reduce in producing things.  What about raw materials?  What about energy?  All of these things have cost implications.  This is what costing is about – opportunity costs.  Making more efficient use of a given factor of production – economising or making less use of it to achieve a given output of one thing so that you can free up more of this factor to produce more of a given output of some other thing. In other words I am arguing for a system of calculation-in-kind where “relative scarcity” is the criterion upon which you economise – not just on human labour but also on titanium and nitrogen fertiliser and a thousand and one other things.  You dont need a system of monetary pricing to ascertain the relative scarcity of all these factors.  All you need is a fully functioning self-regulating system of stock control and a distributed computerised network of telecommunications.  We already have that today.  The infrastructure of a potential socialist society exists right under our very noses Labour time can be economised on in this society in precisely the same way as we might economise on the use of a rare mineral ore such as titanium Now, you can call this process “labour time accounting” if you so wish  but if you are concerned or interested, as you say, in “how much of other people’s effort I am consuming” in a socialist society  then this information is going to be very difficult is not impossible to come by in a literal sense.  That being so I question the purpose or usefulness of you even trying to do ascertain such information (and trying to do it involves effort that could be more usefully applied elsewhere) You mention that in the factory in which you work you add "about 5 seconds of labour time to each litre of juice; something that can be calculated in about 10 minutes".  Fine.  But it’s not just your effort that should be factored into a calculation about the about the amount of human effort that went into a producing a litre of juice, is it?  What about the effort that went into building the machine you are using?  What about the effort that went into producing the electricity that runs the machine? What about the effort that went into constructing the power station that produces the electricity that runs the machine? What about the effort that went into manufacturing the cement and the blocks to build the power station that produces the electricity that runs the machine you are using?  What about the ….and so on Point is that the production system is a totally joined up phenomenon and trying to track the amount human effort down a bewildering maze of production chains is a matter of infinite regression.  It can’t be done so there is really no point in even trying What we need to go for is something much more modest and achievable.  We need to abandon completely the kind of argument put forward by Engels thus: From the moment when society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character may be, becomes at the start and directly social labour. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. 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  (Anti-Duhring) What Engels is asking for is impossible. There is no way we can literally know how many hours of labour are contained in a steam engine.  Each component part of a steam engine – and I guess there are many thousands of these components – has its own production chain history and at every stage in this production chain other production chains branch off.  Knowing how much effort goes into anything in this holistic concept of labour time accounting is an impossibility since ultimately everything is interconnected.  My suspicion is that this kind of thinking that Engels demonstrates here goes hand in hand with an endorsement of society wide central planning – which is a complete absurdity – with labour time accounting being proposed as the tool to administer such a system It is that fully fledged holistic concept of labour time accounting that I reject.  But I don’t reject labour time accounting in the much more pragmatic limited and ad hoc sense of the term that I tried to elaborate upon earlier.  It is important that we keep this distinction in mind in talking about labour time accounting  

[robbo203]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Hmmm…Robin, why are they taking such an optimistic view?The Doomsday Clock

Quote:

In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.” In 2017, we find the danger to be even greater, the need for action more urgent. It is two and a half minutes to midnight, the Clock is ticking, global danger looms.

 Well Alan I wouldnt want to rule out "global catastrophe" of some sort.  It could happen although equally it might never happen.  Weve had these doomsday scenaros before – The Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" Report in 1972, The Population Bomb of Paul Erhlich,  Famine 2000 by the Maddocks (cant remember the exact details) etc.  The prognoses offered in these various publications all singularly failed to materialise I dont want to be blase about the risks but I am quite concerned the psychological impact of dire warnings such as the one provided in the OP.  If it is intended to galvanise people to do something about climate change I think it will have the opposite effect,  It wll induce a sense of crippling pessimism with "crippling" being the operative word here,  meaning disempowering I sometimes wonder if these sensationalist scenarios are deliberatley fashioned with a view to keep us passive and resigned to a bleak future or no future at all in this case.   Why do we find whenever the future is depicted in films or TV it is almost always presented as some kind of grim fascist dytopia from which we can be delivered only by the intervention of some charismatic rebel leader.  I think there is a hidden agenda being pushed here….

[robbo203]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Robbo,But each team at each stage of the production process will have calculated the contrbution of themeselves in labour terms, and we could, if we wanted, follow the full labour trail: but, concrete labour types are not commensurate, abstract labour would only ever be a rough and ready reckoning across the whole system. 

YMSEven if you could "follow the labour trial" – I think you seriously underestimate the scale of the task given the thoroughly integrated and socialised character of modern production – to what end would you do this?.  What is the point of the exercise?  Past labour is past labour.  Also how would you weight different kinds of labour anyway?  Is one hours labour by a neurosurgeon equivalent to one hours labour by a janitor, say? If not what is the ratio you recommend – and why?

[robbo203]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

It seems to me that the whole notion of labour time accounting whereby society seeks to establish “how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production”, is so problematic and vulnerable to error as to be more or less useless and thus a waste of time and resources.  I really cannot see the point of the exercise. 

But it's no more nor less what managers in any enterprise do now: look at how many staff they have, stimate material outputs and work toward their targets (and hire more staff or reduce if they need to).  Hands on managers think in task time.  We'd always need to know how many hours of X work are required to perform our tasks, or find ways to substitute if a particular skill is in short supply, that doesn't need any statistcial bureaue or anything like it, and an be done at the firm level.

 No I dont think this is same thing YMS.  Managers dont calculate “how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production" – not from start to finish at any rate, going right back along the production chain.  They dont calculate how much labour is  "congealed" in the machinery their employees use, for example, in carrying out their work , which congealed or dead labour would need to be taken into account in assigning labour values to each article of consumption.   This is what I take labour time accounting to mean in its proper sense and why I distinguished it from the more narrow production unit-based 0r project-based endeavour to ascertain how much (and what kinds of) labour is required to produce a given output.  The latter is certainly feasible but labour time accounting in its full-blown holistic sense as advocated by Marx, is not.  It is deeply problematic for the reasons mentioned in my earlier post

[robbo203]

Another prediction which at least has the merit of keeping humanity intact by 2050  as opposed to being rendered extinct by 2026 "Natural disasters displaced 36 million people in 2009, the year of the last full study. Of those, 20 million moved because of climate-change related factors. Scientists predict natural disaster-related refugees to increase to as many as 50 to 200 million in 2050. This will cause increasing social stress and violence, mostly in developing nations without the resources to cope, such as in poorer coastal countries in Asia, and in regions of Africa subject to desertification" http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/12/01/climate-change-and-coming-humanitarian-crisis-epic-proportions?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

[robbo203]

Dave B wrote:

 It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour-powers. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted “value”. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch26.htm Here he uses value in italics and in inverted comma’s because the content of value in socialism is the same; it is just that the form it takes is different.

 Why will it be necessary for society to know “how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production” and how precisely will this information obtained? How for instance – to use Engels words  – will society be able to "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" given that: 1) Final goods are the end result of a complex production chain going right back to, for example. the extraction of minerals ores where each stage along this chain involves the application of labour too that must be accounted for in the calculation of how many “hours of labour are contained in a steam engine” 2) Final goods are assembled out of parts that each have their own unique production chain history which greatly complicates the situation 3) Different kinds of labour have to be weighted differently. For instance, you cannot treat 1 hour of skilled labour as being equivalent to 1 hour of unskilled labour.  But what ratio would you use in that case? It seems to me that the whole notion of labour time accounting whereby society seeks to establish “how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production”, is so problematic and vulnerable to error as to be more or less useless and thus a waste of time and resources.  I really cannot see the point of the exercise.  If it is to ensure the efficient allocation of resources then there are other – better – ways of going about this involving stock control management and using criteria that focus on the relative scarcity of stock rather than its labour content.  That requires a system of production that is essentially self-regulating but what Engels seem to be envisaging here is not this but a system of apriori centralised planning.  Hence his reference to "the plan" i.e. a single society wide plan which in itself is totally unrealistic This tallies also with Marx’s statement concerning the nature of “planned production Secondly, after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense that the regulation of labour-time and the distribution of social labour among the various production groups, ultimately the book-keeping encompassing all this, become more essential than ever. Socialism from this perspective begins to sound more like a bureaucratic nightmare in which “book keeping” becomes more essential than ever along with “regulation” of labour time.  How exactly labour time is to be regulated in the context of freely associated labour is anybody’s guess Both Marx and Engels have provided us with many useful insights but some of their more speculative comments on the nature of socialist society were less than helpful in my opinion

[robbo203]

Tim Kilgallon wrote:

 Much as it pains me, I must agree to some extent with L Bird (I assure you it is on this issue only) if we have a situation where labour can be allocated to a number of different project, then society, or the part of society that these projects impact on, must have some idea of the relative amounts of human endeavour involved in the different projects in order to be able to vote rationally on the choices at hand.

 There might be something in this but I dont think this amounts to what I would call a fully fledged across-the-board system of labour accounting which assigns  labour values to the products of industry generally and on a routine basis.  I dont see any merit in this latter proposal not least because the labour values it assigns  could be throughly misleading for all sorts of reasons  and consequently result in a misallocation of reosurces.  This is not to mention the bureaucracy involved. Again we also have to ask what is the purpose behind such a system?  Is the idea that we should abandon products that involve a high labour content for those that  involve a low labour content?  Or what? In some cases this could result in decline in quality  for the sake of (apparently) economising on labour.  It seems to me that the idea of assigning labour values to the products of industry in general  is going down the road that will eventuate in a situation where your consumption is directly linked to your contribution to society and where goods are priced in labour units and made available on a quid pro quo basis. The idea of assessing labour requirements for particular projects is, I suggest, another matter and  I woldnt disagree with what you say Tim.  I think something like our contemporary" job centres" will continue to exist in a socialist society except, of course,  that we wont be talking employment anymore.  Such centres adapted to the needs of a socialist society could be the primary sources of information concerning the availabity and kinds of skills required for these projects

[robbo203]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Lbird,but the point is that Socialism is about achieving definite ends, not using the least labour possible: we might, like ancient peoples choose to throw labour unnecessarily at a task because we enjoy doing it and want to show how much labour we have.

 Thats a good point YMS.  Didnt Karl say something about labour becoming lifes "prime need" (Critique of the Gotha Prog),  So rather than economise on labour – ostensibly the purpose of labour accounting – we  might want to express ourselves more fully through our labour. Particularly in the face of automation and robotisation which is gathering pace today.  The idea of "fully automated luxury communism" has a certain appeal but it also has its drawbacks. Which ties in with the theme of this thread.  We need to be thinking of the kind of society we want to have at the end of the day and the problem with the capitalist concept of econoimic growth is that it is so utterly vacuous in that respect.  It just assumes more is better meaning it focusses on quantity rather than quality.  More workers digging more holes in the ground and then filing them in contributes to GDP growth and therefore is good even if nothing has been achieved as a result. The system is bereft of any grand vision of where we should be heading on the back of this engine of economic growth. Growth has become growth for its own sake

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

I don't think socialist society would or could or should try to measure "socially necessary labour time". It doesn't make sense as this is a category of an exchange economy (established by the workings of that economy).

 Yes indeed since exchange is about the exchange of equivalents, SNLT being the measure of this equivalence.  Also, there seems to be some confusion about what SNLT actually is supposed to represent. Is it an average for the amount of labour time  it take to produce a particular type of commodity for industry as a whole or is it a case of what is "best practice" as some have argued,  Quite apart from that there are subtle variations in the commodity in question from one business to the next which makes comparison problematic and hence the business of arriving at some kind of average figure for the labour time involved I know there have been attempts to provide empirical evidence for the Labour Theory of Value but ultimately such attempts are foredoomed because of the nature of the theory itself.  Which is not to invalidate the theory,  Just because it cannot be empirically supported in a satisfactory sense does not mean it is not valid.  There are a number of useful proxy indicators we can  use from which we can infer the existence of surplus value e,g, the ratio of worker output in money terms to wages etc 

ALB wrote:

Marx does seem to have favoured labour-time accounting but this wouldn't be trying to measure (the equivalent of) socially necessary labour-time. To be useful, it would have to be actual labour-time, i.e the actual use of the resource labour-power of various kinds.Attempts to reproduce "socially necessary labour" in a non-capitalist society (such as that of the Dutch Council Communists in the 1930s) have been internally inconsistent and have in effect re-introduced the sort of circulating labour-money that Marx criticised in John Gray, Proudhon, etc.It would be possible to fix some arbitary average labour (and vote on what it should be) and use this as a unit of account but this would take us to the nightmare society envisaged by Michael Albert and his "Parecon" where people get to vote even on precisely what an individual can consume (individuals have to submit a list of what they want to some committee). On the other hand, it might appeal to some as his blueprint involves virtually non-stop voting.

 I am sceptical about this whole idea of labour time accounting as I am of the labour voucher scheme.  As your last para suggests it seems to be about tying in peoples productive contribution with their consumption entitlements on a quid pro quo basis.  Thats the slippery road back to an exchange economy and capitalism. Why else would you engage in labour time accounting if not to ascertain the amount of labour involved in producing a particular kind of good and in sense putting a price on it albeit measured in labour time units.  But even this would be extraordinarily difficult since you have to take into account  not just the final stage in the production of a good  liken say a car or a TV set where the good is assembled – but also also the preceding stages when the parts were manufactured  This is not to mention other considerations such as qualitative differences between different kinds of cars or indeed different kinds of labour.  How do you weight these different things?Better to scrap all these bureaucratic interventions and keep the production system as simple and as transparent as possible and preferably as self regulating as possible.  The idea of a socialist society as being an endless round of voting on everything under the sun – from scientific theories to how much labour it takes to produce a plasma TV set, send shudders in me. We will have no time to do anything else!

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

So if you paid a  bunch of workers to dig a big hole in the ground and then fill it in again, thereby achieving exactly nothing in  real terms,  the economy would have grown and we would all presumbly be that much richer!  LOL

That's because they are measuring actual labour rather than socially necessary labour. Don't know how you would measure the latter. Not sure you can. In criticising various schemes for "labour money" in his day Marx suggested it couldn't be.

 I guess thats what the "heterogeneity of labour" argument is  about.  How do you measure one kind of labour against another in cardinal terms. Thats what critics of the labour theory of value raise as an objection to the theory, missing the point that you dont need to, and can't anyway (as you say), directly measure socially necessary labour time. The point about  the example of  workers digging a hole and filling it in again was to show the absurdity of the conventional metric of accounting.  According to this growth has occured yet self evidently we are no better off in real terms

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

Actually, the problem they have come across brings out the validity of the labour theory of value. They seem to want to include use-value whereas in fact GDP is based on and is a measure of exchange-value.  In Marxian terms GDP is the new  value added in a year, or rather Net Domestic Product is because the gross figure includes depreciation which is replacing used up value. Basically, it's surplus value (and its subdivisions) + labour income.  "Growth" is the amount by which this increases from one year to the next (not that it always does, of course, as the figure also "slumps" from time to time).One way they calculate GDP is, in fact,  capital income + labour income, This means that national product = national income. The other way is measuring the "value added" (their terminology) by adding this up for each industry and field of activity. So, If you try to add "added use-value" (as,eg. from what is freely available or housework) then this equation will no longer hold as national product will be greater than national income. In trying to combine exchange values and use values it's no wonder they get into difficulties.

 GDP as the measure of all monetised activities within the economy… So if you paid a  bunch of workers to dig a big hole in the ground and then fill it in again, thereby achieving exactly nothing in  real terms,  the economy would have grown and we would all presumbly be that much richer!  LOL I liked this little snippet from the above article:  "(When the European Union decided to include recreational drugs and paid sex work in 2013, Britain’s G.D.P. grew by 0.7 percent.)" Do we not all have a patriotic duty to engage in these pastimes to help make Britain a stronger and more competitive economy?

[Author]

Posts