robbo203
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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
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
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
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
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!
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! LOLThat'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
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?
LBird wrote:.I'd be interested if you or any other member could find a matching article in the 1990s (or even 2000s), because we might be able to identify approximately when the SPGB stopped making these Marxist and democratic arguments, and moved to the (seemingly) present position, which is far closer to Lenin's views about 'matter', 'specialists', and 'problems' with democracy, to the exclusion of any mention of class consciousness or the proletariat, or the process of self-development of our class.LBird you are becoming a complete bore now with this persistent, obsessive , deceitful and thoroughly evasive mantra of yours. There is absolutely no evidence you can cite that anyone on this forum subscribes to this peculair definition of "materialism" you allude to – namely mechanical materialism – which you atrribute to Lenin. No one here that I know of subscribes to the fact-value distinction that is central to a positivisitic model of sceince. If you have evdience to the contrary lets hear it. Saying that matter exists is NOT tantamount to saying that " the rocks speaks to us" to use your choiuce phrase – a point you persistently fail to see As for your gibberish about "specialists" and the "problems with democracy" it is noteworthy that you have singularly failed to address any of the questions that have been asked of you: On what grounds do you believe that socialist society – or any kind of modern advanced society for that matter – can dispense with any kind of specialisation? On what grounds do you believe that it is remotely practical or even necessary for billions of people to vote on tens of thousands of sceitnfic theories to determine their truth value in a socialist society? Until you begin to seriously attmept an answer to these and other questions or modify your you stance, you will continue to have absolutely zero creidbility on this forum
LBird wrote:So, your concerns are the 'limits' of, and 'counterbalances' for, democracy?It certainly is an important subject that deserves further discussion – and it would help if those who are to discuss it were actually in favour of democracy (never mind workers' democracy, the concern of socialists).That doesn't appear to be the SPGB, though, does it?I think that those with robbo's concerns, need only read the texts produced by bourgeois academics over the last three centuries, to ascertain some useful advice on 'limits and counterbalances' regarding democracy.This certainly is a 'surreal debate'.Yes of course there are limits to democratic decisionmaking. For example, it is totally impractical to imagine that 7 billion people can vote on the "truth" of multiple thousands of scientific theories. It is totally impractical and undesirable that "society" should democratically determine where we live, what work we should do, what clothes we should wear, what our tastes in music or food should be . And so on and so forth. Whether or not some bourgeois academics agree with us democratic communists on the impracticality of these things is neither here nor there. It does not make them any the less impractical – or undesirable. Freedom matters as much as democracy – in fact,one without the other will destroy both – and though a leninist like LBird might sneer at the idea of freedom as "bourgeois" he would find his totalitarian centralist ideas strongly opposed by Marx. Thus : "We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced that in no social order will freedom be assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.” (Marx, Engels, et al., Communist League, 1847).Finally yes of course the SPGB clearly does favour democracy. This is inscribed in its very object " The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community" That is an example of where democratic decisionmaking is both practical and desirable
ALB wrote:Tim Kilgallon wrote:As to your nonsensical proposal to have votes for every single scientific development,Tim, it's not just on scientific developments that he wants a vote. It's also on how we describe everyday things such as a table — the perceivable and perceived regular pattern in "external conditions", "inorganic nature", "the world of phenomena", "matter", or whatever you want to call it, that was called (in French and then English) "table" generations ago without a vote having been taken, a description and social convention passed on to succeeding generations through learning and which will no doubt continue into socialism
Which reinforces the point made in an earlier post which is that if we can extract/salvage anything useful at all out this surreal debate with LBird then it should be to focus minds on where the practical limits of democratic decisionmaking in a socialist society should lie and to what extent democracy has to be counterbalanced by other considerations.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/socialism-and-democracy This is an important subject that deserves further discussion
Tim Kilgallon wrote:This is the scenario. We are living in a socialist society which works along the lines of your proposal for voting re scientific theories. In an area of the world an outbreak occurs of a particular illness at a level of deadliness previously unknown, perhaps a little like the recent Ebola outbreak. Would the development of an effective treatment for this illness be required to go through the lengthy, time consuming process of organising a worldwide vote, with all of the requisite sharing of relevant information, etc.at every stage of the process, before a treatment for this deadly disease could be given to the victims of the disease?You wont get an answer from LBird on this question, Tim. I note that it is his clear policy to shy away from anything remotely connected with the mechanics of how a global vote on thousands of scientific theories is going to be organised. Little wonder too. He has been hoisted by his own petard and is too embarrassed to admit it
LBird wrote:How can you consciously know 'matter', ALB, without a vote being taken by your fellow social producers?How would this vote be organised among 7 billion people, LBird, What would happen to the minority within the tiny minority of people ever likely to vote, if they disagreed with the majority within this tiny minority? Would they be allowed to continue holding and propagating their minority view? Or would your Leninist thought police be on to them , rounding up all these non-conformists in dawn raids? If none of the above, please explain in plain terms to simple proles like myself what was the point of this vote being taken among the social producers . What did you hope to achieve by such a vote?
LBird wrote:. The SPGB has started to argue for 'specialists', who are not under the political control of the 'generalists'.This is Leninist politics by another name.No, LBird, the only Leninist here is you with your leninist argument for so called "democratic centralism" Not only are you a leninist but you are a dishonest leninist to boot. The suggestion that the SPGB argues for specialists not under the political control of the generalists, clearly implies that said specialists have, in some sense, the power to impose their views on others against the will of the latter. Where has this ever been suggested? Cite the evidenceThe problem really boils down to your utterly childish and idiotic argument that there can be no specialists and no specialisation in socialism/communism. You have never bothered to explain how, for example, a neurosurgeon can become a competent neurosurgeon without specialising in neurosurgery, without devoting years and years of her life to studying and honing her craft. In LBird's surreal worldview, anyone can just walk off the street in a socialist society and perform a complex brain operation becuase, according to him, every single one of us will be fully competent skilled and knowledgeable in every conceivable kind of occupation. There will be no specialists in anything because we will all specialists in everything The idea is so preposterous its hardly even worth debating, Of course any advanced modern type of society requires specialisation to some degree – do you deny this LBird and if so on what grounds? Lets hear your argument for a change. Come out in the open with it and defend your ideas instead of forever running away from this argument every time it is levelled against you. And while you are at it, please explain how a neurosurgeon, being a neurosurgeon, can have any power over others in a society in which all work is performed on a purely voluntaristic basis and where all goods and services are made avialabe on a free access basis
ALB wrote:A joker wrote:No matter what Marx says, you're not going to have workers voting about whether 'matter exists' or not, are you?robbo203 wrote:the silly idea that scientific ideas – tens of thousands of them – should be put to a democratic vote by the global population …, if your silly idea were ever to be attempted I suspect less than 0.0001 per cent of the populace would even bother to vote on whether sting theory was true or not.I agree with you, Robbo, that if the issue "Does matter (external reality) exist? Yes/No" was put to a referendum, most people would vote with their feet — in the same way that Dr Johnston did when he answered the same question by kicking a stone. And if the No side won the Brexiteers' dilemma would be nothing compared with theirs. No doubt, our joker would be there to insist that "Exiting Reality means Exiting Reality". Who could disagree with that?
Yes indeed, ALB. I mean, what LBird is saying is so ludicrous it is astonishing that he doesn’t even seem to have the faintest glimmering of this. Is he seriously proposing that some new theory concerning, say, the asexual reproduction of the Malaysian tapeworm is gonna be put to a global vote of 7 billion people??? C’mon. Let’s get real here. LBird is obsessed with the word elitism” but it got nothing to do with elitism. Its get everything to with the fact that individuals are different in multiple ways. I couldn’t care a toss about the asexual reproduction of the Malaysian tapeworm, frankly, but somebody might. Maybe there is a little community of enthusiasts scattered around the world who are deeply interested in the subject. Good on them! Maybe LBird could join their forum if they would have him. He seems to think that every individual in a future communist society is going to be 1) fully knowledgeable and 2) fully interested in every conceivable kind of scientific theory that is being churned out so perhaps he should practice what he preaches and lead by example by actively participating in the discussion of that forum with fegular feedbacks to this forum I imagine, though, that some Facebook group for Malaysian tapeworm enthusiasts is unlikely to organise a democratic vote on this startling new theory but supposing that it did, what then? Are the rival factions going to stop debating the topic just because one of them carried the day and got more votes than the others? Of course not. So what really was the point of the vote in that case? You see this is what LBird doesn’t understand. He pretends to be a “democratic communist” but he hasn’t got a clue what democracy is about or what it is for. Democracy is not about stifling the free expression of ideas, denying the right of a minority to continue expressing their ideas in the face of majority opinion. This is what is so sinister and repulsive about what LBird is saying. He is a Leninist putting forward the Leninist principle of so called democratic CENTRALISM. The whole thrust of his argument is totalitarian, not libertarian, and it is high time he should be outed on that count. In effect, since there is no possibility of his apparently ultra-democratic proposal of a global vote on all scientific theories ever being implemented what he is actually arguing for, if only by default, is for a tiny minority to decide what the rest of us should think. That is to say, once this vote has been taken – in effect, by a tiny minority, since there is no way 7 billion people are going to concern themselves with the asexual reproduction of the Malaysian tapeworm – that’s it! No further dissenting opinion will be permitted. The TRUTH has been decided once and for all. This is the fascism of a Big Brother state, frankly. It is certainly not remotely what democracy is about. Democracy is not about controlling and regulating ideas. LBird’s basic argument is that ideas are socially produced which is true enough but he fails to see that just because something is socially produced, it does not follow therefore that it must therefore be subject to democratic control. My mobile phone is socially produced. Does that mean that every aspect of it’s design and functionality must be subject to a democratic vote of the entire world population. Seriously? Until LBird begins to learn the difference between what democracy is for and what it is NOT for, we will not make much headway in this discussion. Once he has jettisoned these junk ideas he holds then, but only then, can we begin a serious discussion about what democracy will look like in a democratic communist society
LBird wrote:And robbo keeps up his elitist claim that the 'science' done by a minority outweighs the opinions of the majority of producers.Bollocks. I say nothing of the sort. Its you who upholds the silly idea that scientific ideas – tens of thousands of them – should be put to a democratic vote by the global population, not me, So the question of the views of some "outweighing" those of others would simply not arise in my case. In practice, if your silly idea were ever to be attempted I suspect less than 0.0001 per cent of the populace would even bother to vote on whether sting theory was true or not. Meaning a tiny minirity anyway And if you still haven't answered the question – what happens if the global population of 7 billion (or 0001 per cent of 7 billion) decided by a majority that string theory was wrong?. Would people who thought that String theory was correct be preventeted from propagating their ideas in your Brave New World? I think you are basically a Leninist, LBird, with a strong attachment for the Leninist principle of democratic centralism whilst pretending to be a democratic communist
