robbo203
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Well, for what it’s worth one factor that figures prominently in our lack of progress is our own small size. It makes for inertia. We remain small because we are small. Irrationally, (and we are all irrational as well as rational, beings), people assess the credibility of a political organisation in terms of the number of adherents it attracts. Greater credibility entails breaking through a numerical threshold – and we can speculate on what this might be – when this factor that has for so long worked against us might finally begin to work in our favour. The snowball effect.
If this analysis is correct, then we have to think of the problem in more rigorously strategic terms. DJP contends that “FWIW The SPGB is virtually invisible online, as well as off. Nobody knows who you are”. That may be true for the online community in general but there are little corners of that community where it is not quite true – such as various Facebook groups, one or two of which are quite large, where the SPGB had acquired a presence or sorts. These are groups where you are likely to find people more on our own wavelength – like the “Moneyless society” FaceBook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1299924940356627) devoted to “obsoleting money” which has 23.8K members. We may be practically invisible on the internet in general but we can and, to some extent, do make an impact in groups such as these, though not nearly enough
The repetition or reinforcement effect of different members contributing to these kinds of groups and posting links to our literature could make a significant difference at very little cost in terms of effort expended and could engage even the most physically isolated member in the collective enterprise of spreading socialist ideas. Yet we don’t really exploit the opportunities such an approach offers. It is so do-able
TM:”And every homeless man i’ve met has boasted of his military exploits and told me we need the draft back.”
OK but how can we effectively address such reactionary and irrational sentiments? Clearly, responding to these sentiments in purely rational terms, though necessary, has proven to be far from sufficient or adequate. The proof of this lies in the complete lack of progress we have made thus far.
Paradoxically, as “scientific socialists” (I don’t really like this term) we need to transcend – or go beyond – our scientific or ultra-rationalistic approach to changing society if we are seriously intent on making progress. In short, we need to adopt a more eclectic approach.
As I have suggested, to discuss this it would be better to start a completely new thread. Personally speaking, I would want to steer well clear of the kind of approach advanced by some on the left that things need to get significantly worse in order for the working class to develop a revolutionary outlook (the history of the rise of the Nazis decisively refutes this claim!) or that there is something about the nature of socialist ideas that condemn them to be the province of only a small minority and therefore inherently unrealizable (the Walsby Society et al).
Arguably this is is the most important discussion we socialists should be having at the present time: how to break through the barriers of irrationalism that prevent our ideas from being seriously considered at the present time. In that regard our ultra rationalism has proven to be a blunt tool
TM: “It isn’t that everyone doesn’t have the rational tool for it, but I don’t see it being used, because reason isn’t master, and I think the party is naive in its, well, 18th century-like view of the primacy of reason”.
There is some truth in that Thomas but what is the alternative? We cannot abandon a rational analysis of capitalist society but we can perhaps supplement – or complement? – it with other methods of promoting socialism or, at any rate, values consonant with a socialist outlook.
Perhaps we need a new thread devoted to exploring what these methods might be
“Evidently, the German Angry Workers’ view that ‘wage labor’ happens to be ‘the precondition for value’, which implies that non-wage labour cannot create value, sounds absurd.”
How then would you go about determining the relative contribution of different kinds of labour – skilled or unskilled – to value if labour power itself was not assigned a market price in the guise of a wage? This is the reduction problem in Marxian economics. In theory, skilled labour is reducible to units of simple or unskilled labour – the ratios of their respective contributions to value being reflected – in the long run – in the differential wages they attract. Money wages are thus a kind of rough proxy indicator of differences in the value of different kinds of labour-power and what is required to produce and reproduce such labour power. But in the absence of wage labour how would you tackle the reduction problem?
A further point is that the generalisation of commodity production upon which the law of value is dependent has to imply the generalisation of wage labour. Non-wage labour tends to imply that a substantial portion of what the worker consumes does not take a commodity form – for example, the self-provisioning farming of the peasant in which food is grown for direct consumption not for market sale. Agricultural surpluses may be sold under these circumstances but the connection with value (or socially necessary labour time) becomes tenuous if not impossible to determine
Yes but that is not what is strictly meant by society-wide planning, YMS. Building a railway across the Bering Strait is certainly a very big project involving large-scale planning. Undoubtedly an element of this will be needed in a socialist society although I am bit wary of the big-is-beautiful school of thought. Big dam projects, for example, have often turned out to be ruinous for displaced people and ecologically disastrous.
But that is something different. Society-wide planning means the suppression or elimination of all independent planning below the level of global society and the replacement of a polycentric planning system with a unicentric planning system and a single society-wide plan. Pieter Lawrence’s model certainly did not envisage this but a spoke instead of a tiered (i.e. polycentric) system operating at global, regional, and local levels.
I understand the point you are making but we should be careful about not using terminology that might convey a completely false and misleading idea of what we are talking about. “Society-wide planning” is one of those terms….
So far I have just looked at the introduction to this piece (which I agree is worth studying). I noted straightaway that it seems to repudiate the concept of a posteriori feedback as a means of spontaneous coordination and so, by implication, is advocating for an idealised system of society-wide planning. This is apparent in this comment:
“In capitalist society, characterized by the private ownership of the means of production, conscious coordination is non-existent and organization occurs at the atomic level (in companies). Capitalist planning, in spite of how much it has been technified in the last decades, occurs only within individual companies and, more importantly, it is fundamentally oriented towards profit expectations. Between different private companies, it is no longer that there is no harmonious planning, it is that there is no planning at all. Only a posteriori, and according to the logic of blind and impersonal market
automatism, can the different productive units be coordinated to supply the demands of the people. These demands (which are sometimes the most basic human needs) will be satisfied, or not, exclusively according to the level of income of each person and the availability of goods that each country has in the global supply chain.”Yes, as YMS rightly says, their work seems to be influenced by Cockshott and bears the same muddled thinking on the matter that Cockshott displays in his writings. Cockshott, on the one hand, seems to want a system of society-wide planning yet on the other, talks about his system being able to accommodate feedback or a posteriori decisionmaking
The logic of society-wide planning calls for a globalised input-output matrix in which the supply and demand for every conceivable good are matched up through a process of material balancing. It’s a sort of general equilibrium model of the production system. To talk of “clearing houses” in the context of such a model implies the application of feedback which is not really compatible with the idea of society-wide planning.
Input-output matrices are what is called a consistency model. In idealised terms, they eliminate waste by ensuring consistency in supply and demand in every case. This is different from linear programming which is an optimisation model in the sense that it plots a course of action that ensures maximised output or alternatively minimised costs (or both).
Linear programming can operate at different scales – from the small scale to the large scale involving thousands of variables (for example by identifying bottlenecks in a complex transportation system like the London Underground to increase the overall efficiency of the system). But that is far removed from society-wide planning
It always puzzles me when people like Cockshott and others seem to put forward arguments that appear to advocate for society-wide planning while repudiating spontaneous coordination or feedback (which they quite mistakenly equate with the market – the market is just one example of this but you can equally have non-market examples).
Perhaps, the greatest failing of these people is that they approach the whole question of a communist or socialist society from a thoroughly technocratic perspective. They don’t take as their starting point, the kind of social relationships that will pertain to such a society
To me, it is as clear as daylight that what they are advocating is fundamentally incompatible with the nature and entire ethos of such a society. They talk vaguely about the democratisation of planning but how is that remotely possible given the immensity of what needs to be planned under a system of society-wide planning?
While there is a certainly a role to play for planning tools like input-output matrices or linear programming we should be very wary of fetishizing these procedures
“Thus, both slave labour (i.e. the labour of a human slave) and half-slave labour are capable of producing value too, aren’t they ?”
No, I don’t think so. As I understand it the law of value only comes into effect in a fully commoditised society and above all one in which labour-power is itself transformed into a commodity. Otherwise how else does the notion of “socially necessary labour time” acquire significance? That presupposes the more or less general transformation of all goods- both producer goods (including labour-power itself) and consumer goods into commodities – in order to assert a relationship between the quantity of abstract labour embodied in a commodity and its price. For that relationship to exist (even if only in an ultimate sense since in practice the prices of specific commodities cannot equate with their value) labour-power has to take a commodity form bearing a price tag in order to enter into the equation at all
True, you cannot measure abstract labour in the way that you can concrete labour. Slave labour is concrete labour but only wage labour can form the basis of abstract labour (and hence value) even if wage workers obviously perform concrete labour as well. Value is an economy-wide phenomenon and presupposes the economy-wide transformation of labour power into a commodity
“The whole mess was created by Engels, Marx never considered that commodity was produced in a pre capitalist society. Marx clearly indicated that the law of value is only applicable to a capitalist society”
That may be true of the law of value – in fact, what you say is I think correct – but does that necessarily mean commodities could not have existed prior to capitalism? I don’t think so
Commodities in the sense of articles bought and sold on the market obviously predated capitalism and possibly by thousands of years. What distinguishes capitalism from precapitalist societies is the generalization of commodity production as the opening line of Das Capital notes. In particular, it is the generalized transformation of labor-power into a commodity that makes capitalism, capitalism.
When you think about it, the law of value presupposes generalized wage labor insofar as we are talking of value being constituted out of “socially necessary labor time”. That implies commensurability (and a universal metric in the form of money) across the board for different kinds of labor in order to arrive at some notional idea of the average amount of time it takes to produce a given commodity.
If this is correct then you could not really talk about the law of value operating in a society that consisted, let us say, of half-slave labor and the other half-wage labor. Presumably, the vast bulk of labor would have to take the form of wage labor for the law of value to become operable…
Quite an interesting article on the situation in China
“Dutch Party Asks Zelensky to Account for $850M in Personal Wealth | 6 May 2022 | Last year, a Pandora Papers leak revealed that Mr Zelensky, who campaigned on promises to “break the system” of oligarchic control and corruption in Ukraine (ER: to our knowledge, the very opposite has happened), set up a spider web of offshore companies in 2012. Zelensky’s office justified the move by saying they were a form of “protection” against former President Viktor Yanukovych. A Dutch political party has taken an interest in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s personal fin-nces. “Zelensky has a fortune: various estimates put his wealth at around 850 million. He amassed most of it after taking office as president. Where does the m-ney come from? And more importantly, where is it going?” the Forum for Democracy asked in posts on its Twitter and Telegram accounts on Monday.”
Lula in the link below suggests Zelensky and Putin are equally to blame for the war. Of course, wars don’t originate out of the character defects of so-called “Great Men” but this does mark a sort of change from the relentless (and frankly sickening) adoration of Zelensky by parts of the Western media. Both Zelensky and Putin head up corrupt, authoritarian oligarchies with little to choose between them when it comes to their conspicuous lack of democratic credentials
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/04/brazil-lula-zelenskiy-blame-war
oops sorry about that – my bad. Here’s the link
PeterFrank
Yes, I have read some of his stuff. I have mixed views on him. His empirical work in relation to the LTV is useful but he is an advocate of labour time accounting and central planning, both of which are highly questionable. In his book “Towards a New Socialism” he seems to imagine that the state-capitalist Soviet Union was essentially “socialist” but marred by the fact that it lacked a democratic form of governance
Prakash
As you say, the prices of commodities don’t equate with their labour values and it is only in the long run that you find a tendency for these things to equilibrate. This is brought about by the self-correcting nature of market competition itself. Higher than usual prices attract businesses (existing ones and new entrants) to step up output lured by the prospect of higher profits. As supply increases so does this begin to affect a commodity’s price. At some point, supply may come to exceed market demand and the price begins to fall
Marx fully acknowledged the influence of supply and demand on price in the short term but in the long run, he noted, these two things cancel each other out. What we then need to explain is the long-run differences in price and it seems to me that only the LTV enables us to do that
As an aside you mention that utility means use-value. Pedantically speaking I don’t think these terms have quite the same meaning though they are obviously linked. Utility is quantitative – or should I say pseudo-quantitative – attempt to gauge the strength or intensity of one’s desire for a particular commodity based on its perceived use-value. The early Marginalists like William Stanley Jevons even went so far as to attempt to come up with some unit of measurement by which utility could be quantified = “utils”
Thus in neoclassical economics everything is reduced to utility which reflects the market’s need for commensurability between commodities in order to effect a market exchange based on equivalence. The problem is that use values in themselves are incommensurable. Utility is an attempt to render them commensurable
Adam Smith invoked the famous water-diamond paradox in this way:
“The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it” (Adam Smith, 1776, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter IV, “Of the Origin and Use of Money”)
He seemed to be suggesting that it was the exchangeability of diamonds that at least in part (he was also an advocate of the labour theory of value) contributed to its high price. This might be connected with the explanation as to why “status goods” or “Veblen goods” (named after the social critic Thorstein Veblen) are so expensive, It is to price other people out of the market who cannot afford to buy these goods and so becomes a means of asserting the high status of those who can afford these things
Conventional mainstream economists will of course argue that the reason why diamonds cost so much is that their marginal utility is extremely high compared to water. Normally the marginal utility of a good is supposed to diminish with every additional unit of the good in question being consumed. The rarity of natural diamonds prevents this from happening. Hence the high price of diamonds is determined by their high marginal utility. That however does not in itself explain why the demand for diamonds is so high
Normally, if demand exceeds supply the competitive nature of capitalism means that output will be stepped up with existing businesses and new entrants being attracted by the high prices and profits (although that is not so easy with natural as opposed to artificial diamonds). There is thus a tendency for supply and demand to equilibrate in the long run. That being the case, supply and demand cannot be invoked as an explanation for the differences in prices over the long run since these things cancel each other out. Only differences in production costs (which boils down to labour costs) can adequately explain this
This is why the labour theory of value is the only one that really holds water
