Young Master Smeet
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robbo203 wrote:Sorry but I still don't get this.So the socialist movement captures political power through the ballot box, The means of production are formally brought into common ownership, Yet you are still envisaging a role for profit sharing as a transitional measure.. How is that possible on the basis of common ownership?
Because we can do what we want with out common property. Like a family Monopoly set.
robbo203 wrote:Not quite sure what 1) is about. "State rules" may well continue to exist up until the democratic capture of political power but how would this prevent the expansion of non-market activities/relationships any more than it would or could prevent the expansion of the socialist movement itself? Such activities exist and LETS type arrangements which people seem to go on about are only a tiny fraction of this divrse non market sector. The idea behind the Road to Socialism circular (1986/7?) to which you allude is that this sector is likely to expand in lockstep with the expansion of the socialist movement itself and that, moreover, it would likely become more and more explicitly influenced by the latter and in turn reciprocally feed into and facilitate the further growth of this movement – a point that some critics of the circular back then completely overlooked and probably still continue to overlook. But ever mind!Landlords can still evict, fiduciary duty will still dominate directors of firms, pension firms will be regulated by the government, LETS would still be taxed in pounds, steel firms would still be run by the market sector, not and non-market sector. Yes, we'd have all the free wicker baskets we could ever want from the non-market sector, but the farmers wouldn't be giving over their food for nowt.
robbo203 wrote:My main criticism, however, is with your 3). I just cannot see how this could happen. You talk about continuing to use money for those parts of the economy we can't immediately make free. But where is this money going to come from? How are workers to acquire the wherewithal to purchase goods that remain for the time being in the money economy?. Are you envisaging the retention of wage labour in the short term much like Lenin did in his outline of "socialism" in which all workers would be employees of the state?Savings, UBI, dole, lottery, although profit sharing is more likely. As also said, this is very much a transitional measure as we cut down on the market parts of the economy, we'd leave people free to trade.
robbo203 wrote:As other people have also pointed out , labour vouchers and money are not the the only two conceivable means by which scarce goods can be rationed. There are other ways of rationing and I have outlined one myself – the compensation model of rationing based on housing qualityThat woiuld require a hideous bureaucracy.
alanjjohnstone wrote:How do we acquire this money?I think you state it will be fiat money issued via some sort of UBI. Is this related to helicoptering in money as on the other thread? Didn't the Bolsheviks justify the worthlessness of their inflated rouble to abolishing money?So it isn't earned as wages? Do we still receive monetary wages? Or as some suggested in the past, we will be paid in labour-time vouchers and non-workers receive some sort of agreed allotment? I raised the possibility of black-market – and we know rationing created the spivs of WW2. Are prices going to be indicative prices as in Parecon? I don't think you mean that but just want to clarify. You mean more that a pound of sausages was 50 pence pre-revolution – it will be 50 pence post-revolution, regardless of availability.UBI fiat money is one option, gold is another. What i'm suggesting is that instead of a black market, we just have a market. Indicative prices would work like prices, but if we're going down the fiat money route, then something would be done to interupt the circulation of money (perhaps time limits, perhaps firms just burn the cash on receipt, etc.).
robbo203 wrote:I can't believe what I'm reading here – socialists actually contemplating the continuation of market relations, post revolution albeit in some kind of attenuated form. This comes of thinking that the growth of a socialist movement prior to the capture of political power can have no significant impact on the scope and extent of capitalist relations of production. Meaning everything has to be done in one fell swoop come the revolution. Now the new revisionist line seems to be – no, lets not do it in one fell swoop. Lets string it out and let capitalism die a gradual death after the revolution because the task of getting rid of capitalism in one fell swoop is just to monumental to contemplate. Is this what some comrades are now saying?1) The Socialist road to Guilford runs up against the facts that state rules will exist in our way up until we get political power.2) I'm assuming a very rapid rise of the socialist movement, East Germany, or Podemos style, we could get to 30% of the vote fairly rapidly, within 8 years or so from take off.3) I'm discussing dismantling the market, and suggesting that while we do this piecemeal, it's better to just continue using money for those parts of the economy we can't immediately make free, as this is more effective than building the machinery of labour vouchers. This is part of a fairly rapid transition.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/BetteroffIN.pdfThe TUC estimates we'd all lose £38 per week on wage (or rather, the average worker would).
Quote:Most institutions’ assessments of the long-run impact of Brexit are based on a broadly similar methodology, and come to similar conclusions. Most estimate the impact of Brexit on the level of GDP some years into the future (2030), from which an impact on household income is derived. This is the basis of the Treasury’s estimated impact on household incomes of £4,300. The same GDP estimates can be put on an annual basis and used to project the impact on average weekly earnings, set against a baseline case from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s long-term growth forecasts.there's an "an upper and lower bound of £10 on either side." Generally, economists are seeing wages rise: "£220 if the UK stays in the EU and £182 if we leave". As they acknowledge, these models are not uncontentious: especially the idea that wages relate to GDP, as we've seen the last few years, wage growth is lagging GDP's by some way (despite pitiful growth rates).So, actually, the TUC are saying that wages will not rise by £38 if we leave, possibly £28.
At first, obviously, they would continue to pay the pharmaceuticals firms, but after repudiation of the patent law (and any ability to enforce it), then co-ordinated actions by the workers movement could make arrangements to produce their own, the only issue then being precursor materials, which if they are needed to be obtained from outside the revolutionary polity, might need to make some form of working political trade deal. The democratic movement would have transformed the operations of state forces, preferably dismantling them, but perhaps there will be a call to put the police on the picket lines…
KAZ wrote:Am I the only one slightly alarmed by the tone of some of these comments? Revolution Day? Coming to power? Why not quote the Money Abolition Clause of the Socialism Enabling Act? Frankly, the precise method of distribution can only be worked out at the time, in the light of real life experiences, which will take place during the revolutionary process.Well, we are committed to acheiving political power, as a socialist movement, and we won't be able to effect some of these changes until the political machinery of the state is in our hands, and converted from an instrument of oppression into THE agent of emancipation.The main point is that we don't need some overraching bureaucracy and nationalisation to take control of the economy as a revolutionary class, we can simply let the market continue to operate while we turn over significant sectors of the economy to social use.
ALB wrote:Yes of course they have. We've actually got more articles than we probably need. It's going to be a special issue on socialism, real and imagined, in the US rather than just on the founding of the WSPUS 100 years ago.That sounds an advance.BTW, will there be space for the role our religion pamphlet played in the case against some New York Legislators who were removed from office?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_State_Legislature_members_expelled_or_censuredhttps://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo1.ark:/13960/t5h99pv6q;view=1up;seq=9
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2016/no-1342-june-2016/cooking-books-mises-irrelevantEntirelky relevant article in this month's Standard:
Quote:‘Obviously there will be no such thing as finance, and whole sections of economic activity will no longer exist because they are completely wasteful and unnecessary. There will be no arms production, no advertising and, of course, no City of London – you can go through the different wasteful forms that will cease to exist. It is quite clear that the standard of living could very quickly be raised if such waste is removed.’So, once this waste is ‘very quickly’ removed, we would already have a situation of relative abundance and so should be able to move equally quickly to socialism and free access to available goods and services.Like I say, it's more likely that legacy prices would be a better guide for the transition (and, gasp, maybe something like UBI, hand out fiat currency to everyone to buy with, have markets based on goods' prices on R-day, and fairly rapidly take key goods out of the market all-together).
Well, we have the example of WWII rationing (with the possible option that the rations in the books may be sufficiently generous, after a short while) that the system may not be too much of an imposition: I would go with that before labour time vouchers, as a deliberate attempt to break the link between labour and reward.
Well, it's to abolish the need for money, so I imagine that money might linger for a short while (and money does the job of money better than labour time vouchers do). But, lets say we come to power, and at a stroke abolish rent and mortgage payments, and fairly quickly get housing for free. Supermarkets might make produce free (up to a certain value) on production of a union card, say, and continue to operate their accounts with suppliers, as a parrallel system uintil we get a co-operative system going. We cease to collect taxes, and lay-off the civil servants. Money is then only needed for some trinkets and marginal goods. We could fairly quickly move money to the edge of the economy.
No mobile phones? The problem of updating the story, would we really do without phone signal in Socialism? Still, hopefully absolutely no-one will record a copy or two at HO….
The notion the above team critiques actually crops up as The Direction in Ken Macloed's latest novel the "Corporation Wars: dissonance". In this (apparent, it could be lies) future, all humans are equally the ultimate beneficiaries of AI corporations, so the corporations, with their robots, operate as capitalist firms, as if all firms were ultimately owned by one individual. This gets round worker owned capitalism and the like, because differential profit rates don't matter, each AI firm is trying to make a profit by its nature, and then the sumk of profits are paid out as a dividend to all. theoretically, this could work, the only problem being that it cannot remove the problem of capitalist crisis, which would mean that every few years, no-one would get (substantial – there's always some firms in profit, even during a big crash) dividends. Could it happen, yes, it could come from he UBI, and while humans continue to run the firms, what we would have is chief excutives and profiteers saying they are working for us, and inequality would continue. Until we replaced them with Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism.
https://theconversation.com/a-post-work-economy-of-robots-and-machines-is-a-bad-utopia-for-the-left-59134A good critique of Mason and robot-end-of-wor fully automated luxury communism.
Quote:Money governs the planet. We cannot live except through money, received in the form of a wage pitched at the level we need to survive as productive labour. But the roots of a wage crisis lie not in the amount of the money we have in our pockets, but because our access to the things we need to live is mediated by money in the first place. How, then, is a crisis of the wage solved by distributing more money? Printing money is easy. Living under the abstract form of domination it implies is not. The distribution of money by the state will only mean a different form of distribution of wealth for social reproduction but in no way can move us to a post-capitalist era.They find concrete utopias in 'commoning' access to things we need. If anything, though, they are focusing on the basic income meme, I'd think Masons ideas also rest around similar commonings: for instance, the threat to expropropriate the common of BBC recipes would have been met fairly quickly by a recipe wiki, thebig companies would not have been able to onetise that sort of resource for free…
